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Shashi Tharoor’s Never-Ending Anti-Modi Commentaries: Selling India Cheap to His Foreign Networks
Shashi Tharoor is no doubt a smart man. He is also a handsome man. He is my age, and I used to be jealous, growing up, how he had already begun publishing in India’s top journals, newspapers, and magazines when he was just a teenager while I could not get one short article published even in a local newspaper. He wrote his first, popular, and perceptive book “The Great Indian Novel” in 1989, when he was 33, reading the new India through the old lens of the Mahabharata. He has published some twenty odd more popular books after that, both fiction and nonfiction. Equally fecund has been his pursuit of women, and of women chasing him. The number of women he has courted, bedded, wedded, and let go therefore also make for interesting reading. Equally impressive was his educational achievements, having earned a PhD in International Relations from Tufts University at 22!
Over the decades, I have followed the twists and turns in his life — the suspect and the productive, the influential and the seamy, the clever and the political. After his stint at the United Nations, where he sought the highest post and was denied in 2007, he has now been a fixture in Indian politics for about a decade and a half, representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Parliament since 2009, and as a member of the Congress Party, of which he sought the presidency, and was denied last year. He says he felt comfortable joining the Congress Party because he is “ideologically comfortable” with it, though paradoxically it is a dynastic and feudal party that uses him cleverly and ensures he is kept on a leash.
The “ideological comfort” he has living in the “House of the Congress Party” has led him to offer a blinkered view of his country and his people to the world, where he has much traction given his long United Nations stint, his prolific writing, his suave and worldly ways, and his handsome personality. His speaking and his writing are neither glib nor do they have depth, they are neither superficial nor are they penetrating. He is an intelligent and a smart man in love with his own glossy self and has therefore not just lost the opportunity to leverage his “God-given” gifts, but he has lost the capacity to make a difference. He is so full of himself that he is…