SHASHI THAROOR's "Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writers & Writing"

The chattering, cheese-chomping crowd shushes down and gathers around the mike in the corner of the room, as Shashi Tharoor prepares to speak. It's another New York cultural evening with a South Asian twist at the Rubin Museum of Art, and the cultureati is here in full force.

There's Aroon Shivdasani, co-founder and executive director of the Indo-American Arts Council, resplendent in electric blue pants and shocking pink blouse with an elaborate, embroidered parrot in multi-hued plume
perched on her shoulder. Really, I'm getting tired of the boring little black dresses and linen suits at these dos and I have to resist the urge to rush up to the old girl and thank her for the sheer scale of her
outrageously idiosyncratic sartorial ensemble.

But she's on the mike right now, playing the gracious host as she introduces speakers, thanks patrons and welcomes everyone to the book launch party for Shashi Tharoor's latest, Bookless in Baghdad.

And now it's time for the reading by the author himself, the writer-cum-UN-man all rolled in one, the international thinking girls' crumpet and subject of endless, deluded debate about his chances of being
the next UN Secretary-General. As undersecretary-general for communications at the United Nations, Tharoor may or may not take on Kofi Annan's job -depending on who you're talking to - but he has managed to whip up a sizeable literary oeuvre. And for that, you've got to give the man his due.

With his hair flopping disarmingly close to his brows, his elegant fingers lightly gripping the microphone, his suit sleeve betraying no hint of a shirt cuff -like a public school brat wearing short sleeves under his
blazer -Tharoor launches forth.

A sudden sense of deja-vu washes over me. Where have I seen this before? Is it because Tharoor looks like an Indian Alan Alda circa M*A*S*H? No, wait a minute, it's the 'photographs' section of his website,
http://www.shashitharoor.com. That's where I've caught every shot of Shashi Tharoor there ever was, and I urge you to check it out. There's Shashi in a suit, Shashi in a striped kurta, Shashi in a white kurta, Shashi looking young and intellectual, Shashi looking middle-aged and intellectual, Shashi looking cool, Shashi looking concerned, Shashi speaking with the UN logo behind him, Shashi in the office, Shashi in black-and-white, Shashi in colour, Shashi looking young and cool in black-and-white, Shashi looking middle-aged and concerned in colour... you get the picture.

So okay, he's full of himself. But he reads in such a charmingly crisp British accent. And his writing is not bad. His piece Bookless in Baghdad, after which the collection of 40 essays is titled, is a beautifully written, poignant portrait of the Iraqi middle class suffering under UN sanctions before the current war.

It's funny that his boss, Mr Annan, has got into so much trouble over these sanctions and I wonder if I'll get a chance to ask a political question after the reading.

No such luck, alas. He moves on to read an essay about a rather contrived George Orwell tribute he paid during a trip to Huesca, Spain. Huesca was where Orwell was almost fatally shot in the neck during the Spanish Civil War, an unassuming account of which appears in his masterpiece, Homage to Catalonia. But unlike Orwell, Tharoor is not made of unassuming stuff. I've read many Orwell tributes, some of them written by bombastic writers such as Christopher Hitchens. But every one of them managed to convey a sense, a
taste of the great British writer's work.

Not Shashi Tharoor, however. Shashi Tharoor's tribute to George Orwell is well, all about Shashi Tharoor.