Reading Shashi Tharoor: If you want to be remembered write a novel

By Mohammed Wajihuddin Sometime in the early 1990s I got issued The Great Indian Novel. It was Shashi Tharoor’s debut novel published in 1989, from Patna’s iconic Khuda Bakhsh Library. With limited vocabulary but unlimited urge to learn the firangi language, I began to read it. I have no compunction to admit that I had to reach out to a dictionary often to understand the meaning of those many words which were unfamiliar to me.
Nevertheless, Tharoor’s lucid prose drew me closer to him. The coinage, the clever turn of phrases, the style to tell stories. They had me off my feet. I fell in love with his English writing. I am among his countless admirers who devour his words but know him only through his writing. I heard him once at a literature festival, tried to ask a question but never got a chance.
I began following him soon after I read his debut novel, have tried to read almost everything he has written and that I could lay my hands on. His novels, non-fiction books, reviews, lectures which got published in periodicals and dailies.
After graduating from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi he went to the US for higher studies. After his long stint at the United Nations where he reached a rung lower to the top, he returned to India and joined politics.
He also began writing a column for TOI. It was sheer joy to read his columns. It was around the same time that I learnt, probably through one of Jug Suraiya’s pieces, that Tharoor began writing while he was very young and would write for Junior Statesman (JS), the magazine from The Statesman stable for the young. Suraiya then edited it.
Now author-publisher David Davidar, in introduction to Tharoor’s new book, perhaps his 21st, Pride, Prejudice & Punditry (ALEPH) tells us that Tharoor “published his first short story, at his father’s urging, at the age of ten.” It was his father who inculcated in him the love for words. Davidar rightly observes that early influences would never desert him. In time Tharoor would become a wordsmith who, according to Davidar’s estimation, “has probably published about five million words over the past fifty years or so.” God, how could a man with such a punishing schedule in diplomacy and politics, write so prolifically?