Dr Shashi Tharoor with Karan Thapar on #Tharoorsaurus and beyond"},"lengthSeconds":"3585","ownerProf

Hello and welcome to a special interview for The Wire supported by Glen Levitt Books. My guest today just published his 21st book and I'll talk to him about it in a moment, but that's not the only reason he's a fascinating person. of that rare breed of politician who has a passion for words, who makes dazzling speeches and women seem to swoon before him and that begs the question of what he is like behind the vocabulary, the clipped English accent and the hair that seems to fall over his forehead . he see if he reveals the answers while i introduce you to

shashi

thiru

shashi

, let's start with your book and here it is, it's called soros complete.

Now I can understand the first part of that name, but why the second part do you look like a dinosaur? Not really. is a fun combination of comprehensive thesaurus and dinosaur. I think I gave credit to my friend Miro Gokle, the editor of Penguin, who came up with the term and then someone corrected me and pointed out that apparently Amul in one of his ad campaigns had invented it. the term got hoarded a few years ago because of something I said, so the idea that combines my name with a terrifying extinct species of dinosaur and a thesaurus, since people like to look up words that terrify them.

They could be dinosaurs, all that gives us a bit of a jokey title, except for the fact that the brontosaurus was not at all scary, it was gigantic, it was slow and it was said to be dim, see, the thing is, it turns out that I am if you like the opposite of a brontosaurus maybe a literate brontosaurus not so slow very fast in uptake and in movement uh and at the same time I don't really like to terrify anyone so maybe in that part for those for those who have I didn't get it which refers to Emily Brontë, the English author, and Charlotte and Charlotte, and they were both sisters.

Now this book is, in fact, a reflection of your fascination with words, so tell me, how did that fascination begin with my father? It goes back to childhood, my dad was a bit crazy about words, he was obsessed with word games like scrabble and then boggle when it was invented, but he also used to make up games for the family to play, so my sisters and I was constantly tested as the best with a word of nine or ten letters from which we had to derive words of at least four letters or more. My sisters, who were younger, were allowed three letters.

I had to do four or five, etc. and they got difficult over time. Dad used to do it. He would make up word games in the car, so, for example, on trips, one of the things he was absolutely brilliant at was that he would ask a person to imagine a five-letter word and the other passengers in the car would have than guessing that word on the contrary. guessing five letter words and being told how many letters match, so imagine you think about myths, for example, and the other people in the car tell you to glue the s and t together, so you would say two and then they would try to stack maybe and the a isn't there either, so you would still get two and they would realize that the vowels were removed in that process and so on and in 20 turns you have to guess the original word that the person imagined, it's much more fun. from what I just said and we grew up with that kind of stuff and at the same time dad didn't write much he himself was on the advertising side of the media he worked as a shame manager for the Statesman newspaper, his Bombay manager before that and the advertising director, the reader's summary after that, so he had had a career in the media, but he wrote the most wonderful letters, some of which have fortunately survived and he wrote the most wonderful, uh, very short columns in the advertising club newsletters, so I made the mistake of valuing words to understand that words represented not only joy in themselves, but also a means to shape ideas and communicate with others that came to me from the iPhone and I can see. that in fact the book is dedicated to your father Chandran till now.

This is a collection of 53 words and, as the preface suggests, these must be difficult words, the kind of words you would look up in a thesaurus to understand what they mean. all the difficult words no some of them are yes difficult or obscure some of them appeared in the national conversation because I used them in a tweet or something some of them were just words that we heard more in our current space like many many conclusions, many of they are words that actually everyone knows and that's why I wonder why they are there, why do you have a curfew, bully, crazy before porn and troll, everyone calls them stories behind them, so you know, everyone They know what a curfew is, of course. but no one knows how the term came about and that it was about covering a fire curve, uh, people, uh, in pre-porn.

I wanted to tell a bit of an ironic story against myself because you know pre-porn only exists in Indian English and I thought briefly. that I had invented it because I first put the word in an article in the junior Statesman in '71 or '72 and then in the following years I kept noticing it appearing in Indian publications and magazines for years after I left. india and I said, hey, the word has survived and become popular, so I rationally wrote a column asking if anyone knew of an earlier usage because otherwise I was going to take credit for it and there was one who quickly got a letter from the lady who runs the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford no less telling me that not only had he not invented it, but he had a quote dating back to the early 20th century in the United States and another from the early 1950s in the India, so there is clearly nothing new under the sun. as far as lexicography is concerned, but I was still happy to tell these stories and also use them as an opportunity for a slight side riff on Indian English.

Now my favorite of the 53 in this collection is zog zwang, it's a chester and rarely used these days. but why don't you explain to the audience what the soon moving wing of azog is? It's the way the Germans would say there's a tea hidden before the z, but it's not there when you type the letters and what is it when you as a player. In a game of chess you are forced to make a move because, as you know, you cannot pass in chess if it is your turn and you have to play and any move you make will result in your certain defeat, in other words, it is something that forces you to capitulate to actually be complicit in their own collapse and it's a wonderful term that I use to describe it applied to politics rather than absolutely.

It's a word that was probably created to often describe the situation that politicians find themselves in, given two or three examples of it in our country, but you know what's interesting is that your vocabulary is rich, it's idiosyncratic, but occasionally you It makes you misunderstood and even gets you into trouble. Remember the cattle class or the squeamish vegetarian? Do you think those terms are too Western for an Indian audience? Well, actually, um, me. in the case of the Catholic class and squeamish vegetarians, I think both were maliciously misrepresented by people for political purposes. In the case of the cattle class, for example, people deliberately overlooked the fact that I was responding to a question from a journalist who supported the BJP to ask when the austerity campaign was proclaimed, Mr.

Minister, will you travel in livestock class? So I used a term that he had used and that I knew had been known for 30 years as a very mild, inoffensive term that didn't say anything negative about people but about airlines. take us to their economy classes like cattle, let's be honest, cattle class is a slightly pejorative and funny way of referring to economy class, not economy class, why is that class cattle? Because the airlines have reduced the space between seats so much that everyone has I heard it like it was cattle, so it's actually an attack on the airlines, not the passengers, saying it anyway I answered yes in cattle class out of solidarity with all our sacred cows and then I went on a plane to Africa and was completely isolated. of all communication for 23 hours and you had to start finding out that the manure had hit the fan, so that became, I mean, everything went well.

I can't believe it was front page news in India for three days before and with people calling for my resignation. for having degraded economy class passengers and so on and finally had to be deflated by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh telling a group of outraged journalists, for God's sake, that it was just a joke and that immediately left the balloon breath, but that's a vegetarian thing apprehensive was a malicious mistranslation from a guy I knew who was trying to gain the trust of the communist party in Kerala and this guy deliberately incorrectly used apprehensive to mean nausea, I didn't say I found fish or the foul fish smell i just said that i am happy to seek the votes and advocate for the needs and welfare of the fisher fork in my constituency even though i am a squeamish vegetarian and to turn that into something that implied in malayalam that i was actually considering that fishermen were disgusting was absolutely cynical and extreme and is a reflection of how cheap and low our politics has sunk, but fortunately I suspect this is one of the dangers of having a Twitter following of seven million I imagine the only people who have the largest number of followers are rahul gandhi narendra modi Are you surprised by your popularity or do you have an explanation for it?

No, I would just say I was an early adopter. Know? I entered this part of social media back in 2009, I think the same year Narendra Modi did, but I was ahead of him until July 2013 when he surpassed me and now he is leaps and bounds ahead and as for Rahul Gandhi, I actually tried to persuade him in 2009 to start on twitter and he absolutely resisted and you may remember when he finally reluctantly agreed to join some years later, it was actually with some distance from him as rahul gandhi's charge, it was just When he became Raul Gandhi himself his popularity on social media took off and I'm very happy about it because it was actually a source of embarrassment for me to have more followers than his office, so to speak, but at the time in which it was him, he was way ahead, now he is the One surprising thing about you is that you have seven million followers on Twitter, the other, someone seven six, if you really must know that someone happened yesterday, you are very, very proud about it, isn't it?

There are many people who surpass me. Look. I was proud of it, but I still remember it in 2009. I think around the time of Hindustan something published a small article saying that Tarou has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. I was the first in India, I think he reached that milestone and all kinds of people. and I won't even tell you how high a place they occupied in our government, they told me how any politician does. Would you give me ideas for addressing an audience of ten thousand people, how I got them and what they can do, and I was busy. giving twitter instructions to people and then these controversies started and everyone who asked me backed out and said we had better stay away from twitter and remember venkaiah naidu was then bjp president quite wisely and it turned out that declaring prophetically too much tweeting would lead to quitting, which is what happened, but you know it in the picture, but I say it's just to point out that there is a lot less to be proud of now than when I was an early adopter and was the most followed person on Indian Twitter now if your 7.76 Million followers on Twitter is one of the reasons why you particularly attract the attention of the other and it affects everyone the moment they see and hear you.

It's your accent but tell me how come a maliadi who studied Instant Stevens and then went to America ended up with a clipped British accent this is the English they taught us

karan

there are many Indians who are taught English and don't speak Like you don't, I'll tell you what happens is that I think those Indians who grow up as national expatriates, okay, I was. I was born in London but we moved back to India when I was two and a half, so I didn't acquire my English voice much. instead of saying "I want my mind" and your great experience abroad was in the United States, where they have an accent and yet you speak English in places where the teachers spoke better, in terms of the old concept of British received pronunciation, a better version of what I'm talking about now.

I just had a good year and I'm proud to say that I think I have a reasonably good year when I learned French or Hindi or anything else and at the same time it's also true that as you are a national expat no mother tongue dominates so My parents were Malayalam speakers, we lived in Bombay and English became the lingua franca not only within the house but also in social circles, family and friends, etc.Then we moved to Calcutta. We are seeing something fascinating. You are saying that this English accent is actually acquired by India. It is totally Indian, acquired by Indian teachers. or two anglo-indian teachers too, but that's how I was taught at the Bombay campaign school in Montfort, school year card from Xaviers in Calcutta and the fact is that there are many Stephanians I know who speak in sort of approximations of the same thing. . kind of voice 30 years in the United States working for the United Nations and you didn't pick up a single accent, not because I had already done it, I mean, you know, I think those who acquire an American accent in English in the United States are those that they never were so fully.

I'm comfortable with English, as some people of your generation and mine, I should point out, grew up in India, so once you're fluent in a language, if you lived in America for 20 years, I'm sure you wouldn't You would sound different from others. As you are, I lived in England for 25 years and I don't have your accent and you acquired it in Delhi or Bombay. Your accent is very far, dame.this is worse than mine, I know you speak English fluently, you speak French fluently, you speak Floren Malayalam and your Hindi is improving every day, which language are you most comfortable in.

No, it's obviously English simply because it was a language in which I thought, read, played, fought and courted the ladies in my life, etc., all that and I'm very interested in that last bit, are the ladies in your life in what language do you dream or what does it depend on? who do you sleep with, oh you are a terrible man, no, I think, I think I have this blessing or curse that I almost never remember my dreams let alone what language I'm in, you do remember who you've slept with though, no you can behave badly, no, but let me get back to the point. uh the mother of my children, who was my colleague and we got married when I was 21, she is half Kashmiri and half Bengali, now inevitably it is the only language in which she could communicate with her in-laws and I with mine was English, so English became de facto our language now, the interesting thing was when the children she had were born, as everyone who has a bit of Bengali blood has a desire to make them good Bengalis, so Ella He began to speak to them in Bengali until they were two, two and a half years old, that was the language their mother spoke to them.

We had a maid who was Bengali, so that was the idea, but the interesting thing is when the children realized it. became more aware that the language the parents spoke to each other was English, it didn't take them long to stop trying to speak Bengali and even respond to comments in Bengali in English, so in multilingual homes this can happen now in their homes. the case of the mother the case of minou the interesting thing is that the opposite happened her mother was Kashmiri with Hindi mother tongues of the Kashmiri diaspora her father was Bengali but what they did perhaps much more wisely than us was to speak only one language to the east with the boy thus literally, when he was three or four years old, received a message from his father in Bengali and told his mother in Hindi and as a result, he is perfectly trilingual because he learned English at school, which could have been a ideal solution, but no.

They are Indians who are like this who they are I think there are many Indians that I know, particularly educated Indians are instinctively multilingual and that is something to be proud of, tell me right now about your childhood and about the type of family you were born into, let's go back to shashi's story and start with what kind of family he was or is and what childhood was like, well my father and mother were born in villages in Kerala, uh, my father, uh, he wouldn't call himself a man made himself because he owes a large debt to his older brother, who was 17 years older than him, he made his way in life and was very successful, he lived in London and was then able to bring his three younger brothers to give them a start in life.

Dad was uh uh, I think the first or second year at victoria college balucard, where he was a classmate of people like tian session of the recognized electoral commission in london, he finished his studies there and joined um, I mean, he started his working life in london working as a rep because I think his first job was at Amrita Bazaar, Patrick from Calcutta, which is quite funny, getting ads for his publication in India etc, after about seven years in the UK, decided to go back to Kerala, Mary and my mother, uh, new too. I left a town just a few kilometers away from him.

I went back to him and that's where I emerged in London. That's how you were born in London. That's how I was born in London. And this has not been a great privilege for my father. very, very modestly employed in modern circumstances, but he never saw himself as an immigrant to England and he was in an England where there were very few Indians. In fact, he, as a student, helped found the Indian club with Krishna Menon, who was the high commissioner and had been the head of the Indian league and that Indian club which I am very proud to say has revealed a little part.

He comes back, comes back, comes back to your own story, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite comfortable. outside the family I wouldn't say no, I think my mother's family in rural Indian terms was better off. My father's family had a great background but had been in steady decline for a couple of hundred years and hadn't been in particularly good shape. The father of my father. my grandfather died, obviously I never knew, he died when my father was 10 years old and the family went through difficult times with scrabble, in fact, my father says that he walked five miles a day to go to school and high school, in a place called alatour of his town and he very often had to do it.

Do it barefoot, but when Shashi was born you didn't walk five miles to school, no, I was pushed on the tram to, I think, Battersea Park, to feed them and feed the pigeons and Trafalgar, and then when you came back. In India you went to schools like Champion School, so a lot of time passed. India first went to a montessori in Bombay, then my two sisters arrived on the scene and my mother decided that she could not cope with this difficulty when she had already done so. two younger ones to look after, so I was sent to a boarding school at Montfort, in the hills above Salem, a place called Montford School in Yerkat, whose most famous pupil, I think, is Rajabini, the Test cricketer, and Ambumani Ramadas , but except that I wasn't there. t a student I lasted a year I did very well in my studies I was miserable in everything else and the reason was that you felt homesick not just homesick I was two years younger than my classmates I celebrated my sixth birthday in class three when all my classmates were turning eight and then you were a bit of a prodigy, well yes, but I was good at taking exams, which doesn't really count for much in the real mozart of Canada, except that it's not musical, but apart from the fact that I was training. six, I had also developed it when our families moved to India, I developed asthma and quite severe bronchial asthma in the days before inhalers and all those conveniences, so I was very often limited to nursing, so You were also a sickly child.

I was a terribly sickly child, so after having spent more time than the school administration thought was wise in the infirmary, but always leaving on time to pass exams, I passed the third class, but so sickly but brilliant academically, okay, it's like As far as I'm preparing, exams were your phrase that doesn't sound academically, okay, so I did well, I mean, look, I was just good at taking exams, it's one of these, it's a skill like any other current one, I mean. You're good at giving interviews. I was good at taking tests. What can I say?

Then I'll come back. I'm going back to your family. You have two younger sisters and I noticed that all three of them have names that start with this. Now you were sickly. You were caressed by your parents You were probably doted on by your mother because you were often sick. Your sisters considered you a hated older brother. In fact, I have been very blessed with my sisters because they have many reasons, I think. They bother me, but in the country they really made me feel admired, adored and loved and we have a wonderful dream, you are the adored older brother, I guess so, I mean, in a way, they made me feel that too.

The weight of parental expectations fell on me because I was the eldest and perhaps also because I was the child and there was much less pressure on them, which is why they turned out to be such wonderfully well-adjusted people. sensible wise calm very happy sounds like shashi was the family favorite adored by his parents trapped by them because his sisters often admired him sickly the darling of the family was always the youngest and that is true in all families . You're the youngest, right? So I know that's how you pamper yourself. I mean, it's typical that today's families tend to take care of and pamper the little ones, but you know, my fur sisters were adorable, they were beautiful, they were baby models. my shobha, the first sister, was the first amul baby, uh, after going through 762 photographs and choosing hers, and then smitha, the youngest, became the first colored amul baby, so you see, I come from a very distinguished family, much more distinguished than me.

I've only appeared in normal cartoons on their billboards. Tell me you were barely 22 years old in 1978 when you got your first job. It was the United Nations that attracted you to the United Nations. Well, you know I've always been fascinated by world affairs and I have no idea why? Because you remember in those days the Indian newspapers were very flimsy, I think they were more or less the average newspaper, it was eight pages, even the Statesman, the Times of India, etc., and you were lucky to have half a page or three quarters of it. page of foreign news and I would devour it and since my father worked in the media we read six to eight newspapers a day, so it was natural and inevitable that the UN appealed so well to Shashi, in fact, the foreign service was my first attraction, um, but I did very well in my school in college and I won a scholarship to go to a school that specialized in the Internet, the Fletcher School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and being there it opened up, if you want, unfortunately, a slightly broader horizon.

It coincided with the Emergency, which was a time of political maturation for me and I thought that it would not be appropriate to try to serve the government of India when a government could take away the civil liberties and liberties of its people and therefore instead of sitting The forest service exams I applied for at the UN is one of those things I wrote about in my book India Since Midnight, you spent 30 years at the UN, yeah, how do you look? How do you remember that period? Oh, with immense satisfaction. It really was that I was incredibly privileged.

I realized that in an organization as vast as the United Nations you can easily end up as a lost cipher in the bureaucracy or as a file-keeper and paper-pusher. I was incredibly lucky to have eleven and a half years of experience. united nations high commissioner for refugees at a time when refugee crises were exploding around the world and i still remember with amazement how five of the first six stories on the bbc world service mentioned my organization unhcr, which when i uni was completely unknown, it was a small organization, we all knew each other by name, so for a 22-year-old this was not only satisfying, but exciting, it was exciting and the kind of crisis, I mean, I was directly director of the office in Singapore during the Vietnamese staff crisis. at its peak when it had thousands of people crammed into this little camp that the Singaporeans had given us and unlike other Southeast Asian countries, the Singaporeans told the United Nations that you run the damn camp, we don't want these people and we don't.

I didn't want to take any responsibility for them and that was a big challenge because I was the only UN official who actually ran a refugee camp everywhere else, the government kept strict control over the refugee camps on its territory, so it was an incredible growing experience that I became. A kind of UN expert on rescue at sea because those are the cases that reach Singapore. I found myself coming up with creative solutions to problems I could never have been trained or prepared for and got the first refugees since the solidarity crackdown. In Poland, upon arriving at my door, I had all kinds of experiences that I must say would give rise to many stories.

It will probably take more time for an impatient current thought. Tell me, would you consider the UN years to be the golden years of rookies? life oh I hope not because that would be very sad because you know, if you haven't done anything more valuable than what you started doing when you were 20, then you haven't really spent the rest, so you're definitely not okay with school days They are the best days of life, no, the solid days, Shakespeare would say no,Frankly, I think the salad is a good dish to start with, if you like, eventually you'll want to move on to your desserts right in 2006, if I have. the correct date, you ran for election for UN secretary general, yes, so I started with refugees, I didn't end by saying that I then worked in peacekeeping at the height of peacekeeping efforts in the UN at the end of the cold war, then I worked in the secretary-general's office under one of the best secretaries-general ever, Kofi Annan, then I became deputy secretary of the largest department and then you decided to challenge Bond.

No no no. Kofi was leaving after two terms and I decided, with his blessing, to run for the seat he was vacating but, in fact, the interesting thing is that probably everyone in the world would have said that you were going to lose, including the government that nominated you, the Indian government, do you think in retrospect this was a mistake? his part should have stood no, I certainly think it should first of all, certainly, personally, when I was asked I was taken aback and it was none other than Dr. Manmohan Singh himself who asked me if I would be interested in India being nominated, so they approached you. oh yes of course it can't work otherwise it wasn't it wasn't shashi coming forward and asking the Indian government you can't do that you can only you can only be a candidate if a UN member state nominates you . so the question wouldn't have been then, what did you say when Dr.

Mahmoud Singh got in touch? Well, he surprised me and I said it would be a great honor for me if you wanted to do that. but of course he is him and I talked for a while and he said what are the obstacles you see? And that is the most obvious obstacle. I thought wrong and it turned out to be China. I said I don't think they feel very comfortable so we have to establish something and you might want to do that and then the thing was floating in the water for a while, during which the Korean candidates they had roped in American support, which was in many ways what ended up deciding, but did you really think you had a chance?

Oh, yes, first of all, because he had the most well-rounded experience of any candidate and that's something you see when, when Dr. Manmohan Singh. I was approached by a dozen ambassadors from small countries, particularly small countries, they had already approached me. No no no no. They came themselves as people who had worked with me at the UN and said, listen, why not? When you put up your phone, I said, you know I can't run, my government has to do it and I don't work for my government, and you know, I've never worked for my government, I always have been. an independent international civil servant, so I'm not sure it's a serious proposal, but the fact is that there are a lot of people, someone who had done humanitarian work, political work, peacekeeping work, administration, budget and communications and at At the same time you worked directly with the secretary general and I saw what your work was, so you were ideal.

It seems like I have the ideal profile, but you know, the problem was that the Americans had committed to the bank, but it's not just that a job like this is ultimately not about The best resume is a political decision and It is a political decision made by 15 members, which is why I asked the question: was it a mistake to stay well if Dr. Manmohan Singh and the Indian government of the time had been able to square the Americans earlier? They did, I thought it could have made a big difference as far as the Chinese were concerned, to our pleasant surprise they did not ban me at any point, in fact what is very interesting was that I went at the suggestion of the Indians to see the Chinese. my own steam, which is at my expense, I neither go to a UN mission nor go and I said goodbye and went to Beijing for two days, I met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and it was quite a story because I remember that I called the ambassador Chinese and I told him: listen to this.

That's why I want to come and if China finds it uncomfortable to receive me on this issue, I will completely understand and that will be the end of all that and the ambassador said let me consult with my capital and a week later he calls me again and says . They would like to receive it, so I said, "Understand." I will not come for business and I will not come as a representative of the Indian government. I will come as an individual and, as always, in that case. I sent the car to the airport and they did and took me straight from the plane to see the Foreign Minister for what was going to be a 20 minute appointment before seeing his subordinates, but turned out to be an hour and a half. and at the end of a long conversation in which he even tested me on my French, it was a Chinese foreign minister who knew that some French people said at the end, "you can convey to your government that China will not stand in your way and that he was as good as his word because when i finally got on the ballot, china abstained, but not on the first balance they voted on, so you're saying something fascinating if doctor manmod singh had been quicker to talk to the americans and I really would have done it before Ban Ki-moon and the South Koreans got in touch.

Shashi could have been the general secretary. I could have been a contender anyway, but to be fair to Dr. Manmohan Singh, the timing. It was unfortunate. This was when India was deeply immersed in the negotiation of the nuclear deal between India and the United States and that was obviously a much higher priority for the government at the time, but also as a result of the nuclear deal he had a relationship with George. Bush that would have allowed him to bring this up, as well as two years later, this election was in 2006, our nuclear deal was consummated in 2008, but the process had been underway and therefore began in 2005.

My guesses and I was never in the government, nor have I seen the files, the government felt that it would be unwise to complicate a very important negotiation with the Americans by giving too much importance to something else, so I found out from the American side later, when it was all over, a number of very high friends in the State Department and the White House. they gave me their version of events and now the loss of the un became in a sense a gain for india because in 2009 you joined the congress party and got elected in thiruvananthapuram which led to a second career in politics , well, first of all, I wanted a second race because, although ban ki-moon, the victor, was kind enough to invite me to stay, I simply felt that it would be unseemly to have competed against him for doing anything I said or did, presumably he would have thrown a shadow over me or him and I simply thought that it was not the right thing to do at the age of 51, having in the normal course the right to expect a somewhat long career, I suddenly found myself having to look for something else and for a year Actually, I did some consulting work for a Dubai-based company that had interests in Kerala and particularly India, but I mean India in general, but particularly Kerala, and that brought me to India a lot and I sort of renewed my ties with people, I mean when I came to India.

I always made it a point to call people I had met in my UN days, so I used to meet regularly with only one thing and yes, one sinner, the two BJP foreign ministers, um, whom I saw regularly. sonia gandhiji, who had seen me in new york and i saw dr. manmohan singh, uh, who was always happy, how the invitation to join the congress came about, it came from the congress party, sonia got in touch absolutely, I mean, you know I wasn't me. I was seeing them particularly during this year after leaving the UN, a year and almost two years, in fact, I was seeing them recently, not every month or anything like that, but I would certainly say at least half a dozen times and it was the moment, for example, when I was invited to deliver the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Prayer of 2007, with Tony Gandhi and the others and the President, etc., so I came in as an external speaker and gave that speech, but obviously the private government, so when she approached you she was obviously not a stranger when she approached you you accepted with alacrity or I needed time to think about it if you really wanted to get into politics I accepted with actual alacrity first of all because my brief time in the world of business taught me I said it just didn't motivate me.

I had never been motivated by money. I made it to both IIMs and went to Fletcher instead. I'm just not, you know, business and and, the bottom line wasn't my stuff. I always, for some reason, wanted to make a difference in people's lives and I knew that making a difference in any democracy is best achieved through politics and I knew that the only reason I had never ventured into politics despite My fascination with the subject was because I had no political background. I thought that in India it was a closed circle. Sonia's approach gave you that political opportunity.

It gave me an entry into the matter. So, but she and Dr. manmohan yes they were incredibly tell me do you like Ruffin's temple? I know that you have won three consecutive elections and the largest majority came in the third of them. Do you enjoy the hustle and bustle of Indian politics? The first and third were both almost equal majorities, but the challenge with the third. is that the bjp had emerged in thiruvananthapuram as the strongest, as the strongest of my rivals, while in my first election I was trying to reserve a seat that the communists had won in the previous two elections, so my main opponent was a communist, while at the time of the third elections, the BJP was a formidable contender, so there has been an evolution in these three elections.

I must say that I enjoy many aspects of political life, but some things we do because we have to, not because we enjoy them, to use your word. I know the interesting thing is that for many people outside you are probably one of the most successful congressmen in Congress. They see you, they hear you, they read you, they admire you and they hate you, they troll me too, don't worry and yet, maybe because you are soft, so I have been so sophisticated with words and some would say so good with women that your colleagues often look at you and talk about you as a misfit at the party, how do you respond to the fact that they have called me a misfit in a magazine cover article they have called me a guest artist at the party and I don't blame them because you know While politics in India has largely become a lifelong profession, the vast majority of people in Indian politics have done nothing else since. their university days, in some cases, their school days and I admire their dedication and commitment to that profession and like any other profession where you suddenly see a mid-career entry, you tend to resent them, in my case it is aggravated because of the fact that that race took place largely overseas and because of that there is this kind of unfair perception that here is this man who has been living in the lap of luxury and now he comes and presumes to represent us, which in fact was the issue of communist campaign in the same way as with the words Image that is unconventional for an Indian politician maybe that is why they say he is not one of us.

Look, you'll have to ask them if they really say that. I ask you how you feel when you are told to take care of a dozen years. Now in the business I think there is a much greater degree of acceptance than your question implies, in fact when some of my colleagues recklessly attacked me just a few months ago and mocked me in various ways for the precise things you asked about that there was such an extraordinary reaction in Kerala and not just in English certainly in Malayalam of people talking about what I had done for my constituency, the way I had interacted with the people and how the aspirational youth of Kerala wanted more politicians like me and even less whose elders The credential was that they had done nothing more in their lives than politics and I think it was a quite sobering wake-up call for some of those who had attacked.

Yes, I'm picking up on something from your answer, it's the aspirational aspect of the image. from shashi, right, the success, the fringes, the softness with which people respond, in other words, you represent to people what they would like one day or what they hope they can one day be, I hope so because I am certainly like any other middle class Indian product. who has had to make his own future and by his own abilities I mean everything I have done, nothing has been handed to me on a plate I have no inheritance I have nothing more than education my parents were wise enough to make sure I had and everything The rest was achieved through education and hard work, harvard, even because the fletcher school degree certificate bears the names of tufts university and harvard university, since it was created jointly by both, so I can point out to Mr.

Modi and say look, I represent both hard work and Harvard. I had a father who walked five miles to high school every day. He was a self-made man. Obviously I have moreadvantages because of the advantages it has. gave me, but I've built on that to achieve what I have and I've also raised my children to be self-employed, you know, ultimately, most people too. I think in our country he started his answer about politics by saying that I always felt that you wanted to do something to serve the people the problem is the difference in people's lives the problem is that you can only really do that when congress comes to power and At this moment no one believes that congress will go to parliament so I want to ask you this.

In 2024, would you want to continue being a substitute deputy or could you look for a third career? Well, first there are a lot of things I have to disagree with number one. People may believe that Congress will not return in a hurry, but that is partly because we have three and a half years before the next general election, so I will not suggest that Congress should be canceled at all. I think he's recovering and we've seen that literally in the last few weeks, while you and I are talking, uh, which is for a lot of my time and as far as being a backbencher, strictly speaking of sorts. as an intermediate representative, I think I am in the third or fourth row of the congressional representative, you are arguing, shashi.

The reason I'm arguing with your question is that I think only the dumbest politician declares long-term ambitions beforehand. My ambition remains to serve the people and particularly the people who have elected me, that is, the people of Tiriman and Purim, I know that I have been able to do so effectively while my party was in opposition. In the years since 2014, a number of things that I have done, things that I have started, have taken off and made a difference and things that I have done even despite not being in power have made a difference and as a result , I know for a fact that I win votes from people who are not committed Congress supporters and of course also from committed Congress loyalists, so I represent a certain uh.

Judge me on my performance message, which I think generally resonates well even at the beginning of this, so you're saying, and I'm interrupting you, you're saying that, in fact, there's a lot more ahead that you want to achieve and you believe you can achieve it. as a politician this is not the time to say it's time for a third career absolutely look, it's not that I'm being unrealistic and I'm already a former minister, I fully realize that one day I could be a former MP but I still don't have intention to be a former writer. I want to be able to continue to impact people's lives, minds, if not their direct lives or livelihoods through my writing and my ideas and all those things that I will continue to do, whether as a politician or a former politician, we will have to see for me right now, there is a cause.

We have to fight I think the direction the country is going under the BJP government is dangerous Well let's not get into politics This is not about politics we will talk about it stick to you let's see So there is a job to do. Come to your authorship. There is a book you published not long ago that is phenomenally good. It has a very catchy title. I probably suspect it was copied from Bertrand Russell. Why I am a Hindu, but the answer is surely simple. You were born in a Hindu family. I start with that on the first page, Karen, but then I go on to explain why that's not a sufficient answer and the point is that, in fact, the first paragraph says that you know, the obvious answer, of course, is because he was born one , that is the exact phrase, but from then on what I talk about is the foundations of the Hindu faith that I grew up with in India and that I maintained even living outside of India, but on regular visits here what I have seen practiced by my own family and friends, relatives and fans, and the contrast between now, who has been most gratifying is the number of people who have approached me, including people of political leanings very different from mine, saying that you have Open your eyes, this is the Hinduism that speaks to me. and overall I think the intolerance that has been spread in the name of Hindutva is not Hinduism, it was not the politics I was talking about, but I tried to ask you if you are personally very religious.

It depends on how you define it. very religious there are several ways in which you can see you can you can uh pray every day I pray every day but I pray mainly at home in my own pooja room instead of being a frequent visitor, there is always a puja room in the house Shashi that I grew up with had a house and there was always even in any apartment we lived in we had a puja room or at least even in the United States, uh, and in the United States, well, it was more of an alcove or a corner ,uh, one could.

I often don't have the luxury of dedicating an entire room to it, but yes, I have always been in the habit of praying daily, but praying more in terms of connecting one with a larger idea of ​​the cosmos. I mean, I'm Indian enough to know that essentially. The divine is unknowable. Do you believe in God? Well, it depends again on what you understand by God. You need to read my book, Karen, because the point is a personalized God who looks a particular way, etc., is very much a later notion. It is, it is the original Hindu concept is that of Nirna, the image on your WhatsApp is a statue of Ganesh, yes, that is aesthetic or it is a reflection of a personal belief, it is both.

I have been very fond of nations during my childhood and I have a collection of about a hundred Ganesha is a photo of one of them uh and Ganesh would be considered my ishtadevata in Hindu terms, but the fact is still that I pray, I have a very eclectic approach of South India towards divinity and prayed to many of the principals. demonstrations and not only to Ganesha not only to Christians not only to Iran and not only to shaving and not only does it sound like an insurance policy in case you missed the right moment exactly you know, I mean, the fact is that when you think on these things um, because Hinduism is one of the few religions that accepts that there is more we don't know about God and creation than we do, in fact, one of the first verses in the rig version, it's also one of the few religions, if not the only faith that believes that there are multiple gods and you can believe in any of them or all or none of them, no, it does not believe in multiple gods, that is the other conflict, in reality it is what It is called a cathedral, believe that because God is unknowable and because God cannot be reduced to either a face, a figure, a gender, or any form, the individual worshiper must be free to worship God as he pleases.

If you want to imagine God as a woman with 10 arms riding a tiger, that's fine too and if you want to imagine God in any other way, even like a suffering man bleeding on a cross, that is also okay for Hindus. What is interesting about Hinduism? Don't you claim to have the answers? It does not claim to have been the only true religion. There is a verse from Nasir in the Rigveda that actually says: Where does this world come from? Who created it? What is it for? Only he is in heaven. knows or maybe he doesn't even know and that is skepticism, that doubt, that questioning is about everything he does and that is also central to the foundations of your personal belief, it is not only fundamental to my personal belief, to my entire attitude towards Hinduism, you see, can you?

Can you tell me something through bhakti? No, no, let's not enter Israel. This is not about Hinduism. It's about you. I'm not a big god for temples, but I still consider him someone who thinks about these things, feels that he respects them, and therefore prays. Did you feel then when last year, sitting in a temple in Kerala, there was a mishap that fortunately could not have been but could have been fatal? Did you suddenly feel that sitting in the temple, my God, the god I pray to, is suddenly being forgotten? For me, no, in fact, it was very interesting because, you know, we actually complained to the police that there was something that no one had heard in hundreds of recorded years about this practice of talabharan collapsing on someone, so it was certainly explained to them. something to those who don't understand.

It is a huge iron scale in which a human being sits in a frying pan and the elements that can be sugar can be bananas, coconuts of that gold stuff and they were weighing you when the skin collapsed and was donated to the temple, like this that they were weighing me down. that and it collapsed now, the interesting thing is that if the blessed iron that holds the scales at the top had collapsed a quarter of a millimeter in one direction, it would have left me blind for life, it would have severed my optic nerve once. a quarter of a millimeter in any other direction would have damaged my brain and possibly been fatal, so in many ways god was with you, god was with me and when bjp followers would normally tweet saying look this proves this man is cursed by god ", they immediately got the answer.

The backlash from people saying two things: first, that she had a miraculous escape and number two, shedding blood in a temple to Devi is actually the greatest tribute you can offer to the cause, so that kind of squashed that campaign against me and I returned to the election campaign after a couple of days and I won it happily, we are reaching the end of this interview, many people who know shashi, who see him, hear him, look at him, say to themselves themselves, this is a man who has gone from success to success to success, oh, you know better, but the truth is that there have been some pretty dark, desperate and terrible moments in your life when your wife Sunanda died, the police accused of a suicide attempt and you are still facing that case today, how do you deal with?

This, oh, and it's worse because of all the accusations made by certain unprincipled politicians, news anchors and others. I mean, if I opened my timeline any day of the week, now, six years later, there are still accusations that I'm a murderer, wife beater and worse, it's horrible and of course I'm deeply hurt and the fact is that, as a human being, I am proud to represent certain values ​​and principles in my own life and conduct. For example, I have opposed corporal punishment. I opposed the death penalty. I have a certain human attitude. I don't judge people.

I've been the kind of liberal who says, "Let people be who they are and become whatever they want to be because that's who they are and that's who you are and you're not." Don't judge them, don't hurt them and you follow their path as long as they don't hurt anyone else and I raised my children with those values. Everyone who knows me is appalled that people can even think such things about me, but of course in public life the vast majority of people don't know you personally and are willing to believe the worst things about you. , and that is very, very painful, and that is why, of course, one not only has to fight the case, which has dragged on interminably.

I mean it took the police, as you probably know, several years to file this charge sheet, uh, during which many hours were spent investigating all sorts of things, none of which have come up with anything more than this, as already I have said in the record. It's stupid. charge that certainly my lawyers believe a responsible court will one day dismiss the problem is that they are going through the process for weeks and months there was a time when this was a mainstream story it was on the front pages it was on television it was on social media you felt at that moment that there is a destiny here conspiring against me you felt that maybe I have not done anything wrong but what the hell is going on well the worst moment when my eighty year old mother was I started to cry when a woman in the elevator of the building in the who lives made a comment about her son and what had happened and so on and I thought, "You know, someone always took pride in making my parents proud of me and to think that my own mother would have to suffer this kind of pain." and indignity was the worst, the worst horror that any son would want to go through with respect to a father.

In a way, I'm just glad my father wasn't. I live to see all of this because I could have killed him, it's literally that, that's so horrible, but you know, at the same time, I've always believed that the truth will prevail, that justice will be served if you stand firm, that faith has kept you going. . Absolutely, I mean, when you have a clear conscience, that helps. I mean, if I was trying to hide something, I would be much more anxious, tense, and worried that whatever I was hiding would have to be found. I haven't been hiding anything.

I have been completely honest, in fact the police themselves admitted in court that they enjoyed my full cooperation at every stage of the investment, they raided my house and confiscated my laptops, my phones and everything I gave them when they asked. for example access to my email, I gave them everything and the password and they took all my email. I mean, the fact is, I have nothing to hide and I don't want anyone to think there's anything that could do. be wrong and yet this this case, it is there before us, it has dragged on for too long for a couple of years in court since the charge sheet was filed, of course, thepandemic lockdown etc also adds to the delays but eventually we hope to get my name cleared and then be able to confront the false nonsense of the media takeover, there is a very real sense in which the worst is behind us uh Oh, I don't know if that's true, history doesn't dominate the way it did, it's not part of the media law of television, pictures of it before, when you see it, but when you look back, Did you realize that you had the internal resources and strengths to handle this?

Were you surprised that That was, I mean, yes, I mean that was not the first unpleasant episode that I had when I was forced to resign from the government, although I was acquitted and returned two years later to the government, so that was a small consolation, but during that. The first time I couldn't recognize the representations of myself in the media I was watching, and now this is the second time, so if you know what, this whole superstition that something that happens once can happen three times means I have to do it. Prepare yourself for a third, but you are a stronger person for the horrible experience, yeah, I mean, you know one was always raised with this value of grace under pressure, you don't show pressure, you don't laugh in front of yourself. the public, the stiff upper lips that was the culture of the time I was growing up, you know, you hit hard for your exams, but you passed them quickly and made it look effortless, I mean, that's how it was and in fact in the present.

A world where people advertise how hard they work and how much sweat, dust and dirt they have on their foreheads. My style is probably a little inaccurate, a little archaic and out of step with what people want, but the truth is. was vindicated by something Kofi Annan told me years ago when he was under very cruel and unfair attack over the oil-for-food scandal, in quotes, he said something his father had told him in Ghana, a Ghanaian proverb that I didn't understand when I said it. He said he said when sharks bite you you don't bleed and when I said I don't understand if a shark bites you of course you bleed he said think about it the time will come one day you will understand and it was so true, because when the sharks bit me you didn't believe me, oh I bled internally a lot, but you didn't let that blood get into the water because that would give the sharks the satisfaction of going in for the kill and that's the question.

I ask you if it was difficult not to show that blood. Did you realize that you had the strength and inner resources to be able to be bitten by sharks but not bleed in front of them? Karen, you will never realize that you have that strength until you put it to the test, you know that people can have bravery and false confidence or they can even be genuinely brave in most situations, but it is the time when you face to those shark teeth that sink into your heart in many ways, is when you discover if you can do it.

I can avoid bleeding. I've really been through a lot. Obviously there were times when I questioned it because I was very aware that if I hadn't entered India. politics I wouldn't have attracted the enemies and the resentments and the jealousies and the hostility that I have and I could have lived a life that was blissful, comfortable and much better paid in a less toxic political environment elsewhere, but no, I came back to India because I care. You know that I was born with the right to a British passport which I have never exercised because I believe in India.

I believe in the Indian idea. I believe in what India represents in the world as the first important country. postcolonial adventure I believe in Indian nationalism I am proud of my faith I carry the Indian flag everywhere with great pride and conviction and the truth of why I do this is because for me it is fundamental in terms of what I am doing on this planet what I am here as an Indian. I want to participate in this great adventure of making the Indian list mean something to a billion people and more, and that is why I am here and therefore for me it was part of the agni pariksha one has to go through to get out of the another extreme if it is not healed or pure at least without scars and ready to pass the next correct litmus test, that's how it was oh, it still continues there are two questions that my female colleagues have He asked me to ask you and I promised you that I will.

The first is I can cook Shashi, yes, but I don't do it anymore. I grew up as a typical Indian man, you know, son of the house who only came into the kitchen to ask when lunch would be. to be ready or not to be ready, but I was forced to cook for myself in graduate school in America, where, first of all, the fair in the university dormitories was essentially the dawn of graduate school, actually It was not edible for a vegetarian, everything there was boiled. carrots and peas on the side, uh, on the side, everything else was meat or salad leaves, which I didn't really like since I got a love, so I had to force myself to learn how to cook and I was writing home to dad and mom for recipes and instructions and then executing them with varying degrees of incompetence, then I became very good at only two things and they were both breakfast, one of them was that I could make magnificent scrambled eggs with a cordon bleu chef's recipe, but with Indian variations of onions and tomatoes. chillies etc., coriander leaves still sweet, it sounds more like Andrei did it by first boiling some milk in the pan, adding butter and then cracking the eggs and you have to stir, which was survival, uh, necessity after my divorce.

I used to make my own idlis in New York and from scratch I would soak the rice, soak the urad dal, mix them, grind them, ferment them and in the US climate it meant fermenting them for at least 36 hours and then on a Saturday or Sunday . In the morning I would steam them for hours making a whole batch of about 88 Italians, put them in the freezer and then take out three or four a day for my breakfast. I am a madman, as has now become known again due to a controversy on Twitter. Italy is where a British professor has rightly described me as the world's most famous idle evangelist, but the truth is I used to make them myself and I'm still proud that those are the only two things I can pretend I can do.

The second question is that they say that Shashi has been married three times is that the triumph of hope over experience well, first of all, I think it's a failure, I mean, I'm the first to admit that, you know, when I I got married Young and idealistic 21 year old, I never thought there would ever be a divorce in my life and I still remember that a year after joining the UN, my then boss in the HCL section where I worked went through a divorce. and the enormous amount of pity and compassion I felt for him and his wife, that this had to be torn apart and so I never expected to go through that myself and having done it, I think I was reckless the second time. the third, of course, ended in tragedy, um, with someone, the second was a reckless decision, yes, because you know, unfortunately, it was a Western marriage to a person with a very Western sensibility who did not want, quote, to live in the third world, etc. but the marriage took place at a time when I was in transition in terms of career and in my mind I had never given up the idea of ​​one day returning to India for good if the right opportunity had arisen and the right opportunity had arisen.

On that and we tried to make it work long distance, but it wasn't possible, she lived in New York and I was there, and that was essentially a thing that was over in less than three years and I think you know that That was there, but the hope over experience is the old cliché. No one gets married with the intention that you will be able to end it one day. Everyone has that hope and faith in a relationship. I am romantic enough to believe in love and compassion. and loving I have seen good marriages wonderful marriages great understanding between couples I have seen many bad marriages and I have seen marriages in which unfortunately communication breaks down or the chemistry breaks down within the man and the woman they continue to suffer from each other, which which is better, which is worse, I think the Western response tends to be: hey, you know, don't live a lie, it's better to get divorced than to live in an unhappy marriage.

The Indian response is probably listen, right? you're married for life this is your destiny get used to it live with it and do the best you can and I've been through it um if you like the first approach I'm not entirely sure there is not much more to say about the second but Of course, I will take the whole process to the end of the day, maybe I don't know if it is actually over at that time, let's leave it to the audience. to decide which one is right, thank you so much for talking so openly, so completely and so interestingly about yourself, take care, stay safe.