What economic libralisation needs, if it is to succeed , is a general acceptance that reforms are for the general good, that they might seem to help some more than others, but that in the long run everyone will benefit from them. Such attitude is far from being realized

I make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.

Diplomacy is much like the "lovemaking of elephants", which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years

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.

If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.

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.

In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.