The elephant, The tiger And The cell phone

“THE elephant, THE tiger AND THE cell phone” by Shashi Tharoor; centers around India as the emerging super power of twenty first century. For me it has been third in series, books predicting futuristic India based on statistics past and present. The earlier two being ‘Planet India’ by Mira Kamdar, and ‘The world is flat’ by Thomas Friedman.

One really needs to have extraordinary vocabulary while reading Shashi Tharoor. There are far too many words to look up in dictionary. Few interesting excerpts from the book follow.

Sarojini Naidu on Mahatma Gandhi’s frugal lifestyle, one of the great one-liners of independence struggle.
“If only he knew how much it costs us to keep him in poverty”

On renaming of Indian cities like Bombay to Mumbai.
An American businessman who was planning a visit to India after a long absence told me (author) that his associate there “used to live in Madras, but he seems to have moved to some place called Chennai.”
When told that his friend hadn’t moved but Madras is renamed as Chennai. He promptly replied “But cities don’t do that”.

Soap Operas, a new vision of Indian family, teeming with betrayal, infidelity and rivalries of all sort, has gained entry into the living rooms of middle class.

A popular international news magazine reports that the septuagenarian (being seventy years old or between the ages of seventy and eighty; that’s why I mentioned above one will need a dictionary all along while reading this book) wife of then president of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma, instructs her servants to tape every episode of the afternoon serial Swabhiman that her official duties oblige her to miss.