When Diplomacy Drowns in Dictionary Deep-Dives
Shashi Tharoor's recent whirlwind tour of Western capitals—from Washington's corridors of power to the Council on Foreign Relations—has once again exposed India's most celebrated linguistic showman in his full, bewildering glory. While representing India on matters of terrorism and Operation Sindoor, Tharoor described his journey to Washington as a "horrendous, three-stage overnight journey" from Brasilia via São Paulo and Panama, immediately demonstrating that even jet lag cannot cure his compulsive need to overcomplicate the simplest statements.
In an era where India desperately needs clear, forceful communication on the international stage, we instead get a walking thesaurus masquerading as a diplomat. As Tharoor himself has admitted, "It is sometimes fun to use complex, obscure words to add flavour to writing"—a confession that inadvertently reveals the performative nature of his linguistic gymnastics.
The Unrepentant Recidivist
Eight years have passed since the infamous "farrago" incident, yet nothing has changed. If anything, Tharoor has doubled down on his lexical exhibitionism with the evangelical fervour of a convert. His recent book "A Wonderland of Words" celebrates his "extensive lexicon" that has "sent thousands of Indians scurrying to dictionaries"—a badge of honour he wears with insufferable pride.
This is not evolution; it's entrenchment. Tharoor has transformed from an inadvertent linguistic show-off into a calculated one, monetizing his reputation as India's walking dictionary. When asked about building vocabulary, he smugly notes: "I am not a fan of rote learning—as I said, my own vocabulary was expanded purely by reading far and wide". This false modesty masks a deeper arrogance: the assumption that his natural linguistic gifts justify their constant public exhibition.
The Diplomatic Disservice
The stakes have never been higher for India's international communication. During his recent US tour, while briefing American lawmakers on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and India's military response, Tharoor's linguistic peacockery served as an unfortunate distraction from urgent diplomatic messaging. When India needs every word to count in building international consensus against terrorism, we get a diplomat more interested in showcasing his vocabulary than sharpening his arguments.
Consider the grotesque irony: when speaking to US House Foreign Affairs Committee leadership about "complete unanimity in condemning terrorist attacks and defending India's right to defend itself", Tharoor managed to communicate clearly. Yet in casual social media posts, he cannot resist describing routine travel fatigue in needlessly ornate terms. This selective complexity reveals the performative nature of his linguistic exhibitions—he can speak plainly when protocol demands it but chooses not to when personal branding is at stake.
The Institutional Enablement
The tragedy is not just Tharoor's individual vanity—it's how India's intellectual establishment has legitimized it. Universities teach "Tharoorian English," coaching institutes promise to help students "speak like Shashi Tharoor," and publishers eagerly commission books celebrating his verbose virtuosity. We have created a linguistic cult of personality that conflates obfuscation with intelligence.
Book reviews now describe his writing as "a perspicacious peregrination through the discombobulating gallimaufry that is the English language"—sentences so aggressively pretentious they read like elaborate parodies of academic writing. The reviewers have contracted Tharoor's disease, measuring intellectual worth by syllable count rather than clarity of thought.
The Global Embarrassment
What makes this particularly galling is how it reflects on India internationally. When American diplomats and journalists encounter Tharoor's unnecessarily complex formulations, they don't think "how impressively educated"; they think "how needlessly complicated." In an age where global communication prizes brevity and clarity—from Twitter's character limits to TED Talk's 18-minute maximum—Tharoor's Victorian verbosity feels antiquated and self-indulgent.
His son Ishaan, a Washington Post journalist who recently questioned his father during the delegation's visit, represents the next generation of Indian voices in global media. The contrast is instructive: the younger Tharoor writes with precision and punch for American audiences, while his father remains trapped in a linguistic time warp that impresses no one except fellow logophiles.
The Opportunity Cost
Every minute spent decoding Tharoor's verbose formulations is a minute stolen from engaging with his actual ideas. And here lies the greatest tragedy: beneath the lexical exhibitionism, Tharoor often has genuinely valuable insights on diplomacy, democracy, and India's place in the world. His analysis of Operation Sindoor, his understanding of Indo-US relations, his perspectives on terrorism—all get buried under an avalanche of unnecessary adjectives and archaic adverbs.
His own advice—"follow George Orwell's rule: never use a long word where a short one will do"—stands as a monument to his hypocrisy. He knows better, teaches better, but cannot practice what he preaches.
The Ultimate Indictment
Tharoor has become a living metaphor for India's worst intellectual tendencies: the confusion of complexity with profundity, the preference for performance over substance, the belief that incomprehensibility equals intelligence. In a nation struggling to communicate its narrative effectively to the world, we have elevated as our leading English-language spokesman someone who seems pathologically incapable of saying in ten words what he can torture into twenty.
The time for gentle mockery has passed. Tharoor's linguistic exhibitionism is not harmless eccentricity—it's a disservice to effective communication, a barrier to international understanding, and an embarrassment to Indian intellectualism.
India deserves better. The world deserves clearer. And Tharoor, despite his evident intelligence and experience, continues to serve up neither.
It's time for India's most verbose diplomat to take his own advice and start following Orwell's rule. The alternative is watching him become a linguistic curiosity while more pressing matters of state demand clear, forceful advocacy.
In the end, the greatest indictment of Tharoor's lexical exhibitionism is this: in an editorial critiquing his unnecessary complexity, every example of his overly complex language had to be simplified for readers to understand the very point being made.
