Quotes from Shashi Tharoor

I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre

for many in India, he said, God will only appear as a loaf of bread.

Taxation and the general conditions of life under the East India Company were so unpleasant and onerous that, as I have mentioned earlier, as many as could fled their traditional homes for refuge in domains beyond the Company's remit, whereas the migration of Indian peasants from the 'native states' to British India was unheard of through most of the nineteenth century.

William Digby calculated that 'the ryots in the Districts outside the permanent settlement get only one half as much to eat in the year as their grandfathers did, and only one-third as much as their great-grandfathers did. Yet, in spite of such facts, the land tax is exacted with the greatest stringency and must be paid to the Government in coin before the crops are garnered!

Kerala's Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton could lay claim to.

He argued that it is an insult to preach religion to a man with an empty stomach, and for many in India, he said, God will only appear as a loaf of bread.

One cannot take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge

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.7.37

When an Englishman wants something, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as a 'burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants

It is a bit rich for the Brits to suppress, exploit, imprison, torture and maim a people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it. We weren't given democracy, we had to snatch it from your hands

Islam came to Kerala not by the sword, as it did in northern India, but through traders, travellers and missionaries, who brought its message of equality and brotherhood to the coastal people.

British under Clive defeat Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula to become rulers of Bengal, the richest province of India.

We brought up our sons to 'eat everything', but their mixed genetic inheritance prevailed: one twin took to meat-eating with relish, while the other, at age seven, with no persuasion whatsoever from his father, turned staunchly vegetarian.

lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious.

India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.

My friend Keerthik Sasidharan suggested to me, in twenty-first-century terms, that Hinduism is analogous to an open-source operating system on top of which others can build applications to be deployed in the receptive hardware of human brains. All Hinduism demands before the formation of any belief is analytical and logical consistency. Even the existence of God is subject to this test.

But in two hundred years of British rule, and thousands of cases in which Indians died at the hands of their colonial masters, these three cases were the only exceptions.

Hinduism, with its tradition of openness, tolerance and acceptance of the Divine in the most diverse forms imaginable, 'could perhaps more easily than any other faith develop, without loss of continuity with its past, into a universal religion…

the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, 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.

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.

Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti: the Truth is One but sages call It by different names.

control. The people's character is deliberately debased, their mind is denationalized and perpetually kept in ignorance and fed with stories of England's greatness and 'mission' in the world… As Pankaj Mishra has observed: European subordination of Asia was not merely economic and political and military. It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which

there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I

Ugliness is halfway to beauty.