{"author":"Shashi Tharoor","author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor","total_quotes":27,"quotes":[{"text":"Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin’s bullet with the words “Hé Ram” on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, “it is doomed to destruction.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["hinduism","india","islam","religion"],"id":13596,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["india","reality","truth"],"id":31302,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"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.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["travel","home","parents "],"id":36431,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"The notion of 'world leadership' is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous country by 2034?","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["leader","world","country "],"id":57847,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"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.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["development","india"],"id":64697,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"Five decades ago, as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: 'After Nehru, who?' The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: 'After Nehru, what?'.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["world","nation","india "],"id":76053,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"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.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["hinduism","india","religion"],"id":80077,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"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.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["gandhi"],"id":123696,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["india","prayer","religion"],"id":157526,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"},{"text":"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.","author":"Shashi Tharoor","tags":["hinduism","india","religion"],"id":201930,"author_id":"Shashi+Tharoor"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}