writer, politician, diplomat, jurist
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1956
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.
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?
No Indian nationalist leader ever needed to say: We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.
We all have multiple identities in India; we are all minorities in India. Our heterogeneity is definitional.
Pluralist India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.
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.
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."
"It was as if he had heard what I wanted," she said. But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.
The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.
What is most important to me is Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of India, India as a pluralist society and polity, an idea which is central to India’s survival, which has held now in the four decades after his death and which is all the more in need of defending.
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.
In building an Indian nation that takes account of the country's true Hindu heritage, we have to return to the pluralism of the national movement.
The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.
Does NRI (Non-Resident Indian) stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished India? I believe a little of both!
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.
The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.
The pluralism and the linguistic diversity of India is something of which we can truly be proud.
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.
India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made.
Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.
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.
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.
Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream. We have given passports to their ideals.
India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.
In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
Ultimately, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together.
The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.
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.
The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination.
If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.
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.
The U.N. guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the U.N. is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them.
Education in India has made monumental progress since Independence but continues to face daunting challenges at multiple levels, particularly in terms of quality, infrastructure and dropout rates. We have islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity.
I believe in an India of pluralism and diversity, not of religious bigotry and caste politics. I believe in an India that is secure in itself and confident of its place in the world, an India that is a proud example of tolerance, freedom and hope for the downtrodden.