Shashi Quotes

Hindu fundamentalism," because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages - French and Persian amongst them - the word for "Indian" is "Hindu." Originally "Hindu" simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word "Hindu" did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The kind of stillness of being nothing, and doing things from that emptiness, make one strong. ~ Shashi

I don't go by my caste, creed or religion. My works speak for me. ~ Shashi Tharoor

In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Life is like a river, where one has to flow along with the present moments of love and understanding. Yet, we vigorously thrash about, trying to reach out and rest on the banks of desires and doubts, ultimately becoming a spent force, buried deep on the banks of past memories and future worries. - (Page 95) ~ Shashi

Terrorism is a principal preoccupation in most of our international contacts. ~ Shashi Tharoor

crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with ~ Shashi Tharoor

Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone. ~ Shashi Tharoor

If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Everyone has a specific place in the cosmic fiber of the universe and if you do not find it for yourself, you will be forever traveling without knowing where you have to go. So look deep into
yourself and find the reason for your being. ~ Shashi

When the living gets unburdened with needs and desires, the life becomes simple and easy to carry. ~ Shashi

The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the 'Voice of America' and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity. ~ Shashi Tharoor

There was a time when bright people had few prospects for higher education and good jobs here. But that is changing. India is no longer seen as an undesirable place to work or pursue research. ~ Shashi Tharoor

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali
a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a "true path" that they have missed. ~ Shashi Tharoor

How to Sleep at Night

Try to think of nothing.
That's the secret.

Try to think of nothing.
Do not think of work not done,
or of promises unkept, calls to return,
or agendas you have failed to prepare for meetings
yet unheld.

Think of nothing.
Do not think of words said and unsaid,
or minor scandals and major investigations,
of humiliations endured, insults suffered,
or retorts that did not spring to mind
in time.

Think of nothing.
Do not think of your wife,
of lonely children and their reproachful demands,
or the smile of the pretty woman
whose handshake lingered just a shade too long
in your palm.

Think of nothing.
Do not think of newspaper headlines,
of the insistent transience of the shortwave radio,
or the seductive stridency of the TV microphones
thrust so thrillingly
into your face.

Think of nothing.
Do not think of the waif on the foreign sidewalk,
her large eyes open in supplication,
her ragged shift stained by dirt and dust,
stretching her despairing hand towards you
in hope

No, do not think
of the solitary tear, the broken limb,
the rubble-strewn home, the choking scream;
never think
of piled up bodies, blazing flames,
shattered lives, or sundered souls.
Do not think of the triumph of the torturer,
the wails of the hungry,
Shashi Tharoor

Hinduism is great for encouraging social peace, because everyone basically believes their suffering in this life is the result of misdeeds in a past one... So Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage - about what we'd do, where we'd do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she'd become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She's a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn't all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things - frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn't even seem to miss it. I did. ~ Shashi Tharoor

I believe in an India of pluralism and diversity, not of religious bigotry and caste politics. I believe in an India that is secure in itself and confident of its place in the world, an India that is a proud example of tolerance, freedom and hope for the downtrodden. ~ Shashi Tharoor

This is the one international institution we have in which governments get together to work collectively for a common purpose. International crises, by definition, require international solutions. Peacekeeping is a response to conflict, is a response to situations in which often it is not the business of any one particular country to get into. It seems to me, therefore, that the world will for the foreseeable future need peacekeeping. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Man has always tried to rewrite his history but the mind is unforgiving, more so is time" - The Monk ~ Shashi

As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Space between thoughts is the meditative silence where greatness is created." - Anishka - Songs of the Mist ~ Shashi

A wife should always be few feet behind her husband. If he is an MA you should be a BA.If he is 5'4'tall you shouldn't be more than 5'3'tall. If he is earning five hundred rupees you should never earn more than four hundred and ninety nine rupees.That's the only rule to follow if you want a happy marriage ... No partnership can ever be equal.It will always be unequal, but take care it is unequal in favor of the husband. If the scales tilt in your favor, God help you, both of you. ~ Shashi Deshpande

In eternity
We live. Come from.
Life is one Series of footprints. ~ Shashi

national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics? ~ Shashi Tharoor

The episode of the 'shoe bomber,' Richard Reid, has suddenly meant more feet being bared at airports than at the average Hindu temple. My solution has been to replace my customary lace-up Oxfords with a pair of slip-on loafers when I fly. Generals are always fighting the last war, and security screeners are the same. ~ Shashi Tharoor

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Things can never be as they were. It's astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature. ~ Shashi Deshpande

The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later, ~ Shashi Tharoor

Don't grieve for desires that are not fulfilled. Sometimes the things that don't happen keep disasters from happening too ~ Shashi

The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers. The ~ Shashi Tharoor

We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet. ~ Shashi Tharoor

A highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay). ~ Shashi Tharoor

Most of the time, our enquiries are triggered by desires to corroborate what we think it is, rather than the genuine desire to know." - Anishka (Pg 177) ~ Shashi

Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy
and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Gangaji's truth required activism, not passivity. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them. ~ Shashi Tharoor

I returned to India after long years of international service, because I had always cherished the desire to make a difference in my own country. ~ Shashi Tharoor

It's not just that life is cruel, but that in the very process of our birth we submit to life's cruelty ~ Shashi Deshpande

They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time. ~ Shashi Tharoor

India's national elections are really an aggregate of thirty different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents, and different patterns of political incumbency. ~ Shashi Tharoor

I returned to India because I believe in an India of honesty and hard work, not of corruption and crookedness. I believe in an India of openness and straightforwardness, not of hypocrisy and double-dealing. I believe in an India where opportunities are available to all, and not just to a chosen few. ~ Shashi Tharoor

India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made. ~ Shashi Tharoor

There is not a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. We are where we are at the only time we have. Perhaps it's where we're meant to be. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Though the euphoria surrounding Barack Obama's election last week as President-elect has not yet begun to subside, it is already time to recognise that the most important challenge facing the next U.S. president is to restore America's standing in the eyes of the world. ~ Shashi Tharoor

In Indian culture, the woman of the house - the embodiment of the family's honor - treasures her gold jewelry both as her soundest asset and as the symbol of her status. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. ~ Shashi Tharoor

If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Love is the highest form of our bliss that comes from the mixing of our own self- worth and reverence with the other." - Calliope in "Songs of the Mist ~ Shashi

Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. ~ Shashi Tharoor

One American newspaper wholesaler told The New York Times that the Indians basically replaced the old Jewish and Italian merchants and they've filled a tremendous void because nobody will put in the fourteen and sixteen-hour days that they do quite willingly and that you have to put in when running a newsstand. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The ISI may well be Pakistan's answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it ~ Shashi Tharoor

India ... was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously ... Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages ... [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign influences poured in ... and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Women without men, I realized then, are totally different creatures. ~ Shashi Deshpande

Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real you never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces. ~ Shashi Deshpande

I know that safety is always unattainable. You're never safe. ~ Shashi Deshpande

Nehru, speaking of his country's dreams, said: 'Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.' It ~ Shashi Tharoor

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it. ~ Shashi Tharoor

The right path is the one where you feel happy within yourself, at ease within yourself. When there is peace and harmony within, these questions lose their meaning. (Songs of the Mist - Page 95) ~ Shashi

Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and have provided foreign journalists with the opportunity to remind the world that India remains the world's largest democracy. ~ Shashi Tharoor

but it does not want ~ Shashi Tharoor

To overcome your fear of death, you have to move from 'the world ends with me' to 'the world goes on without me'. It is a great leap, the biggest step a human can take. ~ Shashi Deshpande

Many of the people who are most considered anti-American would love to partake of the American dream: the unspoken slogan of many protesters outside U.S. embassies abroad is really: 'Yankee go home, but take me with you.' ~ Shashi Tharoor

Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries? ~ Shashi Tharoor

Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, and Iranians with Indonesians. The Indian Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge linking them together. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Much of the conventional analysis of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people. ~ Shashi Tharoor

He leaned towards the young man, his eyes, mouth and face all round in concentration. '"There was a banned crow,"' he intoned sonorously. '"There was a cold day." Not bad, eh? I learned those on the boat. Sounds like perfect Urdu, I'm told.' He paused and frowned. 'The devil of it is remembering which one means, "close the door," and which one will get someone to open it. ~ Shashi Tharoor

There are times when the way has to pass through sufferings to cleanse ourselves from the burden of the past. ~ Shashi

Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. Pluralist ~ Shashi Tharoor

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I'm in love with an Indian. I must be crazy. ~ Shashi Tharoor

A friend ... showed me the kitchen in her new home with the words, "This is my office." I knew what she meant. This is where I do the work I want to, the work I like and enjoy. ~ Shashi Deshpande

On Gandhi: Don't ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground. ~ Shashi Tharoor

minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions. ~ Shashi Tharoor

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. ~ Shashi Tharoor

In China, national priorities are established by the Government and then funded by the state; in India, priorities emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments amongst myriad interests, and funds have to be found where they might. ~ Shashi Tharoor

While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Diplomacy is much like the "lovemaking of elephants", which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years ~ Shashi Tharoor

As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Surely there comes a moment in every human's life when he or she says, like the Sibyl - I wish to die. ~ Shashi Deshpande

How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years. ~ Shashi Tharoor

India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India. ~ Shashi Tharoor

Love usually transcends the limits of our physical existence to connect us with the beauty of life all around - Ashutosh (Page 10) ~ Shashi

Going abroad to study as a teenager, and joining the United Nations at 22, confirmed my ease with the world of the frequent flyer. I saw the average airport terminal as a familiar haven, like a friend's sitting room. But 9/11 changed all that. ~ Shashi Tharoor