KHAOISTS: PLUNDERING INDIA'S FUTURE

An admission: this is a rather torpid post, the spiritlessness, the tiredness induced not by any physical ailment but by a sapping despondency and a sense of hopelessness about the speed at which India seems to be hurtling towards some sort of disaster, social upheaval, coup, even revolution, whose outcome one cannot even begin to visualise at this moment in time.

I have written many posts on the cancer of corruption that is eating into the vitals of this country. But to an outsider like me, as more and more layers of the rotten onion become visible, the bottom of the pit seems to get that much farther. What I had once thought was the Nadir, appears now to be just the shallow end of the stinking pool in which members of almost every single organ of the state - politicians, babus, judiciary, police - are splashing merrily along with that so-called watchdog, the media, that now appears to be in the vanguard of The Great Indian Robbery.

I simply do not have the heart, the enthusiasm, to pen another article with the passion and detail that I have earlier. Those who have the time and inclination may go through some of the older ones, links provided at the end of this post. But the matter is so grave that I cannot shut what I am seeing out of my mind altogether and remain no more than a passive, mute spectator and, thereby, a party to this plunder of India.

As we sit in the comforts of homes and theoretically debate, unaffected and from a safe distance, whether India faces a grave threat from Maoists whose writ already runs in varying degrees in 160 districts across eight states, we forget to notice that the real darkness, the real danger is right where each one of us is, in every corner of the country, and that most of us are actually responsible for it, one way or another. Just saying that lifts a burden off my soul and makes me feel good about myself. But, it does nothing to lessen the increasing and already unbearable load that we have placed on the soul of India.

We are the Khaoists, the incorrigibly corrupt, the shameless plunderers, the reckless looters who are hollowing this country from within. With gay abandon, as though it is our birthright. Many of us will, naturally, not admit publicly to being Khaoists, but as even a fool knows, only eunuchs and men of extraordinary virtue and character can stay away from the pleasures of a harem if they live there. Both are hard to spot these days. Many of the rest of us are India's shame. We are pushing India into an abyss at a furious pace because we are in a tearing hurry to catapult to riches with the nation's wealth, the money that should have fed, clothed, educated and empowered more than half of India's population that is still mired in the grime of inhuman poverty because of our unbridled, unprincipled ambition and greed that does not think before snatching a morsel from a hungry mouth, that conveniently shuts its eyes when it sees another doing so out of fear that it may spoil our party, disrupt our good life. Not one of us is blameless here.

I am feeling enervated. So I will leave you to go through some words of a few of those who live in and/or are fully cognizant of what goes on in the Khaoist's core. Make sense of what they are trying to say - and hide - and then decide for yourself whether there is hope yet, whether anyone can pull India out of this vortex at all before it is too late.

• Barkha Dutt. As a political journalist, I have to confess, that I am almost shock-proof when it comes to the entrenched corruption of many of our netas and the deals they strike to keep the wheels churning.
• Rajdeep Sardesai. We live in the age of institutionalised corruption. From politicians to judges, from senior bureaucrats to policemen, from corporate tycoons to petty officials, everyone it seems has a price... ‘paid news’ is not an overnight phenomenon that began with election ‘packages’... A political candidate who pays for favourable media coverage is not guaranteed victory, a corporate house through a ‘private treaty’ is almost guaranteed lasting immunity against journalistic ‘objectivity’...has led to a near-total breakdown of rules and standards.
• Tavleen Singh. At some point around the end of the eighties...everyone seemed to suddenly want to be in politics...the lure was filthy lucre. Indian politics had become the quickest way to make a fast buck...jewels from Cartier and Bvlgari, watches from Piaget and Patek Phillipe and handbags and shoes that cost more than an MP earns in a year.. grand mansions and hugely expensive vehicles... some travel only in private aircraft. The real money disappears into various corporate efforts that on the surface can look very legitimate. In almost every political household these days, there is at least one ‘corporate prodigy’... who thrives in the cloistered boundaries of crony capitalism...The sums we are talking of are so huge that they are beyond calculation.
• Shekhar Gupta. Like conquerors of the past, India’s politicians love to rule, and plunder cities... In older times, cities attracted conquering hordes who wanted to sack them for their riches. Now, in democracies, the political class knows that while their votes lie in the countryside, the real money sits in the cities and their real estate...If the new Andhra can get over the loss of Hyderabad, use what it gets in compensation and its own enterprise to build a new capital city...its politicians will figure soon enough that the money-making opportunity a new city offers is much greater than an old metro nearing saturation, howsoever energetic.
• Sagarika Ghose. (on Twitter) sad truth is media is too tied to advertising. That's why when it cos to corporates our lips are mostly sealed. not a good business model. profession has become terribly degraded. am very disillusioned! i joined in early 90s when press still meaningful.
  

Are Barkha Dutt and others really "shock-proof" to corruption? Their silence and thereby complicity applies only to corruption at the highest levels where the sums involved "are beyond calculation." Where petty officials and petty amounts are involved, where a cop taking a Rs 100 bribe is concerned, these guys aggressively carry out sting operations and confidently con the nation into believing that they are sparing no efforts to expose corruption and clean up the rot. Why this Janus-faced approach? Can they even begin to claim that they have remained "temptation-proof", not just for big bucks but entry into the inner circle of India's most powerful - and corrupt - politicians, whose reflected power enables them to almost 'terrorise' those on the lower rungs of political ladder with an arrogance that you will not see anywhere else in the civilised world?

Is it surprising that Shashi Tharoor can stand in the Lok Sabha and say with a straight face that it is ideals that brought him back to India after over three decades abroad and a failed attempt to become UN Secretary General, and despite the stench of corruption and nepotism emanating from him in the IPL scandal? Is it surprising that politicians are saying that the media, babus and judges rank much higher than them when it comes to graft? As the hastily buried and till now not denied allegation about the manner in which Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi negotiated to get the current Raja of corruption the telecom portfolio indicates, and as is also evident from what you have read above, at the very top, corrupt politicians and journalists are like Siamese twins. Had it been otherwise, corruption would not have become the uncontrollable bush fire that it has.

I can say no more. I know this is a poor, illogical, abrupt way to end an article. Perhaps I should take a break and come back to finish it with a flourish. But why? Why should I pretend to be "shock-proof" to this pervasive rot and close this piece too with detached objectivity, when my mind is filled with a numbing mixture of revulsion, anger and helplessness at what Khaoists have done and are doing to my country, the way they are plundering its future to make their own? I think it will be best if your comments complete this unfinished story, if possible with hope.
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Previous related posts:
1. Shashi Tharoor: making a 'difference'
2. Politics and media: a new nadir
3. ND Tiwari: much more than a sex scandal
4. Covering up the mother of all corruption scandals
5. Conspicuous consumption and conspicuous poverty
6. Sink sting operations that stink
7. Capital punishment, not gain, for the corrupt
8. Corrupt, colonial India faces volcano
9. As long as there is aloo corrupt will be Laloo
10. Modi and Reddy: the choice is clear
11. Maytas: truth inverted, greed is king
12. 1000 times President's salary for India's babus
13. Tarun Tejpal: extra God and the Devil
14. Wake up (poem)
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BRAND IPL: LOTUS DESPITE MODI AND MUCK?

Can someone explain this? How can the IPL be the "finest new brand of global value", as Shekhar Gupta calls it, when it is also being alleged by him and many others in the same breath that that the one man who created it and ran it single-handedly for three seasons seemingly perfectly, is actually a villain who has corrupted the very innards of the organisation he heads?

Thanks to one tweet that felled the fox-clever, arrogant and avaricious Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi has instantly become a ruthless dictator, a corrupt administrator, a money launderer, an inveterate philanderer - add expletives of your choice without a care - who, through a complex web of financial crookery and dubious deals involving ownership of various teams, broadcasting rights etc, has enriched himself enormously and brought disrepute to the game. Suddenly, people have discovered that, thanks to the IPL, he owns a yacht, a fleet of S Class Mercedes cars, a jet and havelis, is into orgies, has been rubbing people the wrong way, has been running the show as his private empire etc. In short, what we are being told by and through the media is that the man needs to be thrown out immediately from his job as IPL commissioner. The sub-text is that once he goes all will be well again.

Lalit Modi would perhaps not have expected that exposing Shashi Tharoor would generate the kind of Tsunami it has. He should have known that the Congress party has always successfully used/bought/arm-twisted people into hastily burying any scam, no matter how big, if it even as much as singes a powerful Congress leader. Shashi Tharoor was no ordinary Congressman. He was one of the star members of the new club of 'educated' and elitist Indians that Rahul Gandhi was crafting to get himself projected by the English media as the Great New And Only Hope for India, before the 2014 general elections .

By stripping Tharoor of the veneer that had made him very popular among English-speaking Indians and revealing his ugly, dishonest innards that were indistinguishable from those of the many dehati thieves that our flawed systems have thrown up as leaders, Lalit Modi committed an unpardonable crime. How could he dare to, when no else did, tell the world that Tharoor should actually be spelled 'Thugroor'?

It is nobody's case that Lalit Modi is a saint. By all available accounts - there is an avalanche now - particularly from those who proudly claimed, till that famous tweet, that Lalit Modi was "my friend", it appears that he did as much wrong as right as IPL commissioner. It is also being projected through selective leaks by India's infamous Raiders of the Income Tax Department that Modi is not the only one who stinks: the whole architecture does. Many team-owners and administrators, even cricket legends, who have been merrily enjoying the IPL windfall for three years are, we are being told, all guilty of sullying the 'fair' name of the game of cricket and that the rot is deep indeed.

In the middle of all this muck, we are also being shown a pristine lotus, the IPL brand, which we are being asked to unquestioningly accept is still a good product, an outstanding Indian global brand that we must be proud of. Is that possible? If the one guy who gave birth to it and has built it up as a one-man brand is the Devil himself, if the other administrators headed by the omniscient Sharad Pawar of many a 'fame', including the rot in the ministry he currently heads, if many of those who own IPL teams, are all dirty guys in the game to maximise their own earnings by every dubious instrument available, then is it possible to believe that the players who have been bought by them and are in their employ are not being used by them or others with the same objective?

How can we believe that there is no match fixing, that the 'integrity of the sport' has not been lost, if the rot is really as deep as is currently being made out to be?

Something does not strike one as being right here. Sure, a lot needs to be fixed in the IPL. But, either things are not as rotten as they appear now or, if they indeed are as bad, then one has to logically accept that the sport too has been fatally compromised. That very few are willing to accept. Which can only mean that it is a mean campaign that has been launched by the government solely to punish Modi for unmasking Tharoor and to politically weaken Sharad Pawar who is a painful thorn that cannot be removed by the Congress because the survival of the government in Maharashtra, even the Centre, depends on his considerable weight, pun intended. This may also be with a view to make Tharoor's crime look relatively benign so that he can be rehabilitated quickly.

Lalit Modi, despite massive pressure, has refused to resign as IPL commissioner. On April 26, a meeting of the governing council of the IPL has been called to remove him from the post. He has not only called the meeting illegal, as he says only he can call for it, but has also refused to attend it. To add fuel to the raging fire, he has launched a counter attack on, yes, Twitter again: "Wait for the ipl to finish - I will reveal the men who have tried to bring disrepute to the game and how we stopped them from doing it."

Modi, let us accept it, is no ordinary fly-by-night swindler or conman. He is proud of the product he has developed with a lot of hard work and also seems to have covered his flanks well. He probably had a fair idea that taking out Tharoor would unleash the might of the state against him. Which means he also calculated that, given the knowledge he has about every aspect of IPL and the men involved in it, at the end of it he would come out relatively unscathed and, more importantly, the brand would remain untarnished.

There is going to be serious egg on some faces over the next few days. But, there is hope that brand IPL will not only not take a hit but will also grow bigger and stronger. This hope has arisen not because of what people have been writing and speaking while keeping the brand distinct from Modi and others, but because of the manner in which Modi is taking on the state and its instruments, including the media, which suggests that he guarded at least the brand zealously.

If, however, everything been as putrid as the hysterical reaction to 'Thugroorgate' is making it out to be, then the muck is not going to go out with Modi. Then, no matter who replaces him, everything will, away from public gaze, slide back to where it was. And who knows, Tharoor the Mentor - fixer in plain language - might quietly get his ministership and IPL team back too.

Related reading: Shashi Tharoor: making a 'difference'
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MENTOR SHASHI

Shashi Tharoor is hitting the headlines again. Just over a month back, I had written a post about how, despite landing in trouble repeatedly due to his tweets, he had emerged victorious, "with not a scar on his pretty face much like Muhammad Ali, the legendary heavy weight boxer, who, they said, 'floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee', and was invincible at his peak." At that time, an old song, "Muhammad Ali, the black superman," had wormed into my head. Suddenly, its lyrics started changing to fit the story of Shashi Tharoor who had begun to look more and more like a Mallu (Malyaali) superman who was constantly taunting, daring, teasing others to "catch me if you can", and "Interlocutor Shashi - the Mallu Superman" emerged.

The Mallu Superman has, alas, fallen. And he has no one to blame but his own arrogance and what appears to be his avarice and tearing hurry to get into the 'bad' world of glamour, cricket and big bucks by getting for his lady love, Sunanda Pushkar, an undilutable and perpetually increasing sweat equity worth an initial Rs 70 crores, in a new IPL team for Kochi that Tharoor wanted the world to believe he 'mentored' due to his love for Kerala and not Sunanda or manna. But IPL Chairman Lalit Modi proved too smart for him and it took no more than one tweet from him to fell Tharoor, who has lost his job as Minister of State for External Affairs for starters, while Sunanda has 'voluntarily' surrendered her "sweetheart" equity. Those interested may read my previous post for more details.

The dramatic sudden and dramatic transformation of 'Interlocutor Shashi - Mallu Superman' into 'Mentor Shashi - Mallu Suckerman' has made me re-write the lyrics I had written earlier.

The You Tube video of the original song has also been embedded below. Read the lyrics as you listen to the song.

This here's the story of Shashi Tharoor
Who changed his name to Mentor Shashi
He knew how to talk and he knew how to tweet
And all the opponents he always did beat

Sing Mentor, Mentor Shashi
He talked out of turn and he couldn't help but tweet
Mentor, the Mallu superman
Who called to that Modi guy I'm Shashi, catch me if you can

Now all you Kerala fans, you've got to agree
There got to be flies on Mentor Shashi
He batted to net Sue free 70 crores
And everyone got what they asked for!

Mentor is known to have said
Lalit take my call and I'll 'Kochi' your head
He yapped like the Mallu superman
And called to the IPL guy I'm Shashi, beat me if you can

He said I'm the greatest India's ever seen
The mentoring champion who came back again
But my tricks were so juvenile just one tweet did mar
Which proves I'm no king of mentoring by far

Sing Mentor, Mentor Shashi
He stole out of turn and he couldn't help but bleat
Mentor, the Mallu suckerman
Who cried to Manmohan guy I'm Shashi, keep me if you can
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SHASHI THAROOR: MAKING A 'DIFFERENCE'

Let me say what mainstream media would have screamed had the man involved had not been a Congressman and, more importantly, one of the many PLUs (People Like Us - the media that is) who thrive and prosper, some at India's expense, primarily because of the manner in which the media protects, promotes and, in some cases, pays them to lead the good life when they should actually be looking for a hole to bury themselves in: the familiar stench of corruption is emanating from Shashi Tharoor, India's Minister of State for External Affairs.

As per records quoted by Indian Premier League (IPL) boss Lalit Modi, it is more than evident that Tharoor is no innocent, selfless 'mentor' who has put Kerala on the cricket map by helping a consortium buy a new IPL team for Kochi. At least one individual whom Tharoor admits to 'knowing well', Sunanda Pushkar, has been given undilutable sweat equity worth approximately a whopping Rs 75 crore. As per reports doing the rounds, based primarily on Tharoor's very public appearances as minister with Ms Pushkar, she is his lady love and is set to marry him. She has, quite expectedly, denied that she is acting as a front for Tharoor, as has he, feigning righteous rage. Only the very naïve believe that she is the only one through whom Tharoor will benefit; others involved too may have coughed up what is a straightforward 'cut' for services rendered by him to get their bid through.

Shashi Tharoor, a Stephanian, may have left Delhi and India when he was 19 and acquired impressive credentials in the US and UN. But, to take off from a cliché, the crafty desi politician - in the mould of the nearby badlands of Haryana and UP - could not be taken out of him. Still an infant in Indian politics, given what he has manifestly so cleverly 'achieved' in an absolutely 'dry' ministry in so short a time, one can only wonder what he would have done had he been given a 'wet' one. Even Dilip Cherian, a fellow Keralite, has been forced to admit that Tharoor has displayed political naiveté in the sordid Kochi IPL franchisee saga.

In 2005, the then Foreign Minister Natwar Singh was exposed for being a petty thief for helping his son make around Rs 75 lakhs through a dubious oil deal with Iraq. Natwar too was one of media's PLUs. Initially he stoutly denied any wrong doing whatsoever on his part, just as Tharoor is now doing. But soon, despite his best efforts, he found himself thrown out of the government because it was impossible to cover the trail.

During those days, Vir Sanghvi had jumped to his defence. Natwar, Sanghvi wanted the nation to believe, was an honourable man because he was well-read, had a well stocked library, had devoured a large number of books, even authored some, and also had an 'outstanding' career in the Foreign Service. It was almost like saying that the real crime was not what Natwar had done but the fact that it had been alleged that an Oxbridge was corrupt, exposing the uncomfortable truth that, shorn of the sophistry that enabled guys like him to remain distant from and above Bharat, as far as integrity was concerned, the Natwars of the world were no different from the Laloos and Reddys. Sanghvi is at it again, a bit mildly this time, though. He has tweeted that if Tharoor goes, so should Modi! See how cleverly the spotlight is being shifted from Tharoor, and his offense sought to be obfuscated, by all kinds of hyphenations? The latest is that Lalit Modi and Narendra Modi are working together! No wonder many believe that, as far as corruption at the very top is concerned, journalists and politicians are like Siamese twins.

When the Tharoor story first broke, the reaction of Rajdeep Sardesai was almost similar. The manner in which he questioned Lalit Modi on CNN IBN made Modi, not Tharoor, look like the villain for exposing the latter! How is Modi's motive even relevant here? The stark issue is that a minister of the Union government has manifestly done something that can only be described as disgraceful and unacceptable. Journalists should have been focusing on that and asking for Tharoor's resignation. Instead, some of them are still trying to make it appear as if nothing really serious has happened. What is new that Tharoor has done, they ask, that other politicians have not been doing? Who knows, may be some guys from the media too have done a Tharoor-Sunanda, or are planning to, to get their teeth into the very lucrative IPL or similar circuit!

It is more than evident from the interview that Shashi Tharoor gave to Barkha Dutt that when he got into the 'mentor' game, he figured that his real role would remain under wraps because of the confidentiality clause about the identity of the owners of a team; since no details of the ownership of other teams had been made public till then, Tharoor reckoned that the 'hamam' effect would ensure that the extent of his involvement and the 'pay-off' of Rs 75 crore worth of sweat equity to his girl friend and possibly future wife would not become public. That, and not naiveté, emboldened Tharoor to misuse public office.

Can anyone believe that Tharoor did not know why those guys approached him to be their 'mentor' (notice also how he has re-defined the meaning of yet another word!)? Would they have looked his way had he not been minister? As per his own admission, in the consortium that includes Sunanda Pushkar, there are some people "I haven't even met or am aware of". Why, then, did he agree to 'mentor' a lot whose identities, much less credentials, were not known to him? Was it because Sunanda was from the beginning a part of the consortium or was it only after they agreed to bring her on board on Tharoor's 'suggestion'?

What exactly did Tharoor's 'mentoring' translate into in a competitive bidding process? Modi's allegations and Tharoor's own admissions make it clear that he used the weight of his appointment during the bidding process to influence its outcome. That was his only real role to help a group of people, most from outside Kerala, who wanted a slice of the IPL pie. And as it turns out, Tharoor's lady love was rewarded obscenely for the value she is supposedly going to bring to the franchisee with her unheard-of-even-till-now expertise in event management etc!

Ah! Tharoor must surely love Kerala, a state that he probably would not have even looked at had he not been compelled to return to and seek respectable resettlement in India following his failure to become UN Secretary General.

Surely, Tharoor, with his vast experience in the UN, will know only too well how lobbying and influence works, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, like it happened with his own bid to head the organisation. Did he write that almost demeaning piece in Time magazine in praise of Sonia Gandhi because he actually worships her or was it to win her favour and himself a ministerial berth? Just before he formally joined politics, he also wrote columns in The Times of India, some of which were skillful exercises to further his own political goals by projecting how India needed more politicians with his kind of background, his in-depth, though distant, knowledge of this country, his type of accomplishments etc, and not the groin-scratching, nose-digging, non-English-speaking, corrupt lot that India has in plenty. He never was a naïve babe in the woods, as he wants us to believe now.

Tharoor may have perfected the art of saying in 140 words or more of sometimes convoluted prose what can and should be expressed in 140 characters or less. But his skill with words, his command over the English language - the master key that still opens many locks in India - his 'erudition' and his Natwar-like arrogance cannot wash off what he has been caught with on his hands this time.

A couple of months back, in response to questions on Twitter about why he had joined politics, he had tweeted, briefly for once, that he had done it "to make a difference". BRP Bhaskar had then tweeted back asking, "difference to whom?" Tharoor has not yet answered that question. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for India, Lalit Modi has.
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Readers may also like to read:
1. Politics and media: a new nadir
2. Interlocutor Shashi - Mallu superman
3. ND Tiwari: much more than a sex scandal

INTERLOCUTOR SHASHI - MALLU SUPERMAN

Shashi Tharoor 'talks out of turn and can't help but tweet'. That has landed him in trouble on more occasion than one but, amazingly, each time, he has emerged victorious, with not a scar on his pretty face, much like Muhammad Ali, the legendary heavy weight boxer, who, they said, 'floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee', and was invincible at his peak.

After he became Minister of State in the External Affairs Ministry, Tharoor chose to stay in a five star hotel rather than in the Kerala Bhawan because, he said, the latter did not have a gymnasium and did not provide the privacy he needed. To conduct affairs of the state on Twitter, was it? The Congress High Command, then in the throes of an austerity-attack, asked him to move out and he was next seen having his meals, one at least, smile intact, in the Kerala Bhawan canteen, much like the aam aadmi whose clothes he wears there days. Perfect combination.

Forced to travel in economy class, Shashi then enraged The Holy Cow of the Congress by referring to it as 'cattle class' in a tweet to Kanchan Gupta. There was a lot of noise, both from the Left that does not associate anything holy with the cow, the Centre (Congress) that believes that only their Kamdhenu cow is holy and the Right that has patented its claim on the Hindu belief that all cows are holy. A private audience with Sonia Gandhi apart, Tharoor emerged unscathed, even stronger, from that controversy which had then inspired me to write a limerick and poem:

Feel sorry for minister-tweeter Shashi Tharoor
Who tweeted austerity was a "cattle class" rule
The enraged holy cow
Shoved a horn and how
That indiscretion in searing pain he does rue!
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There was this smart guy called Tharoor
Who came to India ready to say 'Huzoor'
Not knowing then that for first class
He would soon lose his long held pass

Now no more than chattel
He has to suffer class cattle
And to the wishes of the holy cow
Morning and evening humbly bow

In December 2009, he stoked another row by using Twitter, again, to openly question his ministry's decision to tighten visa rules in the light of the David Hadley case, saying "26/11 killers had no visas." His boss, Foreign Minister did feebly assert his seniority by asking everyine in his ministry to be on the same page, but the net result was that some visa norms were actually eased. Tharoor had won again.

Within a few days, Tharoor was once again in the cross-hairs of the media that played a clipping of his speech that showed him crossing the criticising the founder of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty:“foreign policy of Nehru and Gandhi was more like a moralistic running commentary.” That was the Lakshman Rekha that should have cost Tharoor his job. Or so the media thought. Instead, the very next day he blasted them for "inaccurate, dishonest, irresponsible and tendentious reporting" and clarified that he was only quoting Lord Parekh's points and not offering his own. A neat KO punch!

A couple of day back, Tharoor kicked up another storm when he told Indian journalists in Riyadh: “We feel Saudi Arabia has a long and close relationship with Pakistan and that makes Saudi Arabia even a more valuable interlocutor for us,” Everyone thought that Tharoor was signaling a radical departure from India's long-held position that talks between Indian and Pakistan had to be bilateral and that there was no room for any third-party involvement. Predictably, the lifeless BJP, desperately looking for issues to embarrass the government, was up in arms, as was the 24/7 Indian media whose very survival depends upon some inane political controversy or another that keeps the focus of news in Delhi and in TV studios. But Tharoor not only neutralised them in a hurry, he gave them and his lakhs of Twitter followers lessons in the English language too: "If I speak to u,u are my interlocutor!I mentioned the Saudis as OUR interlocutors, ie the people we are here to speak to. Some misinterpretn"! Go nurse your wounds.

Today, for no apparent reason, an old song, "Muhammad Ali, the black superman," wormed into my head. Suddenly, its lyrics started changing to fit the story of Shashi Tharoor who is beginning to look more and more like a Mallu (Malyaali) superman who is constantly taunting, daring, teasing others to "catch me if you can." In less than an effortless hour "Interlocuter Shashi - the Mallu Superman" emerged.

Those who may not have heard the original song can listen to the embedded You Tube video while reading the lyrics:

This here's the story of Shashi Tharoor
Who changed his name to Inter-locutor Shashi
He knows how to talk and he knows how to tweet
And with clarifications his opponents he does beat

Sing (Inter)Locutor, Locutor Shashi
He talks out of turn and he can't help but tweet
Locutor, the Mallu superman
Who calls to the cattle guy I'm Shashi, catch me if you can

Now all you twitter fans, you've got to agree
There ain't no flies on Locutor Shashi
He confuses the arena wherever he goes
And everyone gets what they asked for

Locutor is known to have said
You hear me waffle and I'll muddle your head
He yaps like the Mallu superman
And calls to the media guy I'm Shashi, catch me if you can

He says I'm the greatest India's ever seen
The tweet-weight champion who's come back again
My lexicon is so baffling you can't ever mar
Which proves I'm the king of chatter ring by far

Sing Locutor, Locutor Shashi
He talks out of turn and he can't help but tweet
Locutor, the Mallu superman
Who calls to every other guy I'm Shashi, catch me if you can
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SHASHI THAROOR'S TROUBLING TWEETS

He was asking for it. Shashi Tharoor, back to India after decades in the US, forgot that he was not President Obama, India was not the US and the Congress party was not the Democratic party. So, when he got onto Twitter and started tweeting regularly to an ever increasing number of followers, the Congress High Command would not have been amused. And when the number of his followers crossed one lakh, alarm bells would have started ringing. Outside of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Tharoor, a political novice, had become the first leader to connect directly to so many Indians, and that too interactively on a daily basis.

His soaring popularity, highlighted regularly by the media, not only created a new star in the Congress overnight but also made many Indians acutely aware of the distance and the disconnect that existed between them and the much more youthful Rahul Gandhi, the uncrowned king of the country.

The High Command had to do something. Sure enough, it reacted a few days back by publicly ordering him out of the comforts of the five star hotel he was staying in, and in to the rather humble environs of the Kerala House where not only was there no gymnasium, Tharoor even had to eat food in the canteen like, and with, the real "aam aadmi". It is clear that Tharoor did not get the real message then. That is why not only did he send a tweet to his fast growing followers, that he was paying from his pocket and that he had been staying in a five star hotel for 100 days because it had a gym and gave him privacy, but also kept tweeting regularly.

The Congress was not going to let him get away! It was just waiting for that inevitable slip that would give it just the opportunity that it needed to censure him even more severely and put a firm end to his twittering ways. Yesterday, he did that and more. Replying to a tweet about travelling in Economy Class as a part of the austerity drive launched by the Congress High Command, he tweeted: "Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows."

The Congress party has hit back hard saying that his remarks were "unacceptable given the sensitivity of all Indians and not in sync with our political culture". The "political culture" bit is the operative part. How can any Congressman dare to even remotely compare Sonia Gandhi with a cow? Criticising the party's Holy Family is blasphemy!

The effect on Shashi Tharoor has been electric. He has not posted a single tweet on Twitter for over 22 hours now, the last one being "RIP Patrick Swayze". Perhaps just the right tweet to let his own Twitter page rest in peace, leaving behind 164, 548 disappointed followers.

Yesterday, I had penned a short poem on hearing about the commotion created by his "cattle class" tweet. Although I had posted in India Tweets then itself, I am posting it here again:

There was this smart guy called Tharoor
Who came to India ready to say 'Huzoor'
Not knowing then that for first class
He would soon lose his long held pass

Now no more than chattel
He has to suffer class cattle
And to the wishes of the holy cow
Morning and evening humbly bow

Today, I have written a limerick in similar vein. Here it is:

Feel sorry for minister-tweeter Shashi Tharoor
Who tweeted austerity was a "cattle class" rule
The enraged holy cow
Shoved a horn and how
That indiscretion in searing pain he does rue!

I am sure this is not the end of the story. I will not be surprised if he soon finds himself travelling in real "cattle class", a bullock cart, on the the dirt tracks that you find in India's hinterland. How soon do you think he will move to the Rural Development ministry?
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