5 highlights
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Sadly none of these qualities are visible in Shashi Tharoor’s The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, a ragbag of columns and op-eds in which ancient platitudes, second-hand insights, and tacky witticisms are aimed at the reader with a quite breathtaking conviction.
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This is dubious in itself, but a further advertisement of pluralism, Tharoor avers, was the Indian team itself,a champion side “including two Muslims and a Sikh, and captained by a Hindu with a wife named Donna”. Tharoor here carelessly seems to confer an honorary Christianity upon Sourav Ganguly’s wife Dona – one can’t see any other reason why her name merits a mention – to fill up a blank in his pluralist headcount.
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Nor is Tharoor much more edifying when talking about another of his pet subjects, “the new India”. Watching the excitable cricketer S. Sreesanth slog a bullying South African fast bowler over his head for six and follow it up with a frenzied war dance, Tharoor is convinced that this incident epitomizes “all that is different about the new India” – bold, fearless, confident.
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Tharoor continues: “Sreesanth’s India is the land that throws out the intruders of Kargil…that wins Booker Prizes and Miss Universe contests.” I felt embarrassed even reading such twaddle.
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In another passage about India as a land of contrasts and extremes, Tharoor closes a paragraph with the lines: “Any truism about India can be imeediately contradicted by another truism about India. I once jokingly observed that ‘anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true.‘” What is going on here? In these lines we find not one but two Shashi Tharoors – Shashi Tharoor present and Shashi Tharoor past – supporting each other in confirmation of the most trite characterisations.