Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

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.

On Mohandas K. 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.

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.

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.

India imposes no procrustean exactions on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.

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

I don't go by my caste, creed, or religion. My works speak for me.

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.

On "The Great Indian Novel": 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.