Seen in the picture are:
PWD Minister VK Ibrahimkunju
MA Vahid MLA
Johnson Joseph opposition Leader TVPM Corporation&
Shashi Tharoor with MP& CM of Kerala Shri Oommen Chandy

“I express my profound condolences at the loss of Damodaran, one of India’s finest diplomats, who passed away after a long and distinguished life yesterday,” Tharoor, a former UN Under Secretary General, said in a message.

As a diplomat, scholar and public servant, Ambassador Damodaran continued to contribute to India’s international relations and the country’s appreciation of the underpinnings of its foreign policy long after retirement, Tharoor said.

“Damodaran was an invaluable adviser, guide and mentor to me personally and I had the privilege of being able to see him periodically over the years, as the father of my classmate and dear friend Ramu Damodaran.I will miss him greatly,” he added. A teacher, writer and freedom fighter before becoming a diplomat, Damodaran breathed his last in New Delhi yesterday.

Source: DNA

At the Galle Literary Festival, where Tharoor was one of the largest crowd-pullers this year, the question came the moment the floor was opened to the audience: “Do you regret your cattle class tweet? Why did you make it?”

The tweet in question, Tharoor explained in some detail yet again, was in response to a question from a “journalist of anti-Congress persuasion” soon after the Government of India introduced an austerity drive. She had asked him: “Tell us, Minister, next time you travel to Kerala, will it be cattle class?” Tharoor, then Minister of State for External Affairs, replied: “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows.”

Tharoor explained that he had been working abroad for over 30 years and was used to the phrase. It was commonly used to ridicule airlines for the manner in which they treated economy/coach class passengers and not a description of travellers of that class. He was at pains to explain that the inference that he had described economy class passengers as cattle was wrong. “To this day, there are at least a few references each day to the remark I made,” he told the audience, adding how a voter from his constituency, Thiruvananthapuram had voiced her objections! A desperate Tharoor said that if he lost the next elections, a lot of ‘credit’ would go to this misunderstood remark.

R.K. Radhakrishnan

Source: The Hindu

This is a man who has spent most of his life, he’s 56 this year, as a compulsive overachiever (famously, he earned the title of ‘Dr.’ at the tender age of 22 when he wrote his thesis, ‘Reasons of State’, a text that remains compulsory reading for many students of Indian foreign policy). However, a controversy in 2010 centred around the IPL Kochi franchise had his party asking for his resignation. Having declared his innocence, Dr. Tharoor is back in the fray and is considering a new book. Below are excerpts from our interview, conducted partly in person and partly over email.

Your father loved to introduce himself as ‘the author’s author’. He sounds like an unusual man. Would you tell me about him?

My father was an amazingly unusual man. He was a self-made man, the child of a farmer who died when he was 10. My father recounts walking barefoot eight kilometres to school every day from the village. He had a tough upbringing. The elder brother – much older, 17 years older – went away and made good and then took the younger brothers with him to England and so my dad was able to move suddenly from a village life of poverty to go off and study in England at the end of the second WW.

He taught himself English reading Byron and Shakespeare and he wrote beautifully. He wrote mainly letters, and these are gems of correspondence and human contact. He was an amazingly broad minded person for someone growing up in a village in Kerala before the Second World War. It’s amazing that someone like that existed. I am desperately fond of him. He passed away when he was only 63 and the pain still lingers now, 18 years later. One doesn’t quite overcome it.

I’ve often wondered whether God made me the way I am or my parents made me the way I am, but I can’t now do only one thing. I react to the world both through my intellectual reactions if you like, which is what comes out through my writing, but also as a man of action, as someone who wants to deliver results and that manifests itself in my work and both to me are fully necessary. I think if I gave up one or the other, a part of my psyche would wither on the vine.

Even though you weren’t in India when Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in 1975, it had a profound impact on you. Did it discourage you from joining the Indian Foreign Service?

I didn’t take the government exams and I’ve written about this in ‘From Midnight to Millennium’. I felt that as a student during the Emergency, knowing that our government could do such things, and suspend the constitution, at least for a year and a half, that made me profoundly unwilling to serve the government and so I actually did a PhD as a way of postponing the decision to take the IFS exams and then when I joined the UN that was that and I never looked back. After having had a UN career, however, when I wanted to explore my options, the hankering to serve my country came right back again. It had never really left. A lot of my books were about India, a lot of my writing was the perennial scratching of a psychic itch about India.

In a time when so many people are disillusioned with the U.N, what was your own experience of the organisation from the inside?

I was privileged that my 29 years in the UN were all areas that were action-oriented. I began in the UN High Commission for Refugees. It was then so small that we all knew each other by our first names and it kind of grew under me, while I was there because of all the dramatic global crisis that happened soon after I joined the UN in 1978. From the Vietnamese ‘Boat People’ crisis to the Central American crisis to the invasion of Afghanistan, everything happened almost simultaneously, and it suddenly became a very large and serious organisation. But it began very small and I was able to crest that wave of exciting jobs, heading the UN operations in S.E Asia, in Singapore that is dealing with the cases of refugees rescued at sea and those coming into Singapore.

Then after 11 ½ years of that I moved to peacekeeping, again when it was very small, when we had only five people, five civilians and three military in the entire peace keeping staff in New York. I found myself not only being Assistant to the then Under Secretary General Sir Marrack Goulding, but I also ended up being the person handling the Yugoslav crisis when it erupted. It became the largest peacekeeping operation in UN history and there I was helping run it from New York.

So I was very lucky, very busy and given tremendous responsibilities throughout my career. I then worked in Kofi Annan’s immediate office when he was Secretary General and finally ended up as Under Secretary General with 800 staff in 77 countries around the world. So I ended up at no point having a dull day or feeling underwhelmed or under challenged until I tried for the top job and lost it. Lost it narrowly but lost in nonetheless and felt I should move on.

You were so close to becoming the UN Secretary General. It must have been very disappointing.

It was because I had overlooked the simple reality that this was not a job where the guy with the best resume makes it. And I think I would be unnecessarily modest if I didn’t say that I had the best resume as a resume. It’s a political job and there are political considerations on the minds of the 15 countries voting on the council. From their point of view – the then American ambassador to the UN has written a very indiscreet memoir in which he has said that his instructions were to the tune of America didn’t want a strong secretary general and there were bilateral considerations with South Korea for example that would have come in the way of that choice and so on. I have absolutely no resentment about that, that’s the way the game is played. I came in an honourable second, in a race with seven contenders that included a serving president, a number of prime ministers, deputy ministers, foreign ministers, so for me as a mere UN official to be able to do that was enough satisfaction back from that experience.

Are you sometimes surprised to find yourself in politics after all?

I’m certainly surprised to find myself in politics because I don’t come from what is considered the traditional political pedigree i.e is either coming from a political family…there was a study by Patrick French in his book recently where he established that every member of the Indian parliament under 40 (or was it 45? I can’t remember) was a son or daughter of a politician. It worries people obviously because the feeling is that it shouldn’t be such a closed world but it is.

Someone like me would have been a complete misfit in the normal course but I have been privileged to have been given an opportunity by my party president Sonia Gandhi to contest. Then I had to go out there and prove I could do it. I had to go out there in the hot sun in Kerala, talking a language I hadn’t used for three decades or at least only in a very, very limited context. I had to get the message across that I could be someone they could trust to get their message across in the national context.

You’re frequently accused of being elitist – did it concern you that they would not respond?

It was precisely because I anticipated that sort of criticism that I felt I should go the Lok Sabha route and go into the Lower House…I felt it was necessary to earn my credentials as somebody who could connect, but it didn’t stand me in any good stead, after having won the election I still found that I had attracted the deep resentment and hostility of many members of the political class and that is something I probably have not fully overcome and this is people who have done politics all their lives and are probably never going to see an interloper like me, someone who has come from a totally different background in life as somebody who is honing in on their patch.

Does the fallout from the IPL controversy linger? From the outside, it looked like it was the charges against your integrity that seemed to cut deepest at that time.

Yes, after a lifetime of leading a life unblemished by the slightest taint on my integrity, it was hard to be falsely attacked for that. But it also cut deeply to give up a job that I enjoyed and felt I was doing rather well, that of helping shape and shepherd my nation’s place in many parts of the world.

Was the decision to dive back into the fray a difficult one?

I never really left. I’m not a quitter. I stayed, licked my wounds, and continued. I gave up a great deal to make my foray into Indian politics, and I wanted to stay true to the convictions that had brought me into it in the first place, even if my idealism had taken a bit of a bruising.

Your writings – both fiction and non-fiction – have been about India or based in India almost without exception. What makes the country and ‘the idea of India’ such a rich source of inspiration for you?

I look in the mirror and I see an Indian, that’s who I am. I grew up in India from age 2 ½ to age 19 ½ and my spirit was shaped by the experience of being Indian and to me therefore a lot of my own creative energies have been spent in exploring what it means to be Indian, what it means to be India in the world. On the bookshelf are some of the products of that exploration.

I suppose my commitment to India was always something of a conscious choice, since by birth I was entitled to a British passport, and my long residence in the US could have provided an American option for me as well – but I never sought either. I grew up convinced that India was the most interesting country in the world and that it was a privilege to be part of its narrative – let alone help, in a small way, to shaping it.

Just 140 characters leave a great deal of room for misunderstanding – post-several mini-controversies over your tweets, what has kept you online and tweeting?

Imagine you can send something out and 1.2 million people read it. The 140 character limit actually has one very valuable plus point and it means it takes very little time to write… Having done that of course, there are pluses and minuses because even if you do feel it takes less time the consequences of an ill guarded remark can take a lot of time. I’ve been there and you’re far more liable to misinterpretation because you have to be brief.

I began tweeting because I was so thrilled that there were actually three hundred odd people who wanted to follow me as soon as somebody opened an account for me. I really actively started tweeting the day the election results were being counted. As I went around seeing the results and I was getting more and more confident that I would win.

What does 2012 hold for you? Do you have any new projects planned?

Always, though what is unplanned often turns out to offer the most interesting experiences! The first priority is to find a 25th hour every day so that I can finish the book I’ve been struggling to find the time to write… It’s a real frustration. It’s a non-fiction book, though I have various ideas for novels bubbling away in the back of my head, at this point, as someone relatively new in politics, I believe my first book after entering politics ought to be on a subject of policy interest and this is also a subject that matters to me – India’s foreign policy and its place in the world. We’ll see how that goes.

Name of Source: SundaY Times

Name of Source: Asian Age

Tharoor felt that it is not right to give up the Vilappilsala treatment complex when only works amounting to Rs 2.5 crore out of the total budgeted Rs 13.58 crore for the setting up of the modern plant have been completed. Misplaced agitation should not be allowed to hold the entire city hostage on this account, he opined.

Once completed, the Vilappilsala treatment plant will be able to process the waste scientifically with considerable reduction in the present conditions there. The residents of Vilappilsala have to cooperate in the larger public interest, especially since the site has been functional for quite some time now.

If need be, the residents who wish to relocate should be fully assisted to do so and the project should be completed on a war footing. Management of waste, domestic as well as those generated by commercial establishments such as markets, eateries and institutions, is the primary responsibility of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, he reminded.

”They cannot abrogate their responsibility to this end by trying to conveniently place the blame on others,” he added.

Tharoor said that generation of waste is not unique to Thiruvanathapuram. All over the world, towns and cities face similar problems and it is only a question of dealing with the problem efficiently. “They should have anticipated these problems before reaching this critical stage,” he said.

The Corporation has also let go opportunities that have arisen to access up-to-date technologies and systems available in other places. The offer of the Council of Barcelona, Spain, for signing a twinning agreement with the city was one such example. Other cities of comparable size in India and abroad are effectively dealing with similar problems.

Reminding that panicky solutions may not work even in the short run, Tharoor said that decentralised management of waste makes sense only up to a point, but large disposal sites cannot be totally dispensed with.

Decentralisation cannot mean every home and every building doing its own waste management that would be unscientific and unsafe since standards vary widely. Much of this waste will ultimately find its way into the sewerage system, leading to further complications. It can only mean the setting up of smaller waste treatment plants in select panchayats and city neighbourhoods to process their own waste, but not in every home or every ward, to complement Vilappilsala.

The Corporation should ensure that, together with associations such as FRAT and Kudumbashree, a system of segregation of waste at the point of generation is created and enforced through fines, if necessary.

If the Corporation requires any additional resources for the above approach, it could be put into a project proposal and sent to the Union Government through the State Government, the MP suggested.

Source: IBNLive

Sir, you’ve had a glittering career full of professional achievements – and hope it continues. But what do you think is your biggest personal achievement?

My twin sons.(Laughs). On a personal front, I speak with pride, of their success. They’re both in New York – Ishan is working on a novel, and Kanishk is a journalist – both turning out to be very good writers. What more personal accomplishment can you ask for.

Speaking of that, where do you see your writing career going?

At the moment its going nowhere because I’m not getting enough time to write!!

I’ve been a columnist for newspapers in India and abroad, and that’s all I’ve done for a while. I’m currently working on a book about our nation and its place in the 21st century world. Now that book, like any other, requires application of your mind in some way, and sadly, I just have not been able to spend much time on it. So, I have to admit that it’s a bit of a struggle. But, I never want to be a former writer. One day, I’ll get used to being a former minister, but not a former writer.

Your last novel, ‘Riot’ was published almost 10 years back. Can your readers expect a work of fiction anytime soon?

Not immediately, because fiction requires not just time, but some space inside your head too- A space to create and inhabit an alternative moral universe, one whose realities have to be consistent in your own mind. And you can’t allow the spell to be broken by intrusions of reality too much. You can’t easily write a fragment of a novel and return to it eight weeks from now. You simply find you have to reinvent the novel each time you do that. A politician like me has to travel day in and day out, bring work home, stay away from home for a while – those kinds of interruptions are deadly for writing fiction. And I found that an enormous struggle.

So, if I write now, I’d say its more easy to, or I am more likely to write non-fiction. Because non-fiction, its interruptible. Your life is non-fiction. (smiles). Like somebody once said, “I didn’t realize I’ve been speaking in prose all my life”. So even if I interrupt writing (non-fiction), and I’ve been doing it for a while now, I feel I can go back to it at a later point.

Sir, Would you like to speak about your fondness for PG Wodehouse, which somehow reflects in ‘The Great Indian Novel’, perhaps the most celebrated of your works?

(It reflects) Only in sections. (Laughs)

I love Wodehouse – his tremendous escapism, tremendous humor and tremendous sense of alternative reality. And I love his style- his use of language. The ability to make people laugh- its such a gift. Hilarious situations, very cleverly contrived comical plots, and great writing – all of it come together in his books.

As for ‘The Great Indian Novel’, I was once reading a translation of the Mahabharata by the Calcutta professor P Lal who uses a very racy and modern style. I must say that I was struck by the immediacy of the narrative. I said -“I’m reading a 2000 year story that reads as if it could’ve been written yesterday.” And then I thought –“Hey, what if it were written yesterday? What would a contemporary Veda Vyas write about the great events of his time?” So, it started as a sort of playful experiment, taking the frame narrative of the Mahabharata, and some of its style and digressions, its philosophies and situations, and applying them to a retelling of a subject which had fascinated me most- 20th century Indian political history. I think it has really worked – the book is now in its 42nd edition, the new generation is loving it. Readers who weren’t even born when it was written tell me how enjoyable they find it. So what could be more gratifying!

We hope you enjoyed your brief stay at IIM Calcutta. Do you have a message for us?

The message is to be the best you can possibly be. Whether you become a manager, or a professor or a writer – it doesn’t really matter what you are; what matters most is how good you are at it. The worst thing you can do is let yourself down. Do well in your life, and do something good for the country. Best of luck!!

Sir, it’s a privilege to have you in our midst today. Thanks a lot for your words and your time.

Name of Source: Jokatimes

Name of Source: Asian Age

Tharoor was addressing the session ‘Where is India’s Obama?’, at the ongoing second Indian student parliament at the MIT School of Government, on Wednesday.

“The average age of Indian population is 28 and yet the youth has a lesser access in terms of playing active role in the nation building, owing to the tendency of according importance to age and experience in Indian politics. Somewhere, this is leading to restiveness.”

Tharoor said, “The rise of Barack Obama as president of the United States (US) has three dimensions viz. Obama’s social background; his youthfulness as a leader and mission-oriented efficiency in work.”

“Obama represents the minorities and comes from a social background that constitutes barely 20% of the US population. Yet, the fact that he could get an opportunity to lead the US speaks volumes about the maturity of democracy in America,” he said. “It also reflects on the leadership skills of Obama, who had to overcome issues like apartheid and slavery,” he added.

Tharoor said, “India too has a stable democracy mainly because it follows the principles of great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Gautam Buddha. We are a land of diversity with several religious practices, 23 languages and 22,000 dialects. In a way, these diverse sections are referred as minorities and we are a land of minorities. Yet, our strength lies in managing consensus amid such diversity.”

He said, “If one takes a look at India’s leadership from the past, the minorities have held several key positions — starting with Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, who rose from his Dalit backgrounds to author the Indian Constitution, Presidents K R Narayananan and APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who represents a community that is barely 2% of the Indian population. It is instances like these that make Indian democracy strong.”

Vice-chancellor of Mumbai University Rajan Velukar presided over. Founder head of MIT Vishwanath Karad and MITSoG dean Rahul Karad were present.

Source: Times of India

The civil-military imbalance in Islamabad is a key factor impeding India-Pakistan relations despite a large constituency for peace in both countries, former Indian minister Shashi Tharoor said in Islamabad on Thursday. The dominant role played by the security establishment in shaping
Pakistan’s foreign policy and the powerful military’s long-standing links with jihadi groups are issues that will have to be addressed to put the bilateral relationship on an even keel, Tharoor said.

Speaking on the theme, “India and Pakistan: Cooperation or conflict”, at an event organised by the Jinnah Institute, a leading think tank, Tharoor noted that elements in Pakistan had for long sponsored terrorists and jihadis as part of a policy meant to “bleed India” while compensating for the asymmetry in conventional forces.

The Pakistan Army was one of the most “lavishly funded” armies of the world and has a “stranglehold over policy” while no elected civilian government had ever completed its term, he pointed out.

It was not in Pakistan’s interests for the army to get a “grossly disproportionate share” of the GDP and the budget, said Tharoor, who arrived in Lahore on Tuesday on a four-day Pakistan visit.

“The army lays down the red lines that political leaders dare not cross,” he said. The army also preserves the “myth of an Indian threat”, the former minister of state for external affairs underlined.

This civil-military imbalance made people in India wonder whether the government was doing the right thing by holding talks with a civilian administration in Pakistan that neither controls nor launches militants for terrorist attacks, he said.

Each terror attack, he said, undermines the minority who believe peace is possible.

People in India also questioned whether the Pakistan Army would agree if a civilian dispensation decided that India is not a threat, Tharoor remarked.

In this regard, he said peace overtures made by President Asif Ali Zardari shortly after he came to power and the army’s negative reaction to them showed that the President “went farther than the army was willing to allow him to”.

Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and any efforts to wrest Kashmir from India too are not in Islamabad’s interests, he said.

At the same time, Pakistan was suffering due to its policy of financing and training jihadis for 20 years as the terrorists were now targeting military establishments like the army’s General Headquarters and a naval airbase in Karachi, he said.

Addressing Pakistan’s concerns about India, Tharoor said the people of India were “totally reconciled to Pakistan’s existence as an independent state” and no one believes that the events of 1971 – which led to the creation of Bangladesh – can be replicated.

He noted that the 1971 war was a “special case” precipitated by a Pakistani crackdown on the people of erstwhile East Pakistan.

Answering questions from the audience after his speech, Tharoor made it clear that India had neither the intention nor capability to foment unrest in Balochistan.

A strong and stable Pakistan was in India’s interest, he said. India was essentially a “status quoist” country and there could be peace between the two sides if they agreed on “mutually acceptable parameters”, Tharoor said.

While terrorist groups have a momentum of their own and cannot be turned off like a tap, Pakistan and India can focus on softer issues like a free trade pact and educational exchanges to improve relations, Tharoor noted.

He also called for greater interaction between India and Pakistan on Afghanistan, where an “unhealthy sense of competition” had developed. Though both countries were often on opposite sides, a stable, moderate and functional Afghanistan was in the interest of both sides, he said.

In response to a question on the failure by both sides to reach an agreement to end the military standoff on the Siachen glacier, Tharoor acknowledged that there had been a “hardening” of the Indian stance after Pakistan-backed infiltrators occupied strategic heights in Kargil in 1999.

There were fears that a unilateral withdrawal by Indian troops would be taken advantage of, he said.

Source: Hindustan Times