Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Deja vu, 3 Jan 2008
This is a real let-down. It feels like a reheated collection of articles and other previously published pieces, cobbled together to make a few bucks. Did an editor ever set eyes on the manuscript? There are a huge number of repetitions, some of them only pages apart. Check out, for example, the number of times Mr Tharoor makes the point about India's multi-faith political leadership. Or his point about Hinduism not having a Pope or "Book". Each reappears almost verbatim several times within the first 100 pages. A large part of this book consists of the author commenting on the writing of other people or - worse still - his own.
There are plenty of other "feel-good" books about India around at the moment. In "Midnight to the Millennium" Sashi Tharoor wrote one of the better ones. Read that one, rather than this.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Not one India, 6 April 2009
Author Shashi Tharoor is a political man, but not only that. Born in London in 1956 and educated in India and The United States, he is a prize-winning author (both fiction and non-fiction), chairman of a Dubai-based venture-company, and a New York resident currently running for election in Kerala, India, where he has again faced the challenge of being listened to, and not just read...
"Lok Sabha elections 2009: Shashi Tharoor walks out of talk show - Saturday, 04 April, 2009, Thiruvananthapuram. Former UN Undersecretary General Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate for the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat, took everyone by surprise when he walked out of a live TV talk show Friday night. The anchor of the show organised by Asianet TV channel described the incident as 'unfortunate': 'When he walked out, the Left Democratic Front candidate P Ramachandran Nair was responding to questions on MP Panniyan Ravindran. In fact Tharoor had answered all the questions that were put to him by me and also from the audience. We were taken aback when he walked out. We rushed to him and asked him to stay as the programme would get over in 20 minutes, but he refused,' said P.G. Suresh Kumar. However, Tharoor's chief campaign coordinator G.S. Babu, a local Congress activist who was witness to the event, had a different story: 'I was present at the spot. Tharoor answered all the questions put to him and at times the crowd was becoming a bit unruly. He immediately asked the policemen on duty to pacify and control the crowd. The policemen in turn politely asked him to leave to defuse the situation. And since he wanted things to cool down, he left,' said Babu."
It is likely that he will have listeners, at least as many as his readers, because "The elephant, the tiger and the cell phone" has the kind of title that makes people who never heard of him want to join the growing numbers of those who attend his conferences and rallies, and those who watch his TV interviews, never mind those who have read his previous books. This one is written in a deliberately accessible style - no doubt the fruit of his experience in addressing listeners rather than readers - and Tharoor himself points out that readers can start with any chapter. Just dive into it as if it were India. The most fascinating aspect of the book, apart from the fact that the publisher chose a cover that exactly reflects the contents, derives from the author's observation that one can only speak of India in the plural because defining what it means to be "Indian" is impossible, at least in terms of a common language, faith or ethnicity: "The sight in May 2004 of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) - in a country 81 percent Hindu - caught the world's imagination." Well, maybe not, but it should have. Whether you are interested in literacy, cows, Bollywood, cricket, Nehru, saris, ayurvedic cures or the cohabitation of families whose infants attend Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Hindu schools in the backwaters of Kerala, all travelling in the same water-buses, this book has lessons for all. One world, many people. But one India, no.
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by Aravind Adiga
by Shashi Tharoor
by Edward Luce
by Pavan K. Varma
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