India Quotes

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”. . . [T]he wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita [says]: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly.”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a price. The resultant stagnation led to snide comments about what Indian economist Raj Krishna called the “Hindu rate of growth,” which averaged some 3.5 percent in the first three decades after independence (or, to be more exact, between 1950 and 1980) when other countries in Southeast Asia were growing at 8 to 15 percent or even more.”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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. But this cannot be the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, or the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, who, a century ago, at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the liberal humanism that lies at the heart of his and my creed:”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond