Shashi Tharoor: Quotes about history

“India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”

Shashi Tharoor

World Policy Journal, "Reflections", Volume XXI, No 2, Summer 2004 Available Online https://web.archive.org/web/20080616055809/http://www.worldpolicy.org:80/journal/articles/wpj04-2/Tharoor.html
2000s

People , History , Country

“The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel

People , History

“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 book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel
Variant: 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.

Love , Wisdom , Fate , World

“The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Life , History , Sense

“Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land, emerging from an ancient civilization, shaped by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.”

Shashi Tharoor

The 125th Anniversary Jubilee Lecture, St. Stephen's College, Delhi, November 12 2005, "India: from Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond" Available Online http://www.shashitharoor.com/books/midnight/lecture.html
2000s

Democracy , History , Idea

“This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine…. Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

Source: The Great Indian Novel (1989)

History , Heart