He is rumoured to have squired Nicole Kidman, attained a PhD at 22, and brings to mind words like statesmanlike and lofty, so it is with particular interest that I observe the New York-based Under-Secretary General (Communications and Public Information) of the UN and celebrated author Shashi Tharoor meet Stany Anthony Gomes who taught him Physics and Chemistry 36 years ago, when he was still a student in half pants at Campion School.

The idea to engineer an encounter between the two has appealed to me ever since I learn that for over three decades the legendary teacher has kept the image of the brilliant student he taught alive like a sacred flame in his memory, singling out the brightest students by comparing them favourably to Tharoor; indeed he has used the diplomat-author as a gold standard, a trophy and a bench mark all in one.

So will the internationally acclaimed distinguished 49-year-old statesman passing through Mumbai, and the 69-year-old admiring teacher rise above lip-service nostalgia, go beyond the merely polite, and manage to connect across a thirty-six year chasm?

Was I well-meaning but foolhardy for engineering this meeting? Will the already pressed for time high-flying celebrity give the older man his due?

My worries are put to rest the minute we ring the bell at his room at the Taj, and Tharoor bounds out to greet us, visibly shedding some of his loftiness and seeming relieved to be the school boy again. And to my delight Gomes assumes the tone of a stentorian elder — giving advice, and wagging an avuncular finger at the author-diplomat.

“Be second to none,” he says, apropos of nothing, and “do not appear to try for the post of Secretary General”. They then discuss the time when Shashi had used his presence of mind to resoundingly whack a chloroformed rooster on stage that was supposed to have been asleep during a particular scene in a school play — an incident that has passed in to Campion folklore.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that for all his worldly success a man can never appear more than the sum of who he is before his school teacher or his mother — and this afternoon I have the pleasure of meeting Tharoor in the company of both.

For some one all too aware of Tharoor’s genius, (I gave his book the The Great Indian Novel an ecstatic reviewing in ‘89), his brilliance at international diplomacy, and his sophisticated writing for journals as diverse as The Hindu and Newsweek, this is a welcome change; because with Tharoor, there is a danger of being overwhelmed: by his achievement, his industry and his loftiness.

Added to this is the unfair advantage that his grey-green eyes (the exact shade of that other celebrated Indian Aishwarya Rai’s) his peaches and cream complexion and the schoolboy flop of his jet black hair have. Nature has been very kind to Mr Tharoor and perhaps no one is more aware of this than Mr Tharoor himself.

Though it is never overt, you sense his vanity like a faint after shave, whenever he enters a room. And indeed he admits:
“I have never been one for false modesty. Modestly is not one of my suits, for instance I see my most successful writing as something beyond myself, if I admire some thing from an earlier book it’s almost as if I’m admiring some thing that stands independent of me.”

One only has to google Tharoor’s name to understand that he has little to be modest about. From the New York Times’ front-page heralding of his book on Bollywood, to erudite speeches delivered at august bodies, to superbly crafted essays on the likes of Einstein, Pablo Neruda and PG Wodehouse, there is a solid body of work that speaks as much  of the man’s God-given brilliance (he does hail from God’s own country!) as his mind-boggling hard work: for the last twenty-six years Tharoor has driven a giddying spiral upwards in his career at the UN along with an equally irresistible rise as an author, essayist, columnist and reviewer (his official web site now boasts of his latest achievement — poetry).

“I am probably happiest when I am alone in front of a computer screen writing,” says Tharoor who writes all through the night and on weekends and is divorced from his wife who lives in Manhattan with their 21-year-old twin sons “But I have known the other kind of happiness; for instance, earlier on in my UN career, when I worked for refugees, which I no longer do, I knew the satisfaction of doing things that actually changed the lives of ordinary human beings for the better, ranging from negotiating for the dis-embarkment of refugees, helping them get a new life, persuading ministers or officials to take certain people they would not have other wise taken; as a young man in my twenties I knew that there were Vietnamese kids growing up French or Canadian, whose lives were going to be changed because of what  I has done on their behalf:  the satisfaction of putting your head on the pillow and knowing that the things you had done during the day had actually made a difference to people’s lives."

"I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world, some of it comes out in my work, some of it in my writing. I enjoy getting up in the morning and going to work, I believe in the organization I work for and the principles it stands for and I am happy within my own skin. I feel that if one is parked on this planet for a purpose most of the time I feel I am doing something to fulfill it.”

But of course there are some to whom Mr Tharoor appears too good to be true. Who regard his lofty world view and his committed zeal with a hint of scepticism. Who feel there is something of the earnestness of a class monitor about the handsome diplomat cast in the Nehruvian mould.

But they’re missing the point about Tharoor altogether, because the thing about him is that he believes it when he writes impassioned articles about world peace or when he says – “The UN is the place to draw up blueprints without borders. It is the one indispensable global organisation in our globalizing world.”

In many ways, Tharoor harks back to another century altogether, perhaps his oratorical skills and exquisite penmanship would have been better suited to India’s independence movement, where one can imagine him pitting wit and witticisms at Jinnah, or discussing national issues with Patel and Nehru.

Indeed there is some thing relentlessly heroic and larger than life about this asthmatic boy who because of his illnesses shunned sports and instead read a book a day, turning into some thing of a child prodigy, writing his first novel before he was 10, and winning prizes for debates and dramatics.

His is the stuff of school boy legend, the irredeemably clever class prefect and president of the St. Stephen’s College union, who could dazzle with his wit and voice and who went on to wield his talent on an international stage. Perhaps what he wrote about another writer diplomat Pablo Neruda could well be said of himself.

“Neruda was a man of action, serving his country as a diplomat and politician, always willing to put his life and limb at the service of his convictions.” Tharoor said  in The Hindu, of July 18, 2004

“Are diplomats uniquely suited — provided they have the gift to begin with — to be good creative writers?” He asked in another column  Diplomats as litterateurs on September 29, 2004, going on to list  galaxy of other writer diplomats including the late great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, the  Frenchman Marie-René Auguste Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, one of his country’s most illustrious diplomats who wrote under the nom de plume St John Perse;  the Yugoslav  diplomat Ivo Andric, a master craftsman — often compared to Tolstoy, the  French playwright, poet and essayist Paul Claudel who was a diplomat of distinction, serving as his country’s Ambassador to Belgium and the British diplomat Lawrence Durrell  who wrote hilarious accounts of diplomatic life.

Clearly, Tharoor belongs to a rich lineage of thinker-writer-diplomats, and he is aware of this legacy.

But fortunately today, in the presence of his school teacher and his mother, he forgets about matters of international import and allows himself to be lectured on his fondness for ras malai and his lack of exercise!

And as if on cue — the minute he leaves the room to give an interview to a TV channel-mother and school teacher are discussing the world wide celebrity as if he were the brilliant little school boy again, and not the author and Under Secretary General in Charge of Communication at the United Nations who has nine acclaimed books to his name and 750 people working for him in 70 countries!