Dear Shashi (written a few months ago)

Background note to readers:
The Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, the former Under Secretary General of the United Nations, is in some hot water, first, for having stayed at Delhi’s plush Taj Mahal hotel (admittedly at his own expense since there is no gym at the Kerala Bhavan where he should have stayed, eating avial and kalan) while waiting for his official residence to be vacated by the previous resident. Also, in response to a diktat that all ministers travel economy class, he is supposed to have used, in a tweet, the expressions cattle class and holy cows…the people of India, I am told, are not pleased and the General Secretary of the ruling Congress Party, in addition to others, has apologized to them…

This is a friendly letter written to The Hon Mr Shashi Tharoor, former Manhattan resident and current Indian Minister of State for External Affairs…sharing some thoughts from a current Toronto resident…

Dear Shashi,

While I am not one of the 169,096 people who is following you on Twitter, I have been following the story about your tweets and thought I could share some thoughts with you.

In the first place I don’t think it is appropriate for the Honourable Minister of State for External Affairs of Bharat that is India, to go around tweeting. It is going to give the world the impression that in India we have become so westernized that Ministers, even if they are Ministers of State, do not have important matters to attend to and have all the time in the world to tweet around. It is all fine and dandy for President Obama to carry his own Blackberry and reply to the select group of people who have his email address, not a minister of the Bharat Sarkar. Indian ministers have weightier things to do than tweet away to 169,096 people.

The correct procedure in these matters as your staff may have already advised you is to entrust your Blackberry to your third assistant Principal Secretary. At periodic intervals the third assistant Principal Secretary will ask the fourth assistant Principal Secretary to print out all emails received in your name, review them, and, forward them up the chain of Secretaries, Assistant, Deputy, Principal and Chief to be left in your in tray.

At each stage of the process the appropriate Secretary will add their remarks. You will then peruse the aforesaid document and add your own thoughts, which will work its way down the hierarchy. Should any of the Secretaries require a translation of the comments since you may not be familiar with the national language, Hindi, in view of your having lived out of the country for so long, it will be sent to the Translations Directorate.

Finally, in the fullness of time, the document will reach the fourth assistant Principal Secretary who will call the Principal Stenographer (provided he or she is not on Casual, Sick or other leave) and dictate the reply. The Principal Stenographer will type out the reply and give it to the Information Technology department who will send the message out.

Now, having lived in the infamous West for so long you maybe tempted to say “Why do I need a Blackberry for doing this ?” Dear Shashi, that is because like all those who have lived in the West for so long you have no understanding of time…you think if something is not done on time, there is no point in doing it…let me try and explain this to you from the Indian perspective…

Years ago, much before computers took over the Indian Railways and you could check ‘online’ where every train is at a given moment, every station had a printed timetable which gave the arrival and departure timings of the trains. Needless to add the actual time when the trains came and left had little bearing on the timetable displayed.

An irate passenger once marched up to the Station Master and said, “What is the use of this timetable ? The trains are always late…why do you display it all ?”

The Station Master who had been schooled in the timeless philosophies of the Vedas and the Upanishads looked at the customer and said, “Agreed the trains are late. However, if there was no timetable how would you know that the train was late ?”

Moral of the story, Shashi: Timetables and schedules are there only to tell you how late you are…throw that Blackberry away and stop tweeting…you will, if not anything else, give your staff some peace…whatever has to happen will happen whenever it has to happen as the Lord Krishna has said somewhere in some holy text…

Then, Shashi, I saw this picture of you sitting in the Economy class cabin of a domestic flight. While you appeared to be meditating, honestly, the look on your face reminded me of a child who had been forcibly made to swallow a large dollop of castor oil…I am not being critical…I know how bad travelling by Economy class is, having travelled Economy all my life…

Looking at that look on your face I realized how near I was to similar disaster when on one of my trips to India I was offered a job to head the HR department of a big Indian company, and, I very nearly accepted…and the story of your tweeting around only confirmed how some guardian angel sitting on my shoulder saved me from disaster…

Let me tell what may have happened had I accepted that job.

My first job, soon after I graduated was with a large Engineering Company in the Bombay region. Every year, the Management and Union would celebrate Satyanarayana Pooja where all those who had got married in the last twelve months would sit for the said pooja along with their spouse.

As you perhaps know by now, having lived in India for a few months, Satyanarayana Pooja is performed by newly weds to ensure that the God Satyanarayan bestows on the couple a male child…In the year I got married, my wife and I sat the Pooja and enjoyed the meal thereafter…all was well…we had a good time, and, six years later my daughter arrived…notwithstanding the fact that the God Satyanarayan had got the timing and gender of the product requisition all mixed up we had no complaints…this was what happened before I left India a quarter of a century ago…

Just imagine, the Canada returned HR Director dealing with the Satyanarayan Pooja request, had I accepted the job.

Union representative Blackberrys me: “We need to conduct Satyanarayana Pooja and provide a meal to all employees…”
Canada returned HR Director Blackberries back: “What is Satyanarayan Pooja ?”
Union representative: “Satyanarayan Pooja is prayer for newly married couples to be blessed with male child…”
Canada returned HR Director Blackberries back: “What does this Satyanarayan chap have to do with producing a child for our employees ? There are different and more pleasurable ways to producing a child…stop wasting time…get on with your work…”

The rest I leave to your imagination. A holy cow has been assaulted, if not killed…workers walk out, rioting, police come and all that which you maybe slowly getting to know…

Needless to add, the HR Director would have been on his way back to Canada, coach class, to collect his unemployment benefits. (btw, ‘coach class’, try and use that word next time. Having always travelled premium first in your days as Under Secretary General of the UN, you may not have heard of it. It is the same travel class as the prohibited c word that you used, and, is located at the back of the aircraft where you can get the wafting smell of the loos.)

Moral of the story, Shashi: In India things work differently from Manhattan or Toronto.

Now, very recently the lady at Pizza Hut seems to have decided that all of you must go coach class I am not questioning her wisdom, she knows all…However, hearing about this decision and that of the boy wonder travelling by the Shatabdi Express reminds me of an exchange involving the Father of the Nation who used to travel Third Class rail…

I am not sure if it was Lord Wavell or Lord Mountbatten (having written all those books you will know the story and should be able to correct me if I tell it wrong), but, one of them remarked to the Father of the Nation that it was so wonderful to see that in spite of the power he wielded he lived in such poverty. Sarojini Naidu, a woman not known to hide the truth, who was standing nearby, quipped, “It takes an awful lot of money to keep this old man,(referring to the Father of the Nation) in poverty…”

Moral of the story, Shashi: To be a successful Indian politician you don’t have to be poor, you just need to appear to be poor.

Thank you for all that you are doing. Come winter, when I shall be shovelling snow off my driveway, and, the thought comes up in mind, “I wish I had accepted that job in India…” I shall administer myself a strong, hardy slap on my cheek and perish that thought…

With much affection,

PS- I do apologize for having taken the liberty of addressing you by your first name…I should have said, “Dear and Respected Mantri-ji”…again a bloody Western habit, like women wearing jeans and going to pubs…I hope you are not calling your boss by his first name… “Manmohan, old boy” may get you into trouble again, just like that tweet did...