Shashi Tharoor isbetween appointments. After an early morning visit to the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, he heads to visit an ailing political colleague in hospital. Lunch beckons and a little shut-eye before it’s time for this interview.

Tharoor is closing in on 60 years of age but shows no signs of slowing down. Sitting Member of Parliament for the Thiruvananthapuram seat in Kerala, he is also a consummate author, former diplomat and honest to a fault.

“Dubai has a special place in my heart,” he begins. “That’s where I met my late wife Sunanda and my foster son Shiv lives there now,” he says.

The Sharjah International Book Festival is on his itinerary where he will showcase the silver jubilee edition of his book The Great Indian Novel. Tharoor is looking forward to it. “It is an interesting festival with a good turnout,” he says. “Of course an interesting combination of Arabs and Indians, those are somehow the nationalities that are represented at Sharjah. But there are significantly large audiences and a lot of interest. So I’m looking forward to once again having a chance to engage with the audience I remember from my previous visit.”

Although busy politicking, Tharoor continues to indulge in his first love – writing. His India Sutra is all set to be released in December 2014 and is a compilation of his articles and columns written for various publications.

“I have done a series of books on India and this sort of is the last of a trilogy,” says Tharoor.

“The first one was “India: From Midnight to the Millennium” (1997), which took a broad sweep of the first 50 years of the Indian independence chart — history, politics, society, culture, economics. Ten years later I did a sort of follow-up book called The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone (2007), which unlike Midnight to Millennium was a collection of essays, articles and columns on a wide range of subjects.

So India Sutra is, in a sense, the third in the set. It will include all of my recent pieces on the new BJP government of Narendra Modi, so that too will presumably attract some attention — because according to the publishers, it is actually the first book that covers the first six months of the new government.”

Shashi Tharoor does not mince words. Following a career spanning 29 years in the United Nations, even serving as Under-Secretary General to Kofi Annan, Tharoor narrowly missed the top job there. India called him home and he returned, trouncing the opposition in 2009 when he won the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat by over a hundred thousand votes, an astounding victory for a first-timer.

Controversy has continually dogged Tharoor. His tweets have landed him in trouble, allegations over sweat equity of an IPL team stripped him of Ministership, his wife Sunanda’s death hit the headlines with fingers pointing at him and more recently, his open praise for the new Prime Minister Modi’s programmes have earned the wrath of the Congress party which removed him as spokesperson.

Tharoor, however is unfazed. “My values and convictions are fundamental, they precede my involvement with the Congress party,” he says. “And those values don’t change because of positions I may be given in the Congress party,” he adds.

Tharoor straddles the worlds of non-fiction and literary writing with ease. But he worries about the future of books. “I worry about that a little bit,” he says.

“Certainly one is already beginning to see a decline in reading habits generally, just as a habit. There are more and more unread books in the world and eventually publishers will not be able to sustain.”

Bookstore chains collapsing in the West bothers him and he does not relish the idea of reading a book online on a Kindle or on any screen. “Fortunately in India, we are a little behind the world,” he adds with a tinge of optimism. “Already in the Western world when newspapers are shutting down, Indian newspapers and magazines are proliferating. Partly because as a society, there are still people becoming literate and finding the time to read and a large number of people who still don’t have access to online reading and computers and so on. But I would not be foolish enough to bank indefinitely on book publishing as a long-term successful thing. Many publishers will have to diversify or become part of larger conglomerates.”

Tharoor feels that literary authors are not given their due by publishers, who prefer instead to back what he calls ‘popular writers’ who sell more copies. “The bigger worry is also within publishing — where publishers increasingly favour a few very successful authors who are usually going to be the pulp writers, the thriller writers, the murder mystery or horror story writers — at the expense of quality fiction, which is more and more demanding and people have less and less patience,” he says.

And Dan Brown appears to be one such popular writer according to Tharoor. “Well I’ve only read one book of his and that’s the one that everyone was talking about, the one that was made into a movie The Da Vinci Code,” he says.

“I had no particular problem with it because it had some pace and I enjoyed reading it. But I didn’t feel a compelling desire to read a lot more. But my late wife, for example, was an absolute devotee of Jeffrey Archer. She read every book that he ever wrote, she would buy them in hardback as soon as they came out. So there are people like that and that’s essentially what sustains the careers of the more popular writers. You know, Jeffrey Archer, Dan Brown or Chetan Bhagat for that matter in India, will sell vastly more numbers of copies than an Amitav Ghosh or a Milan Kundera. For serious literary authors, there just isn’t that large an audience. Because the reader needs to have a discernment to tell the difference between the two and most readers don’t,” he says.

Tharoor also feels that while it is great to see greater participation of Indian authors at the Sharjah International Book Fair, nationalism should not really matter.

“There are two kinds of audiences,” says Tharoor. “There are those who read a book by an Indian author because they are curious about India. The second kind is one who reads a good book, doesn’t matter where it is set, what it’s about, he’ll read.

“I’d say the last Indian novel for which there was that kind of massive readership and appeal was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. A lot of people who read it may have never read a book by an Indian author and may never read another book by an Indian author. But they read this because people have told them, including reviewers like myself, that this is a great book and you should read it. For that kind of a readership nationality doesn’t matter. The question is not whether people will read Indian books, it’s whether people will read good books,” he signs off.