This interview is part of the Institute's "Conversations with History" series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley's distinction as a global forum for ideas.
Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our distinguished guest is Shashi Tharoor, who is Director of Communications and Special Projects for the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Mr. Tharoor has served in the UN since 1978, including tenure as head of the Singapore office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; as the Special Assistant to the Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations (in this capacity he led the team responsible for the United Nations peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia); and most recently as Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General. He is one of India's leading writers of both fiction and nonfiction. His works run the gamut from history to satire and are rich in the traditions and cultures of his native land. His works grapple with the reality and ideals of modern India.
Background
Dr. Tharoor, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you Harry. Good to be here.
Tell us about your education.
Education. Well it was always rather hasty, I suppose. I raced through school and college. I finished a Ph.D. at 22. Looking back, it made for somewhat hectic adolescence.
I went to school in Bombay initially, after a brief, abortive, and not very happy year in a boarding school in south India. High school in Calcutta. College in Delhi, in Stephens College, which is a very fairly elite college, known for its strength in liberal arts. I spent, I must confess, more time pursuing other activities than in the classroom, but it was a very interesting experience. I came to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts; their degree certificate lists both Tufts and Harvard. It's an autonomous school, at least it was in those days, where I did an MA and M.A.L.D., a masters in law and diplomacy, and a Ph.D. My undergraduate degree in Delhi was in history, an honors degree in history. My graduate work was in international affairs, international politics. My Ph.D. thesis was on the workings of the way in which Indian foreign policy was made during Indira Gandhi's first administration, '66 - '77. I was very lucky in that I was doing my field research just after the government fell, and everybody -- from the former prime minister, Mrs. Gandhi herself, to all her foreign ministers who all happened to be alive -- was willing to talk. It was a thesis that became published as a book, Reasons of State.
But in a larger sense, I suppose, my education is still going on. I'm learning as much as I can from the mere process of living.
Who were your influential teachers?
There were a number of them. I should have mentioned that the schools I went to had an interesting thing in common: they were all Jesuit schools. The Jesuits have developed an interesting vocation for educating the privileged of the Third World. I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I just mean that because they have these excellent schools in the English language in countries like India, they tend to attract members of the Indian urban educated professional classes and their children. And while there were in fact some relatively less well-off children, we didn't actually have a great cross-section of Indian society. What we had was the urban elite. But having said that, the schools were very good, all of them.
The school in Calcutta, St. Xavier's, was unquestionably in my day the best school in the city, particularly in terms of its intellectual rigor. I and a couple of my friends in school came out with the highest possible grades in the school system in the state largely because of the quality of the teaching. I don't want to rattle off names that will mean nothing to those not in India. A number of the priests at these schools are very well trained themselves. I remember a young Jesuit Father, Cyril Desbruslais, who actually took us through an epistemological argument for the existence of God, which certainly impressed my fourteen-year-old imagination no end because I was just beginning to flirt with the idea of atheism. When you discover rationality, your religion doesn't seem so impressive anymore, and when you discover the limitations of rationality it all comes back, but in between I had this very rational, structured philosophical argument from a Jesuit priest. And that was very striking. The values the Jesuits imparted were vital, too: I especially admired Father Remedios, an excellent teacher who visited prisoners in his spare time.
College in Delhi: St. Stephens is an Anglican college, not a Jesuit one; a different culture, and the teachers were largely lay people. In fact, overwhelmingly lay people. There, too, were some remarkable people. I remember a history teacher called David Baker, who was actually an Australian who had renounced Australia and come and settled in India. He was an authority on modern Indian history, particularly the central Indian state, but because he had the misfortune to be white, he was obliged to teach British history, which he detested. But in the process, I learned a great deal from him. And there were a few other teachers who made an indelible mark on the process of intellectual formation that college is all about: Mohammed Amin, the head of the History Department, in particular
At Fletcher we had some very impressive professors as well, some of them are sadly no longer alive, ranging from John Roche, who had been a National Security Advisor to Lyndon Johnson -- who has been called by The New York Times "Johnson's hard-boiled egghead," and who certainly was both hard-boiled and extremely rich in his intellectual range -- to my tutor, Alan Hedrikson, who is one of the finest minds in diplomatic history that you can find in this country. And many others whom I again would want to name in extenso. But I think I have been privileged with the quality of the education I've had in all these stages.
What stands out in the way your parents helped shape your character?
My parents were astonishing for Indian parents (and very traditionally Indian parents in other ways) in the amount of freedom they left me. I had the misfortune of being good at studies -- I say this without any false modesty -- particularly in the Indian school system. Those who were good at taking exams tend to do well, and it doesn't necessarily imply that they have fine minds. But my parents had the typical Indian middle-class ambitions for me and I kept coming first in science and they wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer. Well, I hated science. I only became first in the subject because I knew how to take exams. So at the end of the eighth grade when you stream in India into different fields -- already at that age, much earlier than in this country -- I said I would not do science. I wanted to do humanities, and to the astonishment of many of my friends, my parents said, "Fine, you should study what you want to study." So I went into the humanities, and at the end of school, I had done extremely well. So they felt, well, if he's not going to be a doctor or an engineer, at least be a very successful businessman. So they urged me to go into economics and eventually get a business degree. I said, "No, I'd much rather study history." And again, they were kind enough to allow me to do that. And so at each stage, I was given the intellectual respect for my interests that allowed me to shape my own educational career and my own achievements, I suppose, by my own lights. And that was remarkable.
The other thing that I'd say that's particularly true of my father was the amount of encouragement I was given for my writing. I was a rather young child when I began writing, partially for good reasons. I was an asthmatic child. I was also the eldest son in the family, which meant I was often bedridden but I didn't have elder brothers' and sisters' books I could borrow and read. I finished my own very fast. I exhausted those of my parents' books I could understand. And I had the inconvenient habit of finishing library books in the car on the way from the library. And of course there was no television in the Bombay of my boyhood. So I wrote as much for my own amusement; and my father, my parents both, did me the great honor of taking that very seriously. They got my writings typed up and had them circulated to friends. And I was suddenly made to feel at an absurdly young age that I could think of myself as a writer. By the age of ten, my first story had appeared in print; it had been sent off to a newspaper by my father. I even had a sort of, what I thought of as a novel, but I suppose must be a novella, serialized in six installments in a magazine with the first installment appearing a week before my eleventh birthday. Of course, the fact that I was that young was a part of the reason why this otherwise indifferent prose was published. But the fact still is that that sort of encouragement definitely shaped both my sense of confidence in myself as a writer and my sense of there being an audience for my writing. But paradoxically also, my conviction that I couldn't do this full time, because my parents made it very clear: you can write, that's fine, please write, please publish, but you do your studies, because no one in India makes a living as a writer, and you better be good in your academic work.
So I ended up, throughout my school days, writing and publishing instead of going to discos, I guess. And I studied very hard. Eventually the same thing happened when I finished my academic work. I went into a regular career at the United Nations and tried to continue writing evenings and weekends. I never really felt, right from my youngest days, thanks to my parents' convictions about this, that there was a viable alternative full-time life as a writer. And here I am as a result.
What sort of books stuck in your mind and really impressed you? I gather a lot of English writers, but also Indian writers.
That's right.
I read eclectically, and I must say, indiscriminately. Remember that reading was my principal activity outside schoolwork. I loved the game of cricket and I played it very badly, but also I wasn't often well enough to go out and play. And so that and the absence of television, computer games, and all the distractions that my children now enjoy, meant that if I wasn't writing I was reading. And actually there was one particular year, the year of my thirteenth birthday, that I decided to set myself a challenge of finishing three hundred and sixty-five books in three hundred and sixty-five days. And I did and I kept a list at that point to prove it. So I was a voracious and rapid reader, and with that kind of volume, I obviously read all sorts of stuff.
I read in the English language, but not only from the English language. I read a lot of works in translation as well. And of course a lot of good traditional Indian literature is available in English, often in translations that leave something to be desired, but nonetheless is available. And so my taste ranged from the humor of P.G. Wodehouse, who in many ways remains the author who has given me the most pleasure in my life, sheer delight of his use of language as well as his incredibly complex and clever plotting, all the way up to the traditional tales of The Mahabharata, the great Indian epic that goes back over two thousand years, and lots of things in between. I read East European writers in translation. I was reading Kundera in my teens. I had read all the Russian classics, sometimes in abridged editions, I have to confess, but nonetheless. And of course, American or British writers came to us anyway through our possession of their language. And the result was that I was an extremely widely read and perhaps slightly over-read young man by the time I entered college.
Diplomat
You have given us a good explanation of how you wound up as a writer and hints as to why you chose diplomacy. Let's fill out that part before we talk about balancing these two worlds.
Well, diplomacy was something which in some ways had appealed to me at a fairly young age. I was always fascinated by the world -- not just by my immediate environment, but by the world at large. I was born in London. I didn't mention that my father was actually working there. He'd gone there to study as a young man, as an eighteen-year-old, and stayed on and was the locally recruited London manager of the office of an Indian newspaper called the Statesman, all of whose managers in India were Englishmen. So I was born there, but he was not planning to settle in England. He was just waiting for an Englishman to retire so he could apply for a job back in India. And sure enough, we came to Bombay so he could be the Bombay manager of the Statesman, and subsequently advertisement manager in Calcutta and so on. Nonetheless, I was conscious of having been someplace else, as it were. And I was curious about all of that; I was curious about the wider world.
Secondly, a classic career line for people with my sort of background -- no great money in the family, an education, an interest in the world, and a skill at taking exams -- the classic option was to take the Indian Civil Service Examinations. We had a very elite mandarin corps called the Indian Administrative Service and in those days an even more elite corps called the Indian Foreign Service. I say in those days because since then the priorities of Indian young people have changed a bit and the foreign service is no longer seen as the acme. But in those days, you had ten to twenty thousand kids taking the exams every year, of whom about thirty or forty were selected for the Indian Administrative Service and five or ten for the Indian Foreign Service. And that really was what the brightest kids of the generation were aiming to do. Frankly, it was a sort of natural ambition to be inclined towards. However, I went to the U.S. for graduate studies because I got a scholarship from the Fletcher School. And it happened to be just the time that Mrs. Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency and suspended the democratic freedoms that I had grown up taking for granted in India. In fact, one of the first things that happened to me when the emergency was declared was that a silly short story I had written called A Political Murder was banned by the censors because the notion of a murder taking place for political reasons was an anathema in the new dispensation. Now, that period didn't last very long. The emergency lasted twenty-two months, and censorship ended fairly early in that period; but while sitting in the U.S. as a graduate student, I found myself coming to terms with my own notion of what I valued about being Indian.
I was, like many foreign students when they come abroad, instantly thrust into the position of having to explain and defend his own country. That's a very common predicament. For myself, that meant having to explain to people why what Mrs. Gandhi had done wasn't really all that bad because its only victims were people like me who could publish articles or agitate politically and make speeches and statements, but the real beneficiaries were the common man -- that was Mrs. Gandhi's argument -- who'd be free of all the evils and ills of India. The fact is, of course, that in the course of doing these defenses of the government, I found more and more information available to me in the U.S. I even had a roommate who was a journalist. I was getting lots of wire service copy that wasn't making it into The New York Times. I was getting more and more information about all that was going wrong and how the real victims of the suspension of democracy were in fact the ordinary poor individual Indians, who were helpless, who didn't have the education to rise above these disabilities, and weren't doing well enough to make the compromises with the regime, but instead were being picked up at bazaars and carted off to have their vasectomies done compulsorily as part of the sterilization drive, or being thrown to jail without any effective habeas corpus because the emergency had suspended those rights, and so on. And that was a profoundly disillusioning period.
I remember one of the things that really turned me completely against any notion of government service was when an Indian student, and I believe this was in Chicago, who had spoken out with anguish against the emergency back in India, applied to renew his passport and the government refused to renew his passport. And I thought, I cannot imagine, in the India that I've known and grown up and cherished and valued, that such a thing could even be possible. And though the emergency ended with a fair and free election in which Mrs. Gandhi was routed and the system of suspension of democracy was repudiated once and for all -- we've never had anything close to it ever since -- I felt at that time, because that was the age that I would have to have taken those exams, that somehow the idea of serving the government that could do that and perhaps would do it again was simply anathema to me. For that reason I did a Ph.D. instead of going and taking the exams, and I ended up working for the United Nations instead of my own government. I must tell you that since then, and I say this with utter sincerity, a lot of my friends, whom I would like to think of as just as principled and committed democrats as I am, have served the government with distinction. I don't believe any more that in making the choice I made, I necessarily did something that was right for everyone all the time, but it was right for me at that time: not to make that particular compromise with a system that had betrayed itself.
In our discussion I would like to cover both of your very distinguished careers. You're one of India's leading writers, having written both histories and two novels among other things. And you've risen to the top, really, of the UN. And so I think that what I would like to ask you at this point is to talk about both them simultaneously. Do the roles of diplomacy and writing complement each other or are they in conflict?
Well, let me answer that very personally. I see myself as a human being with a number of concerns about the world that I see around me. Some of those concerns I react to through my writing, and some of them I react to through my work. I have been privileged in the work I've been able to do for the UN. I wouldn't have considered it classically diplomatic work early on. I began my UN career with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In fact as a fairly young man, I was in charge of the office of UNHCR in Singapore during the peak of the Vietnamese "boat people" crisis. Refugees picked up in the high seas were being brought in, and it was my job to help negotiate their disembarkation, get them into refugee camps in and look after them, negotiate their acceptance by other countries for resettlement, and get them off to new lives. Which meant that I was able to put my head to the pillow every night knowing that the things I had done during the day had made a concrete difference to real human beings, to their lives. In fact, these were people I could actually see around me. They were not statistics or figures on a piece of paper. That was amazingly enriching in all sorts of ways. It went beyond diplomacy.
It was important that it was the UN, I must say, because when you think of refugee work, you say, "Church groups are doing refugee work, lots of volunteers are doing that, what's so different, why do you have to do it through the UN?" And the answer is that the UN, because it is an intergovernmental body, has a clout with governments that church groups can't have. The result is that I could go to a government that is reluctant to let refugees onto its soil and essentially remind them of their legal obligations as a member state of the organization which had voted for the Statutes of the High Commissioner's office. I have been able to get things achieved, to bend certain rules, to even help some people on the quiet with the connivance of government officials in ways that no nongovernmental organization would be able to do. And that, frankly, was a period that really convinced me of the indispensable nature of the UN, for all these problems that cross borders, as refugees cross borders, because ultimately the intergovernmental strength that the UN has makes it truly unique and indispensable as a solution provider to these problems.
After eleven and a half years helping refugees, I then moved to peacekeeping. There my life became much more connected to the world of diplomacy. It's also true that, whereas I had the very direct satisfaction that I described to you in the field in Southeast Asia, the satisfactions of working for peacekeeping were quite different. They were not the satisfactions of directly changing human beings' lives, because I worked eighteen-hour days for almost six years and I knew that the blood was still continuing to flow in the Balkans. There was a different sort of satisfaction of knowing that I was working in the field of international affairs at a time when a great human cataclysm was occurring; that I had a key role as a small cog in this very big machine, a role that allowed me nonetheless to leave my own smudgy thumbprints, as it were, on the pages of history. And that was a different sort of satisfaction.
Now, how it was connected to the world of literature, the honest answer is that it is really not. In my writing, too, I kept the two apart. My writing is almost entirely so far about India, both my fiction and my nonfiction. And my work has been completely about any other part of the world but India, partially as a result of the UN's very genuine preference for not having people work on their own countries of origin, and partially because the challenges that were given to me happened to be amongst the great human events of our time. They happened to be the boat people crisis in Southeast Asia, the refugee problems worldwide, and the peacekeeping challenges of post - Cold War Europe, particularly Yugoslavia. None of those happened to directly involve India. So I kept those two interests quite distinct in my life, in my work.
In many ways my work became the enemy of my writing because, as I explained, I write evenings and weekends. One of the first things that happened as my work became more intense is that the evenings disappeared. There was no question of getting home and finishing dinner by eight o'clock. In fact, most often I was getting home well after eight o'clock, and during the peak of the Bosnian crisis I was getting home usually between eleven and midnight. And my home, I should tell you, was a twelve-minute walk from the office, so it was not that I was spending my time on a long commute. The nature of the work demanded that sort of commitment. I had to stay that late because of the cables that I was sending back to the field: if they weren't sent that night, it would cost someone a day at the other end, with the time difference. So there was enormous pressure. And the weekends were never mine during the peak of the Balkan crisis. Every shell that landed in Bosnia had to be reported to somebody, and I was the one whom our Situation Center would call. So there were these constant interruptions. It was also the fact that one traveled, one worked, one took work home. So writing was always a struggle to carve out time and space.
My last novel was published back in 1992. I'm a fairly rapid writer, so it's not that I ... It's simply that to write fiction you need both time and a space inside your head, a space inside your head to create and inhabit an alternative moral universe, one whose realities have to be consistent in your own mind. And you can't easily write a fragment of a novel and return to it eight weeks from now. You simply find you have to reinvent the novel each time you do that. And I found that an enormous struggle. I've actually begun a couple of novels in these last seven years that I have not been able to develop precisely because of these intrusions. The book I'm currently working on, I think I've had, I'm not exaggerating, six weekends in the last year and a half in which I have not been travelling, not been out, or not at work, or bringing work home, in which I've been able to devote to my writing. And that's not quite the way in which you need to do it.
Writer
As a writer you are very much an Indian expatriate. You are enmeshed in your country's culture and history at many levels. As a diplomat, you are very cosmopolitan: you are not embodying the interests of your country, quite obviously. Has the compartmentalization that you have just described for your writing enabled you to realize an Indian identity which has meaning for India as a whole?
Well, Indians are in fact very cosmopolitan. Largely because the Indian adventure at its best is of people working together and dreaming the same dreams even if they don't look like each other, don't speak the same language, don't eat the same kinds of foods, don't dress alike, don't even have the same kinds of color of skin or whatever. We have this extraordinary diversity in India. And paradoxically, that is exactly what the UN is all about, too. At the UN I'm working all the time with people who, like Indians, eat, dress, and speak differently. And so one could argue that in some ways, Indians are particularly well equipped for the worlds of international affairs and the United Nations. In that sense, I find no great contradiction between the two worlds. Having said that, your question, of course, needs a more direct response.
In some ways, the writing has helped me to reclaim and reinvent a sense of my Indianness, which I believe has spoken to Indians in ways that I find very gratifying. Many people come up to me saying, "You know, what you said are things that we instinctively knew all along, but we never heard them said in quite that way." My last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, tries to do many things at many levels, but one of the things that it is all about is an evocation of a sense of Indianness. I make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, that I would like to matter to India. But in the process, I'm also articulating a vision of India as this home of a rich diversity, of a rich pluralism that's manifest in both its social institutions and its political democracy. And that this diversity and pluralism is something that we should cherish and be proud of. I speak to it and from it, quite often, to audiences both in this country and in India. And I'm very happy to do that because to me that articulates a vision that perhaps sometimes, sitting within India, people don't always see quite clearly for themselves because they might sometimes see the wood but not the trees. I beg your pardon, they might sometimes see the trees but not the wood.
I was distracted briefly in saying that because I was thinking of how this has been done far better than by me by the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. You asked me about the books that have influenced me, one that lingers in my memory is his book The Discovery of India. Nehru studied abroad as well, like me. He returned to India and worked for the nationalist movement. And he wrote many of his early books when he was in jail. There is something about being in jail, which rather like being in the United Nations, which gives you that distance, that objectivity to see the larger picture. And The Discovery of India is an evocation of the Indian spirit, the Indian identity, and the Indian history and culture, in terms that still mean a great deal to me today.
As a writer, do you like to work most with nonfiction or with fictional materials?
It's a difficult one to answer because I have done both. I think in some ways, I would say that nonfiction is slightly easier in the circumstances of my life, and fiction is definitely what I prefer. I say nonfiction is easier in the sense that when this last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, was written, it was possible to put it aside for six weeks because work intervened, and then come back and resume it. You can do that with nonfiction. With fiction, you do have to have the commitment to engage at a greater level of emotional profundity with what you are trying to do. I like fiction because it also gives me greater freedom. As a UN official, there are some things in nonfiction that I cannot say because I am obliged by the traditions and conventions of international politics not to cause offense to member states of the UN. In fiction, I take far more liberties. But it still means that I am the only writer, I believe, on the face of this earth whose copyright page carries a disclaimer notice that says, "Though the author is an official of the United Nations, none of the opinions expressed by the characters of this book should be construed as those of the writer in his official capacity."
I assume that especially applies to your book about the movies, Show Business. Let's talk about [these two novels] without getting into detail, because your novels are so rich.
Why a book about the movies on the one hand, and a book that is modeled after the great Indian classic, The Mahabharata, on the other?
Well, they actually have more in common than you might imagine. They both are political satires of course, but what's more interesting is that they are both in different ways about the kind of stories that a society tells about itself. In my first novel, The Great Indian Novel, I took the stories of the great epic, which was written sometime between 800 BC and 800 AD, and which has permeated the national consciousness of India, and I reinvented these stories as an account of the political history of India, from the British days to the present. I reinvented in that process, therefore, the history of that period as well as the legends of the epic. Because both are stories that at different levels are told and retold in Indian culture. The tales of the Mahabharata are learned by practically every child at his grandmother's knee, and the tales of the nationalist struggle, the "freedom movement" as we call it, are part of the stuff of what we are brought up on in independent India. In my intermixing the two, I was able to cast a perhaps cynical modern sensibility upon the great legends of the past, but equally I was able to cast some of the values of that past onto the experiences of the more recent present. In the process, I tried to illuminate some aspects of the Indian condition, of the stories we tell.
In the second novel, I also looked at stories -- in two cases, of the popular film industry. Why? Because our country is still fifty percent illiterate, and films still represent the principal vehicle for the transmission of the fictional experience. Other than your grandmother telling you the stories on her knee, you go off and get your fiction by watching a movie. So I ask the question, "What do these stories tell to Indians? What do they tell about Indians? What can we know about the world from which these stories come? That is, the world of the filmmakers and the actors who make these films. And in turn, what does this all reveal about India as a society today? So in looking for one more metaphor to explore the Indian condition, I took cinema as a very natural one for these reasons. Show Business is a novel that intercuts extensively the types of stories told in formulaic films of Bollywood. In each stage of the book, the hero and other protagonists of the novel are involved in different stories; the story is about stories, and at the same time it's about India. Therefore, these two novels have this element in common: they are about the kinds of stories that India is telling itself today.
One of the elements in your two novels is your devastating and effective use of satire. Just one of the elements, one has to mention. What is it about satire that enables a writer to reveal truth?
Well, I have often found that when you are dealing seriously with serious subjects, you are on the same terms as everybody else. If you are treating issues that are sacrilegious, it's difficult, unless you are being crassly provocative, to find a terribly different way of looking at these things. In one sense or the other, there is a lot of hagiography about the Indian nationalist heroes, for instance; there is a great deal of reverence for the ancient epics. Satire, on the other hand, enables you to recast and to reinvent both the epics and the history -- the great ideas, and the great stories, and the great men or women for that matter -- of these times, in a light that is so unfamiliar that it immediately provokes a fresh way of looking at them. And that is why satire is very useful.
There is a second element. If I can borrow the wonderful statement of Molière, who said that "Le devoir de la comedie est de corriger les hommes en les divertissant." If I can paraphrase it, "If you want to edify, you have to entertain." So your duty as a writer is to amuse people enough that they want to read the serious points you want to make. They'll get that instruction, and they'll get that education if you like, through the process of having been entertained. Both novels, I hope, are fairly easy and light reads even for people who don't know India, because they are written to amuse, to distract, but both are infused with fairly serious concerns. I have always been grateful to the British novelist who reviewed Show Business in the Sunday Times and said, "This is a novel that is hysterically funny in very many places, but which manages to be funny without for a moment being frivolous." And that is the distinction that I try to make in my satire. Having said all of this, I want to confess that the novel I am working on now is probably not going to be a satire.
What do you see as the goal or goals of your writing, to reveal India to itself or what?
Both to reveal myself to India, and to reveal India to myself, but also to reveal India to Indians and other readers around the world. I found, I don't know how quite to explain, my conscious desire to reinvent and come to terms with India. Beyond a certain point, it is beyond explanation. But I've felt so caught up in the nature of the Indian experiment. It is an extraordinary country in so many levels. And there is no other country on earth that embraces quite as wide mixture of geographical diversity, topographical diversity, human diversity, linguistic diversity, and so on and so forth.
Sounds like the United Nations.
Absolutely. And yet at the same time, it has rich millennial history and culture. It has an extraordinary, wide-ranging tolerance, the religious tradition of Hinduism. It has grappled with many of the problems, many of the great problems of our day today. In India: From Midnight to the Millennium, I talk about the classic dilemmas facing the world at the end of the twentieth century: the bread versus freedom debate, of which the emergency is such an example; pluralism versus fundamentalism, which reared its ugly head in India with a new brand of religious chauvinism coming to light; CocaColonization, the whole issue of globalization versus economic self-sufficiency; and even for a country India's size, decentralization versus federalism. All of this makes India such an astonishingly interesting crucible for the things that matter to me intellectually, that I find myself constantly going back to looking at the way in which India and Indians are coping with these challenges.
But equally, the richness of that heritage is something that I want to explore for myself. When I go back into the themes of The Great Indian Novel, I'm in a sense saying, "These are the things that have shaped me and Indians like me. These are the experiences that have created these people." In Show Business, I'm suggesting that these entertainments, these distractions, reveal a great deal about myself and people like me who go to these films. And I hope in the process, therefore, I am revealing India, too. I am trying, constantly in a sense, but without anxiety ... a critic has written somewhat critically of the anxiety of Indianness amongst writers like myself. I'm not anxious, but I'm curious. I would love to go on experimenting with my understanding of this phenomenon of Indianness, which to me is a phenomenon of our times and of our planet that merits repeated investigation and inquiry.
Truth and Power
As a writer pursuing universalistic themes in an Indian context, you are trying to find truth, and truths. And I'm curious, going back to your role as a man of international diplomacy, what you see as the relationship between intellectuals and political figures. Can truth that intellectuals and writers come up with inform power? And if so, easily or not?
Well, truth is a particularly difficult issue. In fact, I mentioned that it's actually part of India's national motto, which is "Truth alone triumphs." But the question is, Whose truth? There are perhaps as many truths in India as there are Indians. And in The Great Indian Novel I find myself inspired very much by some of the philosophical disputations in the ancient epics, asking the question: Is truth a noun that can be modified by a possessive pronoun? Is there my truth? And your truth? And his truth? The truth of the nationalist movement in India is seen so very differently from the other side of the border in Pakistan, that you can well ask yourself: What is truth?
So in my writing, I've tried to ask more questions than to provide answers, because I've essentially implicitly made the argument that the reader will find his or her truth for himself, for herself, from the writing. The writing would probe the nature of truth in history, in fiction, in reality, in the contemporary world, but will do so in a way that allows the readers to draw their own conclusions of what is true and what is not true. In that sense, ultimately diplomacy isn't that very different. A lot of the work of the world's diplomats in international affairs consists of reconciling different forms of truth, different perceptions of truth, of being able to see every international conflict from the point of view of both or all the protagonists, not necessarily to sympathize with them, but to understand that there is more than one answer to every question and more than one way of looking at every particular problem. So in that sense, those elements are in common.
Does one inform the other? For me, I think that certainly they both inform my view of the world. I'm very slow to judge people harshly. I'm quicker to observe them and I might be able to describe them and comment on them, but I'm very slow to judge them because I tend to see that they have their own validity for what they are and for what they believe and how they act.
Accepting that both worlds have multiple truths, I'm curious of your views of the use of words in literature versus their use in politics. Especially in our political system, talking now about the United States, there is a malaise, a sense that words are used to distort, to conceal, to hide. But a writer is trying to use words to shape realities that reveal one truth or several truths. Talk a little about that. Is there a conflict?
That's true, in the sense that writers obviously want exquisite precision in their descriptions and want to convey very clearly the sense of place, of feeling that they are experiencing and wishing to communicate to their readers. Though having said that, and I'll qualify that in just a minute, in diplomacy there is a sense sometimes that precision can do harm, that it is better to find the form of words that are agreeable to everybody. Security Council resolutions or presidential statements are classic examples of drafting by committee where each phrase usually has fifteen hands in it. And ultimately the lowest common denominator is arrived at rather than the most euphonious or the most explicit sort of phrase. In diplomatic language you learn to read between the lines. You learn to read behind the words. You try to think of what has been left out and why. And what the omission implies about the substance of the diplomatic statement. There is always code. There's a wonderful expression: "frank and cordial talks," which means "disagreed completely," and this sort of thing. So diplomacy has its own logic and subtext.
But I said I would qualify what I said about literature. This wonderful field of postmodernism suggests that texts should also be read in literature for what the writers leave out, for what they don't say, for how they say it, for what's between the lines, and so on. So maybe from a postmodern sensibility, the two fields are not that different in the use of words after all.
Let's talk a little about your recent work at the UN. You've been very much involved in peacekeeping, in shaping norms and institutions to deal with the problems that emerged in the post - Cold War world. What has been most challenging in that endeavor? What has been most difficult? And how has this whole area of words and meaning come to play?
Peacekeeping has been an extraordinary experience. I came to it in October 1989, when I was the sixth civilian in the peacekeeping department. There were three military people as well. So it was a very small office. We had five largely stable peacekeeping operations which employed fewer than 10,000 soldiers and which had not changed a great deal in the preceding decade. I found myself in this part of the UN at the end of the Cold War when the dramatic changes in the world, in the "new world disorder," provided so many opportunities for peacekeeping to get involved and to grow. And we shot up from those figures I mentioned to 80,000 troops with seventeen major peacekeeping operations by October '94, and with Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Cambodia competing with each other to be the largest single operation in the UN's history.
I myself led the team in the Department of Peacekeeping that handled peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia, which meant that I was working with and on what remains the largest single peacekeeping operation in the history of the United Nations. So all of that was exhilarating in a certain way, and exhausting in others, tremendously demanding. We were making up things as we went along in many ways. The norms of peacekeeping that you mentioned were being shaped very much through the actual process of coping with these challenges. It was in some ways like trying to ride a train at breakneck speed while fixing the engine at the same time. The entire process was remarkable and difficult.
When you say, "What were the greatest problems?" it is the opposite problem, which is the way peacekeeping became discredited by its application to crises for which peacekeeping as a concept was not ripe for application, particularly in situations where there was no peace to keep. Peacekeepers found themselves being blamed for failing to do things that we were simply not mandated or equipped or financed to do, with the result that the pendulum now in peacekeeping has swung so far away from it that the UN's peacekeeping credibility is very much on the line. The Security Council seems quite unwilling to push the UN onto the front lines of the great peace and security challenges of our day today. These have been the greatest problems. I've shortened drastically my explanation for all of this, but I would say that in responding to you directly, those have been the problems.
You asked the question of words and how words come into all of this. Well, I can give you one example. I talked about Security Council resolutions. There's the famous example of the resolutions proclaiming safe areas in Bosnia, a phrase itself that conjures up all sorts of notions of safety and security, and yet what's unusual is that they say "safe areas" and not "safe havens," which are a real concept in international law. The resolutions never actually use the words "protect" or "defend." They simply expected the UN to deter attacks on these areas by merely deploying the peacekeeping presence. And then the words of the resolution went on to say that if their presence wasn't enough and the peacekeepers were attacked, they would have the right to use the air power of NATO in self-defense. Now, this resolution was what put the UN soldiers in the impossible position that they were in, where they were actually in these safe areas, unable to go in or out, unable to bring humanitarian aid in, unable to perform the functions that they were there to perform without the active cooperation of the Serbs besieging these areas, whom at the same time their critics expected them to attack and bomb.
An American professor very memorably said that these calls for bombing are a particularly seductive form of military power because they are like modern courtship: they offer the possibility of gratification without commitment. Because one set of people are willing to drop bombs on a great height and fly away, while another set of people, the UN peacekeepers on the ground, have to wake up the morning after and live with the consequences. So this situation showed how words applied for diplomatic purposes can be operationally unimplementable on the ground. But interestingly, as the political will of the international community and particularly the Western world changed, those same words found themselves susceptible to different interpretations, so that one after the other, the same resolution, which had given us this mandate for impotence in a very difficult situation, became interpreted to justify the exclusion zones around Sarajevo after the market-place massacre of January 1994. Eventually it became the basis for justifying the deployment of a rapid reaction force, and finally justified the massive bombing campaigns all over Bosnia, even though the words [of the resolution] themselves had not changed. And so one of the lessons that it teaches me as a writer is how much words can conceal, but also how easily words themselves can lend themselves to different political purposes when those purposes change.
So the reality of the world when you are a man of action, a man of diplomacy, is that words are given flesh over time by changing circumstances.
Absolutely. Words can kill. Words can save. Words have an extraordinary power to lay out the possibilities for people in the world of action.
Lessons Learned
What lessons might students draw from your career? You've managed in one persona living two lives to be a man of letters and to be a man of action who is involved in some of the most tragic but challenging of world events. What would you tell a student who would want to prepare for either or both careers?
I would certainly not encourage anyone to try to do it my way because if nothing else it's completely exhausting, and denies you other opportunities -- what are those famous lines of Wordsworth? -- "What's the point of this life full of care if you have no time to stand and stare." Believe me, I have no time to stand and stare. And the fact is that there is such a thing as feeling, from time to time, that you really have bitten off more than you can chew. Because every human being has certain responsibilities he must fulfill as a human being -- professional responsibilities, personal responsibilities. And you do wonder sometimes whether in taking on so much you are failing to do justice to all of them, and do as much as you could have done. If I'd perhaps only been a writer, would I have been a more worthwhile writer? If I had only been a UN official, would I have had more time to devote to my family in the time that I now try to jealously guard for my writing and for talking about my writing? And so on. I don't know.
Looking back later on in life perhaps, I'll have found greater clarity. Right now I'm too caught up in doing it all.
But I would say one thing, that if anyone is motivated enough to be crazy enough to try and do all of this, I would say, do what comes to you naturally. Do what you want to do, not because you feel obliged to do it. I write because ... George Bernard Shaw put it far better than I can. He said, "I write for the same reason that a cow gives milk." It's in you. It's got to come out. At this point in my life, I know that if I'd give up one or the other aspect of my life, half of my psyche would wither on the vine. But at the same time, the circumstances that led me both to train , as it were, academically for a life in international affairs and at the same time to develop my skills such as they are and my interests and talents as a writer, those circumstances need not necessarily obtain elsewhere for other people. I think it might well be possible for someone else to be able to do justice to one thing more than to another, while focusing a little bit more on what they want to do.
I once asked a famous writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, how he'd coped with writing when he needed a job, because he mentioned to me in conversation that he initially couldn't afford to support himself on writing. And he said, "I just did a couple of jobs that didn't require the sort of emotional and time commitment that would have made it impossible to write." I said, "Oh, what jobs are those?" and he said, "Teaching and journalism." And I thought, my God, those two professions, in my mind, require an enormous investment of time and emotion and energy. And I realized what he was really saying to me was that it doesn't matter what the job is that you do, it depends on how you do it.
It's certainly possible, I'm sure, for another international civil servant or diplomat to find himself working in a nine-to-five job and have plenty of time to write. Unfortunately, or otherwise, that has not been my experience. I've never known what it's like to go home much before eight o'clock in the course of my working life, having begun quite early in the morning. So for me, I realize the way in which I do my work at the UN is a reflection of the way I apply myself, and those are the kinds of assignments that I've been fortunate enough to have been given, that they have demanded that sort of time and that sort of commitment. So ultimately, as long as I do my work in the way in which I feel I should do it, writing will always have to find its space. But no doubt the time will come, I don't know when, when I will be able to either reverse those priorities or finally tell myself I've done what I can in my professional field and let me see what I can leave behind on the bookshelves of my grandchildren.
Mr. Tharoor, thank you very much for taking time, for being with us today, and talking about your fascinating lives.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
Source: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Tharoor/tharoor-con0.html