SHASHI Tharoor is having a blast. On Sunday, Bangalore's Who's who had dinner with him in the palatial house of his pal Rakesh Batra, the well-known businessman and proprietor of Orchids & Roses. He even sportingly suffered a Simi-style Rendevouz.

" I'm on holoday", he says deadpan. "But, that's snatched away from me by my publishers".

His book Riot has proved extraordinarily prophetic and Penguin has repackaged it with a cover of the Gujarat riots.

His twin sons Kanishk and Ishaan (18) are all set to join Yale in September and his mother Lily makes very clear that they are Malayalees from Coimbatore.

In short, Tharoor is having a blast. He is not surprised by the adulation. But it would be unfair to accuse him of reveling in it.

In the Library Bar of the Leela Palace, sipping a mosambi juice, he provided insights into what makes him tick. "All my books are a self interrogation of what I think, what I believe about India. In the last two decades India has undergone several revolutions in every field. It stands at the cusp of amazing social change and the world has taken notice"

Tharoor lives in New York where he plays a pivotal role as Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information for the United Nations. He is Kofi Annan's eyes and ears. "When I write a memo and when I write a novel I'm two different people. But I try to make my memos as interesting as possible", he says.

He keeps coming back to his roots out here. "Having grown up in India I can see the trees and living there I can see the woods. When I write, I don't do it as an expatriate".

"I've been accused by some critics of being an optimist. I believe that an optimist is someone who looks at the future with uncertainty. We should all be conscious of how much we have to do still…"

Tharoor was in Trichur recently when 700 children surrounded him, asking him to autograph magazines with photographs of Mamooty and Mohanlal! He obliged.

"I'm working on a coffee table book on Kerala with M.F Husain", he says

On Wednesday, Tharoor will again rub shoulders with the Cognoscenti, the literati and the gliteratti at the Leela, courtesy Vidya Virkar of Strand.