Friends, Indians, countrymen, lend me your ears

I come to concede Tharoor, not to praise him;
The evil that ministers do lives after their term,
The good is oft interred with their files,
So let it be with Tharoor … The noble Modi
Hath told you Tharoor was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Tharoor answered it …
Here, under leave of Modi and the rest,
(For Modi is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Tharoor’s farewell …
He was my hero, faithful and just to me:
But Modi says he was ambitious;
And Modi is an honourable man….
He hath brought many traders home to India,
Whose exchange did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Tharoor seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Tharoor hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Modi says he was ambitious;
And Modi is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Modi spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did vote for him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the smartphone there with the MoS,
And I must pause till it come back to me twittering.

—

Enough of the Victorian Shakespeare. And enough of our mentality running older than that. Why do we always have to think old? Why can’t we think in new patterns? Are our brains too concrete?
Does using twitter make a minister alien? Or does a website make him Extra-Terrestrial. It is called technology. Technology that makes public life social and social life public. So did Obama. And so did Advani try to. But when Tharoor did it successfully people ask him to stop shooting mouth off.

When Tharoor stayed in a 5-star hotel it was luxury. Had he stayed in Mumbai’s Taj Palace, it would have been patriotism.
When he called the ‘cattle class’ the ‘cattle class’, people became cattle, thanks to the English pundits.
When he said people should work on Gandhi Jayanthi, it became anti-national. Destroying a holiday of a billion Indians? Oh My Gandhi.
When the terrorists came in rowing boats the government started asking the flight passengers a few more questions. When Tharoor questioned the logic behind this he was helping the terrorists blast peace off India.
And then he’s reported to have questioned Chachaji’s and Bappuji’s foreign policy. He’s reported to have.
And the Oxford Dictionary’s Pakistan edition is still undecided about the meaning of the word ‘interlocutor’.

Throughout he’s called the man of controversies. Tharoor should be awarded some prize for this skill.
Where other politicians find it very tough to attract controversy even while making controversial decisions, or accepting huge gifts, or spending too less for an ordinary minister; Tharoor seems to have acquired a knack of creating controversy with sentences less than 140 characters long. When Tharoor talks there is controversy, when he sneezes there is tsunami, and when he watches a cricket match there is extortion, profiteering, breach of trust, venality and corruption.
We’ve got options. Change our attitude or cut the tongue and all those digits off Tharoor.