Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

At the beginning of the century, Ruskin declared that 'every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our national desire to live on the loot of India'.

the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

The Atharva Veda points out that the quest for awareness, the search for answers, the journey towards self-realization, never ceases: How does the wind not cease to blow? How does the mind take no repose? Why do the waters, seeking to reach the truth, Never at any time cease to flow? —Atharva Veda, X.7.3731

as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. I am proud of the history of my faith in my own land: of the travels of Adi Shankara, who journeyed from the southernmost tip of the country to Kashmir in the north, Gujarat in the west and Odisha in the east, debating spiritual scholars everywhere, preaching his beliefs, establishing his mutths.

Famine, forced migration and brutality: three examples of why British rule over India was despotic and anything but enlightened

Empire was in many ways the vehicle for the extension of British social structures to the colonies they conquered.

There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.

India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

By the early 1800s, India had been reduced from a land of artisans, traders, warriors and merchants, functioning in thriving and complex commercial networks, into an agrarian society of peasants and moneylenders.

a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).

a faith that I have tried to absorb through beliefs and practices handed down to me by my father and others, my own observations, as well as an extensive reading of the scriptures in translation and numerous scholarly treatises. The

Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin's bullet with the words "Hé Ram" on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, "it is doomed to destruction.

find is a lucid and reflective account of one of the world's oldest and greatest faiths and its contemporary existence.

In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again.

historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

Still, the British higher education system did little to promote analytic capacity or creative thinking and certainly no independence of mind.

Under the British, the universities remained largely examination-conducting bodies, while actual higher education was carried out in affiliated colleges, which offered a two-year BA course (following a year of intermediate studies after high school). The colleges, like the British schools in India, heavily emphasized rote learning, the regurgitation of which was what the examinations tested.

India's villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming

The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.

The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and, according to at least one contemporary account (as well as widespread, if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft.

in the binary terms made famous by George W. Bush: 'Are you with us or against us?

And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.

Human beings don't live in the long run they live and suffer in the here and now

The British in India were never more than 0.05  per  cent of the population.