There’s no longer a superpower standoff. But there are real problems that divide countries around the world. And the UN is still the place where we can get together and try and discuss them.

Terrorism is a principal preoccupation in most of our international contacts.

India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.

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.

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?

Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.

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