Guha vs Tharoor

 Lala Hardayal was the first and last St. Stephanian to achieve anything of worthwhile, though to do so he had first to move to Lahore University. Otherwise, St. Stephens has produced nothing but snobbish mediocrities with a regrettable 'cacoethes scribendi'- i.e. an itch to publish worthless books. This becomes clear when we read the following excerpt from Ram Guha's new book on Rukun Advani. It becomes 

A Stephanian he was distinctly ambivalent about was their exact contemporary, Shashi Tharoor. Both ranked first in their class – Tharoor in History, Advani in English –

since both were 'Arts stream' they were bound to be cretins 

but there the resemblance ended. Shashi was, even in college, very much a public man, debating, acting, becoming president of the Wodehouse Society and of the Quiz Club before being elected president of the College Union. He was charming and outgoing, but, from the start, ferociously ambitious.

He could have been a successful journalist and broadcaster- a more genial Karan Thapar- and in that way could have got to know his own country quite well. 

Shashi wanted to make a mark in the world, quicker and more dramatically than any Stephanian (or perhaps any Indian) before him.

Journalism was the way to go. Instead, Tharoor became a UN diplomat- i.e. a eunuch. On the other hand, Ramu Damodaran- who must have been a batchmate of Tharoor- was Narasimha Rao's right hand man before running away to the UN rather than ending up sentenced to jail like his former boss. I'd say Ramu, who was the presenter of a pop music show on AIR, was the most popular person on the Stephens campus at that time. 

Whereas Rukun had no ambition to become well known. In college, all he wanted to do was read, listen to music, and have one-on-one conversations with friends. In the OUP, all he wanted to do was edit books;

It must be said that the OUP had some excellent Indian editors back then. 

while he gloried in the success of his authors, he never remotely wanted to take any credit for this. As we have seen, this inwardness and reclusiveness deepened even further when he retreated to Ranikhet and ran Permanent Black from there.

Advani emigrated from the twenty first century which was not to his liking.  

Rukun had a mixed opinion of Shashi Tharoor as a writer, and as a public figure.

Guha will now reveal that Rukun thought the man was utterly shit.  

Of Tharoor‘s The Great Indian Novel he once wrote:

[T]he deliberately provocative immodesty of the title actually has less to with the author’s nearly incredible self-esteem than with the irreverent, daring and heady atmosphere of the St. Stephen’s to which this over-spun allegory seems completely traceable.

This is foolish. What Advani should have noted was that Tharoor thought the Dynasty was the 'Kaurava' faction- i.e the bad guys blinded by nepotism. The one interesting detail was that Tharoor thought highly of a Commie politician from Kerala. Back when this book was published, the Soviets would have analysed it- or so Indians believed- and would have decided Tharoor was a sound enough fellow. This might mean more rapid promotion at the UN.  

The proper place for this novel to have been serialized was Kooler Talk, the Stephanian rag made up of wit, puns, good humour, satire and irreverence.

No. Kooler Talk was quite funny in bits. Tharoor is always as boring as...Guha.  

In that same essay, Rukun compared Tharoor unfavourably to other novelists from St. Stephen’s. Whereas the language of Upamanyu Chatterjee, was, he thought, ‘a very much more refined and reflective version’ of Kooler Talk,

Upamanyu waxed lyrical over getting a beejay from a bhishti or some shit of that sort. He has been forgotten 

both ‘Allan Sealy

nobody every managed to finish a book by Sealy. They may claim to have done so but if you ask them what happened to the bhishti at the end of Trotter Nama, they become evasive. The correct answer is bhishti gave beejay to Upamanyu 

and Amitav Ghosh

a Social anthropologist!  

are traceable to St. Stephen’s much less easily and much more obscurely than Tharoor and Chatterjee’. While taking something from their old college, these more gifted writers had outgrown its milieu,

how the fuck can you not outgrow the milieu of your school or college?  

tackling complex historical and moral questions beyond the grasp of the common or garden variety of Stephanian novelist.

they may tackle complex questions but their work remains simplistic.  

As is well known, after St. Stephen’s, Shashi Tharoor went on to a long and distinguished career at the United Nations,

his campaign for the top job attracted Manmohan's attention. He thought Tharoor could be useful in giving insights into the US strategic thinking.  

before returning to India to enter politics and joining the Congress Party. He became a member of Parliament, then a Union minister, before being sacked in part because of a jokey tweet, and in part because he seemed keener in involving himself in India’s foremost cricket tournament, the IPL (Indian Premier League), than in discharging his responsibilities as a minister.

Manmohan gave him a second chance in the HRD ministry.  

When Tharoor was asked to resign by the prime minister, Rukun wrote me a mail combining compassion with sarcasm,

Rukun gloated over Tharoor's misfortune 

which must – only slightly redacted – now be made public:


I feel a bit sorry for him. So much ambition, and successful all the way till the failed attempt to become UN chief. And now the first big political victim of something as silly as a Tweet. Poetic justice I guess for former editor of that expanded version of tweeting, Kooler Talk.

Advani was mentally retarded. He just couldn't get over 'Kooler Talk'. He was like a dog with a bone.  

He’s completely secular and personally decent, a good man fallen among thieves.

Congress was a den of thieves. That was true enough.  

Since he has literary ambition as well, a good analogy seems Tharoor as Macbeth with vaulting ambition . . . trying to dethrone King Lalit Duncan Modi and coming a cropper.

The reference is to Lalit Modi who was had created the Indian Premier League (for cricket)

But I fear something worse is going to befall us now: he will inflict his third-rate narcissistic journalism on us once again. We should plead with Nirmala Lakshman [editor of the Hindu Sunday Magazine, where Tharoor had a column before he joined politics] to run for her life before he starts badgering her.

Tharoor has published a lot of books since then. I believe they sell quite well. He has endeared himself to the younger generations of aspirants to the Civil Service.  

Shashi Tharoor and Rukun Advani were exact contemporaries at St. Stephen’s.

Tharoor was ambitious and did well for himself. Advani liked editing books and that's what he devoted himself to doing.  

Superficially, they were alike; both brilliant, both very widely read, each far removed in his interests from the ‘sports type’ that I myself was in college. Even some of their literary tastes overlapped; both admired Wodehouse and Orwell, for example. Yet in terms of character and personality no two Stephanians could be so radically dissimilar. I suspect most readers of this book will know Shashi Tharoor’s public profile. To show how Rukun Advani is, as it were, his absolute Other, I must take recourse to the words of the most gifted of all Stephanian prose stylists, Mukul Kesavan:

[Rukun] has no interest in impressing others. This sounds impressive but it isn’t because this freedom from human neediness isn’t down to modesty or reticence or some karmic insight into the general maya-ness of things. It’s simpler than that, so simple that he can’t take any credit for it: Rukun doesn’t like People.

Perhaps because they keep telling him he smells bad.  

It explains everything about him. This is why he lives in the hills. This is why he loved [his dog] Biscoot without reservation: he wasn’t human.

Also, he didn't mind that Advani smelled like shit 

He loves Beethoven because he’s dead and his genius can be electronically reproduced without the agency of other people.

who might hold their nose and point at you and say mean things. 

It’s why he deals in books: books are forms of disembodied intelligence, they hold out the promise of profundity or pleasure without people attached.

Not the sort of books Advani edited. They were boring and stupid. Still, at least he got paid and didn't have to listen to people telling him he smelled bad.