War & Peace Quote by Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is doing something deceptively radical here: he turns “taste” from a private quirk into a civic test. On the surface, it’s a gentle plea for tolerance - let people like what they like. But the real bite is in the contrast he stages between the harmlessness of preference (“a flower,” “a flavor,” “a book,” “a composition”) and the ugliness of what happens when a society treats those preferences like battle lines.

The list matters. It slides from nature to sensual pleasure to art, quietly mapping a continuum of experience where disagreement should be low-stakes, even pleasurable. By pairing the intimate (“flavor”) with the elevated (“composition”), Shankar collapses the false hierarchy that makes people defend their cultural choices as if they’re moral truths. He’s telling you: you’re not protecting values, you’re protecting ego.

“Very sad” sounds mild, but it’s a seasoned artist’s disappointment, not naïveté. Shankar spent decades watching art get drafted into identity politics - classical versus popular, “authentic” versus “westernized,” tradition versus modernity. His international career, often celebrated as cultural diplomacy, also put him in the crossfire of gatekeeping and nationalism: who gets to represent “real” Indian culture, who counts as legitimate, whose audience matters.

The phrase “in our country” lands like a sigh and a reprimand. He isn’t scolding individual rudeness; he’s diagnosing a social habit: turning aesthetics into allegiances, then mistaking aggression for conviction. The subtext is clear: a nation that can’t disagree about music without becoming “unseemly” will struggle to disagree about anything that actually matters.