News

The Hindu : The first thing that strikes you about Shashi Tharooris his youthfulness; it’s hard to believe that this urbane-looking, silk dhoti-and-kurta sporting man is 50 plus and the former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations.Members of the book clubs have braved the slashing rain and stormy winds to hear him speak; the former U.N. official is something of a celebrity, especially after he ran eventual winner Ban Ki-moon of South Korea a close second in the poll for a new U.N. Secretary-General as India’s official candidate; not that he wasn’t well known on the literati circuit even before, considering his nine books and columns in various newspapers (including The Hindu).Tharoor is here to talk about his latest book – The Elephant, The Tiger and The Cell Phone – and finds an audience fully receptive to the message he wants to get across. He is a votary of all things Indian; the economic rise of India since the liberalisation unleashed by P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in the ’90s provides Tharoor the springboard to project Brand India on the global and Indian stage.His thesis is simple: lumbering India of the past, shackled by the licence raj for the first four decades of Independence is now rapidly morphing into an agile, lithe tiger; hence the title. The cell phone is a metaphor for the change; Tharoor hammers home the fact that the cell phone has become ubiquitous now, even in the hands of the so-called underclass: istri-wallahs and fishermen. For him, this is emblematic of the economic and social transformation under way, a transformation that marks India’s emergence as a 21st century power, which is, in fact, the subtitle (or more accurately, the sub text) of his book.Tharoor is too canny a speaker, and publicist, to sound over optimistic; he acknowledges the problems that India still faces: the grinding poverty, the illiteracy and failure to educate our…More