reading habit
Editor’s note
Hmm, does Shashi Tharoor need an introduction? We think not. And we’re truly not up to the task of reducing his prolific career and prodigious body of work to a few pithy sentences. So without further delay, here is our most illustrious edition of The Book Addict’s Quiz with our nation’s best known bibliophile, or is that logophile?
What is your most powerful childhood memory of a book?
I have too many! My mother reading ‘Noddy’ books to me would be the earliest. Plus: Hiding a ‘Biggles’ adventure under the blanket and reading it by torchlight after my mother had come in and switched off the light. And reading the ‘Ramayana’ and 'Mahabharata’ stories in English after having heard them from my grandmother in Malayalam.
<Biggles! We haven’t heard that name in a long while!>
What line of literature or poetry do you quote ad nauseam?
Not one in particular but several! To pick three of the most-relevant of those I like to cite, sometimes only to myself: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, from Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. “Not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. I must “prepare a face to meet the faces I must meet,” from TS Eliot.
<The last being every politician’s morning mantra>
What book do you regret re-reading?
I always have so much to read (without enough time to read them all) that I almost never re-read. I would only re-read for pleasure, which would mean one of the PG Wodehouse books in my collection, but I might not—for fear that the original magic of discovery would be impossible to recapture.
<Nice, the literary version of ‘you can never go home again’>
An author you adored as a child and have not thought about in years?
Probably Enid Blyton, whose astonishing oeuvre I devoured, Frank Richards of ‘Billy Bunter’ fame, Richmal Crompton who created the ‘William’ books or Capt WE Johns, who invented ‘Biggles’. One inevitably outgrows them, but they deserve silent thanks for having inculcated the reading habit in me through their addictive story-telling and writing talents.
<Who uses Enid Blyton and ‘oeuvre’ in the same sentence… Yup, this is who:)>
What book would you gift to your worst enemy?
Assuming that the only reason you would gift a book to your worst enemy is to improve him and make him a better human being, I would gift the ‘Bhagavad Gita’. But if your question is a snarky way of getting me to name a book I dislike so much that I would gift it only to an enemy, there aren’t any!
<Snarky? Who? Us? Whatever gave you that idea?>
I would love to see a movie/series adaptation of __ starring __ as __
My novel ‘Riot’, starring Ayushmann Khurrana as Gurinder Singh.
<Really? Our fantasies mainly involve the ‘Great Indian Novel’... though also Ayushmann. Ok, we digress.>
A book review that was better than the book?
At the risk of sounding immodest, The Hindu carried a marvellous review of my new book ‘Tharoorosaurus’ that not only discussed the words in the book, but my life, career and intellectual preoccupations with great breadth and acuity. And its author was their Sports Editor, Vijaya Kumar!
<Especially that last line: “‘Tharoorosaurus’ is him tossing his head back, gently smiling and shining a light on words ranging from the complex to the simple.”>
What book do you pretend to have read?
Marcel Proust’s ‘A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’ (‘Remembrance of Things Past’/’In Search of Lost Time’). I have dipped into it enough to have a sense of what it's about, and the author’s quite astonishing, but I have not made my way through all its pages. Perhaps a project for retirement!
<Excellent choice 👏 👏 👏 —a novel spread across seven volumes. Now that’s a book no one else has read either...lol!>
What is the first “forbidden” book you read in secret?
My parents were remarkably liberal for their times and I was not forbidden from reading anything. An uncle once caught me openly reading a soft-porn thriller by Ted Mark as a 13-year-old and complained to my father, whose response was, “if he doesn’t read bad books as well as good books, how will he be able to tell the difference?”
<Googles ‘Ted Mark’... finds ‘The Real Gone Girls: The Man from O.R.G.Y Swings Again’. Why, Mr Tharoor!>
What book/author still counts as guilty pleasure?
The Tintin comics, which I’ve discovered you’re never actually too old for! A friend recently presented me with three of them, evoking memories of my childhood. I looked at them guiltily for months before opening one and was immediately swept up in their heady excitement. Hergé was a genius both as illustrator and as story-teller.
<Nobody doesn’t love Tintin. Yes, we can do passive-aggressive double negatives and snark:)>
Send us a photo of your tsundoku pile.
My guilty secret is that I have five piles. Here are two of them.
<'The Arts of Seduction’ right above ‘Gandhi in 150 Anecdotes’—and both unread? We love it. 150/100—our highest score yet!>
Thank you for playing, Shashi! We’re off to preorder his next book, ‘The Battle For Belonging’—and so should you! (Yes, he has another one coming out already!)
