Why Shashi Tharoor Is So Damn Good!

An excerpt from Shashi Tharoor's novel 'India - From Midnight to the Millenium and Beyond':

"There are many of us, but, among India's multitudes , we are few. We have grown up in the cities in India, secure a national identity rather than a local one, which we express in English better than in any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part; we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry such sectarian lines. We see the poverty, suffering, and conflict in which a majority of our fellow citizens are mired, and we clamor for new solutions to these old problems, solutions we believe can come from the skills and efficiency of the modern world. We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but in that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.

And, in Indian politics, we are pretty much irrelevant.

We dont get a look in. We dont enter the fray because we cant win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We dont have the votes: there are too few of us, and we dont speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learned to talk about political issues without the expectation that we will be able to do anything about them.

Until Rajiv Gandhi, the accidental Prime Minister, came to power."

The first photograph shows Pandit Nehru with his young grandson Rajiv, not knowing that after almost forty years, the toddler would be leading his country as well. The second is a familiar picture of Rajiv Gandhi in power, a comforting sight to many educated Indians, but also a picture where you conclude that Indian politics is too foul for the clean hearted.