1 Hour with an Unoriginal Shashi Tharoor

The illustrious Shashi Tharoor visited my office yesterday to speak. Speak on what? Didn't matter to the huge crowd who turned up at the hall. All were excited about hearing from one of the most high-profile global Indians around. Though Tharoor's official website projects him as an author, to us he is more familiar as a dapper, media-savvy diplomat of international repute. A guy who almost became Secretary General of UN, was naturally expected to share some very original insights that only he can offer, as a man having a truly global perspective. Well, Tharoor did not live up to his reputation.


Theme of his speech was 'Innovation / Imagining' which made us to believe Dr. Tharoor will present some thoughtful opinion about relevant international issues like the economic crisis, IT slowdown and how we the Young India should get over the hurdles. I agree that's not a very original expectation, still was fair nevertheless.

Dr. Tharoor started his speech by condemning the Mumbai Terror Attacks. At first it seemed perfectly diplomatic to express grief over the Mumbai Massacre, but few minutes into the speech, I realized that he is quoting from his own article that was published in Guardian 2 days back, on Nov 28th. And when I say quoting, I mean sentence-by-sentence, word-by-word. He used the exact same terms to draw picture of a diverse Indian/Mumbai population and to deduce how this attack actually is targeted toward pluralistic Indian culture. The Mumbai Attack part of his speech lasted for 15 minutes and ended with an appeal to whoever is listening that our muslim brothers and sisters shouldn't be demonised indiscriminately.

Next 15 minutes was taken up by another kind of propaganda if not a marketing initiative. Shashi Tharoor, quite abrupt to the mood built up by Terrorism speech, started explaining the reasons why his book has been named "The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cellphone". He elaborated more on the Cellphone part and I somewhat liked this phase of his lecture. He used interesting anecdotes to exemplify how Indian Telecommunication culture improved over the decades.

He wrapped up the lecture on the customary positive note, ga-ga ing over emerging India, reminding us - the IT community that we, belonging to a a priviledged background, should never forget our downtrodden countrymen.

A Q&A session followed in which only 5 questions were handled by Shashi Tharoor because of his tight schedule. Questions were pretty general, and after one hour of listening to Dr. Tharoor, I got the idea of what really to expect. One guy sought Tharoor's opinion on India's Economic Surge and then it happened again. Tharoor quoted from a previous interview of his. The interview excerpt being fresh on mind ( I read it 30 minutes before the session), I could have mouthed his speech at that point. Remaining questions were pretty mundane open house stuff.

That was all : 2 cups of tea, 15 minutes of Terror-tears, 15 minutes of Why-My-Book-is-Interesting with "Innovation/Imagining" forced in between, 30 minutes of unimaginative questions and dishearteningly unoriginal answers. That was my 1 hour with Shashi Tharoor.

One may ask what is it that bothers me so much about Shashi Tharoor's session? Here you go!

First: Maybe he quoted from his own article or interview, but when someone comes down all the way to India and is speaking to a crowd who really admires him, is it unfair for the crowd to expect him to say something unique, at least express the same view in a different way? And anyway, why would one mug up lines from an interview or article? Maybe, Tharoor is a man of his own words. But for a man who gets paid to speak, it can be counted as a lack of Imagination .

Second: We wanted to hear something inspirational, bits and pieces of his wisdom accumulated over years of international exposure, glimpses of his global vision that could impact our otherwise stagnant minds and bring out the spark which we love to believe is still glowing within us. But all that we got was generalized popular opinions, that were characteristically unimaginative and at times - boring. His words sounded eerily similar to the secular propaganda practised and perfected by Indian politicians over years. His insights were too near-sighted, taking into notice that they are coming from a global diplomat. The vision, was not visible.

Third : At times, he was repetitive as well, the idea of Great Pluralistic Indian Society was mentioned every 5 minutes. Personally I won't be excited to hear something that has been spoon fed to us since we were in school - "Explain your views on 'Unity in Diversity' of India" - I wrote answer to this History paper question god-knows-how-many times. Later on, I found certain book reviews also complains about these recurring themes - Indian plurality and diversity - in Tharoor's writing.

I had mighty high expectations from this Session with Shashi Tharoor. But the man turned out to be more gloss than matter. He won hearts with his easy talking, soothing smile and popular views, but not the minds that think. Disheartening and disappointing. Not something you expect from a person who was elected as "Global Leader of Tomorrow".