Memorable Quotes from the Great Indian Novel by Sashi Tharoor

It was as if the good Lord, having given the Indian peasent droughts, and floods, and floods after droughts, and heat, and dust, and low wages, and British rule, said to him, your cup of woe has runneth over, drink instead from the juice of Chausa, and it will make up for all your miseries I have inflicted upon you.


Indian Muslims themselves were not just Sunnis or Shias, but Moplahs and Bohras and Khojas, Ismailis and Qadianis and Ahmediyas and Kutchi Memons and Allah alone knew what else. These differences were simply a fact of Indian life, as incontestable and as innocuous as the different species of vegetation that sprout and flower our land.

So we Indians are open about our differences; we do not attempt to subsume overselves in a homogeneous mass, we do not resort to the identity disguising tricks of standardize names or uniform costumes or even of a common national language. We are all different; as the French, that most Indian of Europeon peoples, like to put it, albeit in another context, vive la difference !!! :))

No Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil serpent who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord.

Your lot were free to be themselves so long as this did not encroach on my lot's right to do the same.

Divide et impera - divide and rule in Roman.

If you want to know why democracy is held in such scant respect by our present elite, Ganapthi, you need only look at the way it was dispensed to us by those who claimed to be it's guardians.


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Memorable Quotes from the Great Indian Novel by Sashi Tharoor

one must vindicate the Truth not by infliction of sufferings on the opponent, but on one's self.

"vinasha kale, viparita buddhi," -whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

This is now the classic picture of India, is it not, and French cinematographers take time off from filming the unclad forms of their women in order to focus with loving pity on the unclad forms of our childrens.

Indulge an old man's rage, Ganapathi, and write this down: the British killed the Indian artisan, they created the Indian 'landless labourer', they exported our full employement and they invented our poverty.

There is something particularly soul-destroying about urban squalor: in a city-slum Nature provides no soothing contrast to offset the man-made horror. In those narrow airless alleys it is impossible to escape from the pervasive wrechtedness.

But Fate has a habit of intervening at just the right moment to resolve these crises, to drop an apple on a sleeping head, to turn an aimless drift into surging tide. Great discoveries, Ganapathi  are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.

Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one.( Her husband or son, of course never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking).

All we are left with is the drama without ths sacrifice - and isn't that a metaphor for Indian politics today.


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