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‘India is the most important country for the future of the world,’ says former UN Under Secretary Dr Shashi Tharoor. If that’s true, his latest work could be the most significant book you read this year.
A lot can happen back home while you’re off safeguarding international peace and security. Shashi Tharoor’s last book on India, 1997’s From Midnight To The Millennium, was published before his stint as United Nations Under Secretary General for Communications, and traced India’s history from late colonial times through its first 50 years of independence. After narrowly missing out to Ban Ki-moon in the race for the UN’s top spot , Tharoor the writer is back with The Elephant, The Tiger And The Cell Phone, a collection of essays examining the vast changes which have swept the world’s second largest country in his absence.
Why The Elephant, The Tiger And The Cell Phone?
The book’s introduction takes the form of a fable in which an elephant – a slumbering, lumbering, ponderous creature which is slow to move – appears to be transforming itself into a sprightly tiger, developing stripes and so on. It’s a thinly-veiled metaphor: that elephant represents India.
Where does the cell phone fit in?
For me, it is the cell phone which epitomises the country’s reinvention. Before the advent of the cell phone, telephony in India was a disgrace, with laughably few functioning landlines. In 1984, the cell phone was regarded by the government as a luxury that India, as a developing nation, could ill afford. Now we are buying 7.5 million cellphones per year, and it’s not just the social elite who are buying them. India has the cheapest cell phone rates in the world, which means that fishermen, farmers and auto-rickshaw drivers can all have cellphones, and they are prospering as a result. Frankly, this transformation has empowered the poor in India in ways that 45 years of talking about socialism never did.
Would you say India’s problems are in the past, then?
Not at all: huge challenges remain. India may have broken the world record for the largest number of cellphones, but we also have hundreds of villages without electricity. We may have Asia’s largest number of dollar billionaires – more than in Japan, even – and yet there are 260 million people in our country living on less than 30 cents a day. We have the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, many of whom are over here in the Gulf, but the fact remains that we have more children who have not seen the inside of a school than in any other country in the world. The story of India is unfinished, unwritten. But it needs to be told.
In print you’ve compared India to a thali, the plate used to serve meals. Why?
It’s the antithesis of the American idea of the melting pot. When people emigrate to America, they are assimilated into one unifying American culture wherein, up to a point, people dress alike, eat alike and think alike. I offer the comparison that India is not a melting pot; it is a thali: a large stainless steel plate with a number of different dishes served in different bowls. Each is distinct from the next, but ultimately it is part of the same thing. They combine on your palate to make a satisfying meal. That to me is the Indian ideal of pluralism: ethnic, cultural and religious identities can all exist under the umbrella of an Indian identity.
What do you make of India’s relationship with the UAE?
I gave an interview 15 years ago in which I rather notoriously said ‘the only place in the world where Indians are not allowed to succeed is India’. At the time, the institutional, bureaucratic culture of India was an impediment to entrepreneurial activity. Places like the UAE and America have traditionally provided Indians with a much-needed platform for personal advancement. Nowadays I meet Indian executives in Dubai who have come over with the express purpose of wooing back expatriated Indian technologists and engineers. Because of its transformation, India is starting to require the kind of skills it has traditionally exported.
You’ve travelled all over the world with your work for the UN. What are the stereotypes of Indians, and how are they changing?
When I went to the US as a graduate student in 1975, the popular perception in America was based on stereotypes like the snake charmer, the sadhu lying on a bed of nails, the beggar and so on… Recently, however, an Indian friend of mine was accosted by a perspiring European at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. ‘You’re Indian!’ he cried, ‘Can you help me fix my laptop?’ The conception now is that if you’re Indian you must be a computer guru or a software geek or a tech wizard.
You’ve been away from India for quite some time. How do you stay connected to your roots?
A tree can spread its branches far and wide, but it remains connected to its roots. As a writer, an address is mere geographic convenience. A writer really lives inside his head, and on the page. I am fully animated by the experience of India and what I felt growing up there. When I look in the mirror, I see an Indian. No question.
This is your 10th book and you’ve been writing for newspapers since you were six years old. Is writing ever a struggle for you?
I think writing skills are probably innate. I’ve never believed that you can learn how to write in any conscious or organised way: for me it is as natural as the way you breathe. George Bernard Shaw put it best when he said ‘I write for the same reason a cow gives milk,’ that is to say, it’s in there and it has to come out somehow. Otherwise, it would be painful. I’m intolerant of people who talk about ‘writer’s block’. Afterall, it is an indulgence denied of the practitioners of other professions. Whoever heard of carpenter’s block?
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