When I was a very young man, for me, Shashi Tharoor was just another Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. But my father, who was a voracious reader, introduced me to a Shashi Tharoor who was a writer, a journalist and above all the greatest advocate of Indian Pluralism. My own conviction that pluralism is India's unique identity and its greatest asset as a nation makes me think in line with Mr.Tharoor. His intellectual opinion on pluralism are rather robust, informed and born out of his experience of growing up in the pluralist backyards of Kolkata, whereas my humble opinion on the same is naive, callow and rooted in my experience of working with a linguistically heterogeneous group of colleagues in Chennai.
Shashi Tharoor's awe-inspiring style of painting words together in a magical way to create an awesome picture leaves readers in a world of enlightened optimism. His staunch belief on the pluralist society of India is very well reflected in his statement that ‘the only singular thing about India is that you can only speak about it in the plural.’ Unlike many of the contemporary writers of modern India, Shashi Tharoor is quite sanguine in his outlook vis-à-vis future of India and this very same optimism is all the more evident in all his writings and profuse in all his speeches. He believes that this great nation doesn't impose any prohibition on its citizens where, ‘you can be many things and one thing - you can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once.’ He goes on further saying that India offered the world a sight of its pluralism when a ‘Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister of India by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 82 per cent Hindu.’ This excellent analogy made by Mr.Tharoor has prompted me to have introspection on finding out the source of my conviction on Indian pluralism.
As I have explained in the former part of this article, my humble opinion on pluralism is a not a result of my upbringing, but is rather based on my professional and personal life experiences in the cosmopolitan locales of Chennai city. My colleagues Jagadeeswaran, Dilip and Abilash used to speak with each other, joke with each other and quarrel with each other in Tamil, which fascinatingly enough, was not their mother tongue. Their mother tongues are Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam respectively but are born and brought up in Chennai and hence know Tamil more than their mother tongues and love to engage themselves in the intricacies of that language. They scarcely reminisce the difference in their linguistic backgrounds and hardly believe those to be conspicuous. Hence pluralism in India has its roots in general human life and gains its nourishment from laymen's (or to be less sexist, laypeople's) ordinary demeanor.
Shashi Tharoor portrays Indian pluralism through simple but elegant examples and argues about its ubiquitousness in Indian society through citing the emergence of Irfan Pathan as a prominent player in the Indian cricket team. For Tharoor, the existence of Irfan Pathan itself is 'a testament to the indestructible pluralism of our country' for, he is a Muslim and that too a Pathan 'whose forebears belong to a slice of land that is no longer territorially part of India'. To quote Mr.Tharoor, Irfan Pathan exemplifies the fact that 'India is a country where it is possible for a 19-year-old from a beleaguered minority to ascend to the peak of the nation's sporting pantheon; and even more that he represents an idea, an immortal Indian idea, that our country is large enough and diverse enough to embrace everyone who chooses to belong to it, whatever be their caste, creed, color, costume or custom.'
Mr.Tharoor, though an international diplomat and has spent a good part of his life outside Kerala, is a very proud Keralite and boasts of it's multi religious-yet-plural society, it's social development, it's high literacy, it's women empowerment and it's secular credentials. Shashi Tharoor, in his articles and speeches emphasizes the 'openness and diversity of the Malayali heritage.' He has enormous faith in what he call as the 'Malayali Miracle', and that miracle is certainly the ability of the Kerala society to be open and tolerant towards many religions and castes, to be accommodative of various religious and ethnic set of people, and to be able to overcome caste discrimination and oppression through education, land reforms and political democracy. Kerala has always been the embodiment of social equality, educational development, peaceful co-existence and above all a safe haven for pluralism to flourish.
Shashi Tharoor’s inimitable style of writing with deft words and his peerless manner of speeches with RP (Received Pronunciation) accent will indeed make one wonder about the immense level of skill and tact this excellent international diplomat par excellence possess. But his inherent belief in Indian pluralism combined with his innate wisdom makes him one of the greatest intellectuals of our time and above all a great Indian and a true international citizen.
No comments:
Post a Comment