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Shashi Tharoor citations

Shashi Tharoor , né le 9 mars 1956 à Londres, est un diplomate, homme politique et écrivain indien.

Après de brillantes études en Inde et aux États-Unis, il intègre l'Organisation des Nations unies en 1978 où il travaille d'abord au Haut commissariat pour les réfugiés puis aux Opérations de maintien de la paix et ensuite en tant que Secrétaire général adjoint à la communication et l'information. Il quitte l'ONU en 2007 après l'échec de sa candidature au poste de Secrétaire général.

Il commence alors une carrière politique en Inde où il est élu député au Lok Sabha de la circonscription de Trivandrum en 2009. La même année il est nommé Secrétaire d'état aux Affaires étrangères, poste dont il démissionne en avril 2010 puis il entre de nouveau au Gouvernement en octobre 2012 comme Secrétaire d'état au Ministère de l'enseignement et de la recherche.

Parallèlement, Shashi Tharoor mène une carrière d'auteur à succès, publiant quatre romans et plusieurs ouvrages documentaires traduits dans de nombreuses langues. Il écrit régulièrement des chroniques et des critiques littéraires dans de grands journaux, tant indiens qu'américains. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. mars 1956   •   Autres noms শশী থারুর, 沙希·塔魯爾, ششی تھرور
Shashi Tharoor photo
Shashi Tharoor: 43   citations 0   J'aime

Shashi Tharoor: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "The Shashi Tharoor column: A departure, fictionally", Sunday, September 16, 2001 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/16/stories/13160675.htm
2000s

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor

Source: Riot

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

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.”

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Shashi Tharoor

"The Shashi Tharoor column: The creation of India," 2001

“Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness. It means profusion of religions.”

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Shashi Tharoor

“The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel

“Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“On "Priya Duryodhani": She was a slight frail girl, with a thin tapering face like kernel of a mango and dark-brown eyebrows that nearly joined together over high-ridged nose, giving her to look of a desiccated school teacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enroll at school. She had dark and lustrous eyes. They shone from that finished face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "Things that happen only in India", Sunday, Aug 13, 2006 Available Online http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/08/13/stories/2006081300010300.htm
2000s

“If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.”

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Shashi Tharoor

Nehru: The Invention of India

“How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! That is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarians. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. That is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "License to Be Himself", April 1, 2001
2000s

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel

“Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "After the Dust is Settled", April 15, 2001
2000s

“There is, in short no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary intervention of the teller, but there can be no finality about the choice. Today’s end is, after all tomorrow’s beginning.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.”

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Shashi Tharoor

Nehru: The Invention of India

“Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.”

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Shashi Tharoor

"The Shashi Tharoor column: The creation of India," 2001

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel
Variante: 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.

“I was not blinded by faith, but the encounter was indeed astonishing at several levels. In our private talk, Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that he could not possibly have known…. He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger."”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "Reality - Spiritual and Virtual", Nov 10, 2002 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2002/11/10/stories/2002111000620300.htm.
2000s

“Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!”

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Shashi Tharoor

Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 3, 371-390 (2005)DOI: 10.1177/0163443705051749, © 2005 SAGE Publications, "Creating immigrant identities in cybernetic space: examples from a non-resident Indian website, Available Online http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/3/371
2000s

“The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.”

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Shashi Tharoor

The Hindu, "1947, first-hand ", Sunday, Aug 15, 2004 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2004/08/15/stories/2004081500530300.htm
2000s

“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.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“No Indian nationalist leader ever needed to say: We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.”

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Shashi Tharoor

Rediff News, "Who is an Indian?", Available Online http://www.rediff.com/republic/2000/apr/06shashi.htm, April 6, 2000
2000s

“But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. 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. As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass on wall of well. On top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What is our hero to do? What action does our puranic man quintessential Indian, take in the situation? He bends with the branch and licks up the honey…. What did you expect? Some neat solution to the problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachchan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly. One strength of Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make 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, india as we know it could not survive.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“We Indians, Arjun, are so good at respecting outward forms while ignoring the substance. We took the forms of parliamentary democracy, preserved them, put them on pedestal and paid them due obeisance. But we ignored the basic fact that parliamentary democracy can only work if those who run it are constantly responsive to needs of the people and if parliamentarians are qualified enough to legislate. Neither condition was fulfilled in India for long. Today most people are simply aware of their own irrelevance to the process. They see themselves standing helplessly on the margins while professional politicians and unprofessional politicians combine to run the country to the ground.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.”

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Shashi Tharoor livre The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

“Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together.”

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Shashi Tharoor

"The Shashi Tharoor column: The creation of India," 2001

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