A letter to Mr Tharoor

Dear Mr Minister of State for External Affairs or just Shashi, if I may call you that?

Let me preface my letter by saying, I have no doubt that this must have been an trying week indeed for you. And doubly so, considering you happen to be a citizen of this Nation of ours, where everyone — from political parties to media houses — seem to be caught in some cutthroat deathmatch of one-upmanship. And as your luck (or lack thereof) would have it, your much publicised twittering (or tweet or whatever it’s called) happened to fall in the run-up to the elections.

You know that’s asking for trouble.

To recap, when you were asked if you would travel by “cattle class” the next time you travel to your constituency in Kerala, you said, “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows”. Dunno about the rest. Makes me laugh (*).

And yes, you did put out many a clarification stating that “you were repeating the term used by the journo”, that “you incorrectly assumed that people would understand humour and not deliberately distort your words” and that it “wasn’t aimed at passengers but companies that herd passengers like cattle” and the Prime Minister too tried to play it off as a joke. Sadly, just as Jaswant Singh and L.K. Advani will forever be stuck with their Jinnah-love, so too will this remark stick to you like white on rice. That’s the nature of today’s world, Sir. Once the media and opposition politicians have sunken their teeth into something you did/said that is open to interpretation, they will all interpret it in the worst way possible and never let you forget their interpretation.

You and I, we’re not all that different, you know — minus the small matter of the UN involvement, the member of Parliament thing, the umpteen books and articles and the education... Apart from all that, we’re not too different. I once made a simple joke using the phrase “LS” for comedy effect. I was tagged elitist. I once referred to a George Carlin line in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and said to someone jokingly, “Stop being so suburban” and i got tagged elitist, snobbish, “townie” and a slew of other shit. <Small digression: And yet, these same morons are branded comedy superstars for potshots at the colour of my skin, my residential address, where I’ve studied, what I’ve done and what I do. The reason I put that (*) higher up in this letter, is because I’m certain that at some point, one or more of these aforementioned morons will question my right to laugh at the statement you made and call me elitist again. Good Stuff>

But I learnt something from all those “faux pas”. The reason I use inverted commas is because personally I did not see my foot even remotely near my face, never mind it entering my mouth. That people chose to make an issue out of it is why it will be known to them as a faux pas, but to me as a “faux pas”. Anyway, I did learn something and that is that if you make the mistake of wasting high-quality humour on these people, don’t explain the joke. They’re never going to understand it. They don’t want to understand it.

Take it easy and don’t let all the governance hoo-ha stop you from putting out some more books. Keep it clean.

Bye-bye...