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This:

“�� My dear fellow, that’s where our future is: politics! It’s a beautiful world—wealth, success, position, power—and yet it’s full of brainless people�� When I think of all the tricks I used in our village to pinch a few torn clothes from people—if one uses half that intelligence here, one can get robes of power. And not have to pinch them either—get them!��

And this:

“…You rob a man, you run, and hide. It’s all so pointless. One should be able to rob a man and then stay there to punish him for getting robbed. That’s called ‘class’—that’s being a real king!��

Girish Karnad wrote Tughlaq (originally in Kannada) back in the 1960s, as a reflection on Nehru: how Nehru began his Prime Ministership of a newly independent India in a spirit of high idealism, and how that idealism degenerated and crumbled over the years. This idea Karnad took into the past, showing it through the story of the mad genius Mohammad bin Tughlaq, who began his reign with great ideals, but whose rule collapsed into a series of disasters, each more indicative of the Sultan’s inability to accept ideas other than his own, his insistence on pushing through with harebrained schemes that seemed fabulous to him,if not to anyone else. Here we see Tughlaq decide to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad; introduce copper coinage; get rid of one uncomfortably irritating thorn in the side after another. Not all of it is strictly historical, but that didn’t matter to me; I could see it for the allegory it was.

And what strikes me so forcefully is that all of this is still so relevant, so easy to relate to. Human nature, politics, the greed for power and wealth: it doesn’t change, after all.