A scathing review of Shashi Tharoor’s latest book: The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the twenty-first century
A newspaper column is, as demonstrated by its best practitioners, a minor but nevertheless demanding art form, the essence of which is to give memorable expression to the topical by linking it to deeper realities. Those who carry it off most successfully on the Indian scene—Ramachandra Guha, Vir Sanghvi, Girish Shahane, Santosh Desai, Mukul Kesavan, Swaminathan S. Aiyar—delight and provoke us not only with their command over their subject but also their flair for shrewd generalisation and the economy and lucidity of their expression. Sadly none of these qualities are visible in Shashi Tharoor’s The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, a ragbag of columns and op-eds in which ancient platitudes, second-hand insights, and tacky witticisms are aimed at the reader with a quite breathtaking conviction. Tharoor has never been a very good columnist anyway, so his unwise (but in some ways perfectly characteristic) decision to gather up his jottings only serves to expose more clearly his considerable shortcomings in the realm of both thought and expression.
More at Chandrahas Choudhury’s blog
Also, another trenchant review in The Telegraph, that concludes... "proving once again that he is more of a diplomat than a writer." Ouch!
That said, I had quite enjoyed reading Tharoor's India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond almost a decade back - more for his childhood reminiscences of vacations in Palghat than the writing about India's recent history.
For a good read of India's history, read Stephen Wolpert's India and John Keay's book, India: A History, both of which I read in the 90s and found immensely scholarly and educative. I believe Wolpert has some more recent books - A New History of India in 2003 and Encyclopedia Of India in 2005 - but I have not read these.
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