Erudite, Eloquent & Engaging: Shashi Tharoor At SALA 2024

Fielding rapid-fire questions

Engaging and animated, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, author, intellectual, former United Nations diplomat, and currently Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India, fielded rapid-fire questions from the media on a variety of topics.

Tharoor, who was also recently appointed Chair of the External Affairs Committee for the second time, spoke with the media prior to his keynote session at The South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA 2024).

Most important book

In response to a question from India Currents about his oeuvre and which book he found most inspiring to write – at the risk of seeming to choose a “favorite child” – he responded that he “found each of them inspiring, but perhaps the first book, The Great Indian Novel , is the one that is most important. Thirty-five years later, people still buy it and come to me to get it signed.”

Women and the workplace: Need for reform

In light of the recent findings in the explosive Hema Commission Report, where damning details about sexism and predatory behavior towards women came to light, India Currents asked him how Kerala’s pride in the status of its women was challenged. In response, Tharoor  expressed admiration that this carefully researched report was made public, even though 67 pages remain redacted.

On being further asked about an egregious parallel in West Bengal where the rape and murder of a young doctor at RG Kar Medical College caused deep anguish across the length and breadth of the country, Tharoor commented that “we need both institutional and attitudinal reforms. Institutional reform from the perspective of how is it possible that a doctor after working so many hours has nowhere to rest, and how is it that anyone could enter that space; attitudinal reform in the sense that we need to educate not only our daughters, but also our sons with regard to how to treat women. In addition to “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” (Save your daughter, educate your daughter) “Beti Bachao, Beta Padhao” (Save your daughter, educate your son!) is what is needed”, he said.

Keynote Session

The closing keynote session of SALA 2024, where Tharoor was in conversation with Dr. Sumit Ganguly, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,  was at the Hauck auditorium in the Hoover Center at Stanford had over 500+ attendees waiting in a serpentine queue through courtyards and walkways. Dinsha Mistree, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, introduced the keynote session, and later moderated the audience Q&A session.

Twenty-six books and counting

After reminiscing about their first meeting when they were both students at Saint Xavier’s College in Kolkata, Tharoor and Ganguly embarked on an animated discussion. They stepped through Tharoor’s prolific writings, starting with his first, The Great Indian Novel, in which he undertook “viewing the present through the eyes of the past,” i.e. the Mahabharata.

His second, Show Business , was panned in India, but lauded abroad—it made the front page of New York Times Book Review. On Riot , Ganguly commented that its many perspectives of the Hindu-Muslim violence which broke out on the demolition of the Babri Masjid was reminiscent of Kurosawa’s iconic film Rashomon. Since most of the more recent books have been nonfiction after the first four works of fiction, Tharoor quipped that some day, voters may send him back to writing fiction again. On what recent reads he would recommend, he named Salman Rushdie’s Victory City , which he called “a remarkable reimagining” of a time in medieval Indian history, the reign of the Vijayanagara Empire.

“Mugged by reality”

The audience Q&A was particularly engaging. A young man from Pakistan asked for Tharoor’s perspective on improving Indo-Pak relations, whereupon Tharoor stated that he had started in “the dosti camp,” but now feels mugged by reality. He opined, “In India the state has an army; in Pakistan, the army has a state.” He also detailed specific events and timelines where he said Pakistan had not acted in good faith. At the end of it, he exhorted everyone to keep contacts between people, to work as individuals to forge connections between Indians and Pakistanis.

Threats to secularism

Commenting on the reduction of freedom of speech and secularism, Tharoor said it is “worrying for any democracy.” He observed that traditional media can be cajoled or cudgeled, and today, digital media has more honest reporting. The last election in India has given us a government that is shared among many parties; it is a good sign that the government was forced into a rethink after injecting a toxin of anti-secularism into the veins of our society.

AI tools, cricket

AI tools such as ChatGPT, Tharoor opined, are useful tools because they can research the internet much faster than a human can. However, he has yet to see an AI-generated paragraph that reads as well as one from a creative writer!

Referring to Tharoor’s celebrated vocabulary and wizardry with words, an attendee asked what he might have said as a commentator during the 1983 Cricket World Cup finals between India and West Indies. Reminiscing about India’s thrilling victory following an epic catch by skipper Kapil Dev, Tharoor said he was in Singapore at the time, listening to this “historic moment” on the radio.

After this exciting session moderated by Dinsha Mistree, Tharoor moved on to field a long line of readers and fans waiting to get their books signed, staying well past the scheduled closing hour. A few hours after the sunset over the striking sandstone buildings of the Stanford University campus, SALA 2024 closed with a flourish.

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