Author, peace-keeper, refugee worker, human rights activist and now India’s minister of state for external affairs: Shashi Tharoor has straddled several worlds of experience. But back home, the minister may still be coming to terms with the rough and tumble of Indian politics after having to vacate his room in a five-star hotel in New Delhi for which he paid himself in keeping with the Congress party’s public claims of austerity.
The first-term MP from Thiruvananthapuram, who is in charge of Arabia, Africa and Latin America, described the controversy as ’silly-seasoned’ in a Twitter post. ‘I would be ashamed if I was spending the people’s money. But I’m not, I’m spending my own savings,’ Dr Tharoor wrote.
His United Nations career began when he was just 22 in 1978. He joined the staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, before going on to hold key responsibilities over the years. As India’s candidate for UN secretary general to succeed Kofi Annan in 2006, Dr Tharoor mounted a spirited campaign and ended up finishing a close second out of seven contenders.
There was a ‘what next’ hanging in the air over his name when he left the UN on March 31, 2007. A likely avenue for the author of 11 books and hundreds of articles and op-eds would have been literature, and Dr Tharoor, in fact, said he looked on his exit from a full-time UN position as giving him the opportunity to return to his first love, writing.
Ironically, it was when his career in the public forum seemed to the untutored observer to be over that the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, recognised that Dr Tharoor had much more to give, and in 2008 named him a ‘Global Leader of Tomorrow.’
Contesting the general election in India seemed to the observer an improbable adventure when Dr Tharoor first announced for the seat under the Congress party symbol. Again, however, he reinvented himself for the needs of street-level campaigning, shedding his suits and suave demeanor that comes naturally to the London-born internationalist in favour of the mundu that is the traditional attire of the average Malayali, and mounted a grassroots campaign fuelled by the technological toys of mass communication, to emerge with one of the biggest majorities in the 2009 election cycle.
The magnitude of that win made it a certainty that he would be inducted into the government; his posting in the external affairs ministry seeks to take advantage of the years Dr Tharoor has spent building contacts and expertise in the international arena.
The minister spoke to Rediff India Abroad’s Aziz Haniffa in an interview a couple of weeks before he, along with his boss, Minister for External Affairs S M Krishna, made the news for staying in five-star hotels after taking office.
From UN diplomat to a politician in Kerala and now a minister: how has the transformation been?
It’s been an extraordinary experience. You may remember that at one point I said to you, I am re-booting. Now it turns out that I’ve done more than re-booting — I’ve changed the operating system completely. It’s been a dramatic transformation of everything in my life.
And I have to admit it’s probably something — it’s a rare privilege to be able to go through because within a matter of months, I have changed my residence, changed my profession, changed my daily thrust of work, and it’s in some ways quite invigorating.
In other ways, of course, there are adjustments to be made, which is healthy for human beings at some stage in their life to re-assess really what they are doing and to do things differently. So I am really very grateful for the opportunity.
Name of Source: Rediff News