The Great Indian Novel Quotes

“Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“In debate he thought high and aimed low.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“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, The Great Indian Novel

“Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“...(It) is to one British colonial policy-maker or another that we owe the Boxer Rebellion, the Mau Mau insurrection, the Boer War, and the Boston Tea Party”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Mahabharata claims that ‘if a man has one thousand tongues, lives for a hundred years and does nothing except describing the faults of woman, he will die without finishing the job’).”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely planters to drown and justify their solitary gins, mingled with the scent of frangipani from their leafy, insect-ridden gardens, and the soothing clink of ice against glass was only disturbed by the occasional slap of a frustrated palm against a reddening spot just vacated by an anglovorous mosquito.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“(Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.)”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Do you know what ‘philosophical’ means, Ganapathi? It comes from the Greek words phileein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, Ganapathi. Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling defect 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 Great Indian Novel

“Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story – a marvellous fable from our Puranas that illustrates both our resilience and our self-absorption in the face of circumstance.’ I sat up against my bolsters and assumed the knowingly expectant attitude of those who are about to tell stories or perform card tricks. ‘A man, someone very like you, Arjun – a symbol, shall we say, of the people of India - is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no – what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak, and bends dangerously. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it; before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape? Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry, and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. What is our hero to do? As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass growing on the wall of the well. On the top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What action does our Puranic man, our quintessential Indian, take in this situation? He bends with the branch, and licks up the honey.’
I laughed at the strain, and the anxiety, on Arjun’s face. ‘What did you expect? Some neat solution to his problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachhan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly, Arjun. One strength of the Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved, and it learns to make the best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, Arjun, India as we know it could not survive.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“(Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.)”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals:”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there’s trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions. That”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“we are,”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“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.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“Our present concept of morality isn’t really Hindu at all; it is a legacy both of the Muslim invasion and of the superimposition of Victorian prudery on a people already puritanized by purdah.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel

“there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel