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Photo: Murali Kumar K.

ELOQUENT Shashi Tharoor is too canny a speaker, and publicist, to sound over optimistic

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 children, the creaking infrastructure, the burgeoning population (especially in the Hindi belt). But these are by way of asides, temporary inconveniences to be swept aside in the unstoppable march to progress, and ... and what? Superpower status?

Tharoor is not at all happy with the S-word: all that he wants is “for us to be the best India that we can.” He is not a votary or exponent of raw power in the tradition of the imperialists and colonialists of yore, or the U.S. neo-conservatives of today; he is more comfortable with the idea of ‘soft power’ as articulated by Clinton administration official and U.S. academic Joseph Nye, of the ability to get what you want through attraction, not coercion. Bollywood’s reach and attraction is a pre-eminent example of how soft power works for Tharoor; Indian gurus, fashion designers, beauty queens and curry houses could be added to the list.

In fact, according to him, what works best for India is not governmental propaganda, but the incidental spin-offs of the emerging India.

Tharoor is a compelling speaker: eloquent, persuasive and humorous. Felicitous phrases trip off his tongue (‘regulating stagnation, distributing poverty,’ a reference to the era of planning; ‘Baywatch and burgers are not going to supplant Bharatanatyam and bhel puri,’ rejecting the notion that we will be culturally overwhelmed by globalisation), and he throws up ideas and anecdotes by the dozen in a torrent of words, leaving the audience spellbound.

At times, it’s hard to separate Brand India from Brand Tharoor, for his talk is not only a celebration of India, but also of Shashi Tharoor: glossy, well-packaged but leaving one with the question, which is the real Tharoor?

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