On Pongal, Shashi Tharoor and Kanishk Tharoor agreed to an informal conversation over cups of masala chai and snatches of commentary from the India-Australia ODI series in the background. The Lok Sabha MP and his writer-son were in Chennai for The Hindu Lit for Life. While the former spoke on India, social media and a globally networked world, Kanishk, author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories , explored the way he writes and why reading is an important part of writing.
Bringing a father and son together, even if it was for a de rigueur newspaper interview, only threw light on a profound connection filled with memories of young, forgotten ambitions and preternatural dinnertime discussions. Shashi Tharoor dived straight into the topic: Kanishk’s book.
Shashi: I’ll be honest with you — I’ve always been a huge fan of his writing. I’ve been reading Kanishk since he was a child, and he always had a terrific way with words. I always liked the stories in the drafts he sent me, and then he kept polishing it, he kept changing it — he’s far more a perfectionist than I am, and I always think that this is a child who has been blessed with a rare talent and all I need to do is encourage him and urge him to keep at it.
Kanishk: I’m also very lucky to have grown up in the household that I grew up in. For a lot of people who are exploring becoming writers or entering the literary profession in whatever way, it can seem like a daunting, opaque and imposing world. Ishaan, my twin brother, and I were lucky in that we grew up around parents who were readers and writers. It also helped that they were not the kind who wanted us to become doctors or engineers, but were happy to let us follow slightly more obscure, literary and artistic paths.
What about influences then? Did your sons ever influence you?
Shashi: In fact, I don’t know if they’ll admit to it now, but when they were about seven or eight, they jointly announced that their ambition was to become military historians because they loved war...
Kanishk: It wasn’t a joint announcement.
Shashi: ( laughs ) Was it just you?
Kanishk: I think it was just me.
Shashi : Well, Ishaan sort of went along with it. Their interests were in history and in reading and writing, and, for me, as long as they were interested in something, and showed that kind of spark, that made me happy. I still remember, because I was going through a very, very busy phase of my working life, and mornings were our time. I was the one who woke them up, served them breakfast, dressed them and walked them off to school. This chap was eight years old when the Bosnian crisis was dominating headlines and he often asked me more intelligent questions on the walk to school than I would face from diplomats during the day. So, it was that kind of family milieu where ideas and issues were always important. I was also a little big on things like sharpening them with quizzes and so on. I wanted them to develop a little more of an edge as any Indian parent would, and so, I would, for example, quiz them on world capitals and currencies. I was astonished a few days ago to see Amanda {Kanishk’s wife} and him quizzing each other on some obscure capitals and I said, ‘You still play this game?’ and it turned out that not only does he play it still, but he’s infected his wife with the same vibe!
Kanishk: Oh, she had it already.
Shashi: Really? I mean this kind of thing is for me a lot of fun. If they had theatre, I would’ve encouraged them...
Kanishk: We did some theatre.
Shashi: You did some, but not in the intense way that I was able to. I remember you acting in a couple of school plays, particularly in high school...
Kanishk: One of the areas where our father’s influences haven’t been as strong is his obsession with cricket. We do love cricket but we obsess over football.
Did you get your father to like it?
Kanishk: He’s a man of stubborn ways.
What about dinner time conversations — were they centred on politics, diplomacy and international relations?
Kanishk: Yes, and it still is. When we’re in Delhi or our father is in the United States, dinner and lunch conversations are often about political issues and current events; our relationship is energised by these kinds of conversations.
Did it veer away from the political and into the normal sort of mundane talk of restaurant or movie recommendations?
Kanishk: Well yeah, the bulk of our conversation is normal. It just so happens that these normal conversations seamlessly feed into other kinds of conversations...
Shashi: For us, a lot of life has been the life of the mind. So a normal conversation for us will inevitably get into ideas, and very often they’ll be telling me about things they’re reading, their reactions to something... I have to admit that it’s because of the distance. Otherwise, it’s all email, and in email, it’s rare to have a series of substantive conversations other than through the exchange of a text.
Kanishk: So we email him, pretty much every day.
Shashi: And now there’s instant messaging, WhatsApping... I remember, when I took a small break after the last election and went to New York, one of the first things we all did as a family was to see a movie. That’s normal and that’s fun; I don’t have the time to do that here. We enjoyed it, no? The Grand Budapest Hotel ...
Kanishk: Yeah, it’s funny having to insist on normality...
Shashi: ( laughs ) Well, I don’t lead a very normal life here...
Kanishk: Ishaan and I are immensely proud of him and everything he has accomplished. But we have a sense of him as being our father, and that is somebody who’s not just a celebrity or a politician or an accomplished writer but a man who has to have...
Shashi: Changed your nappies!
Kanishk: …A man who has to have certain kinds of tea at certain times and loves making idli s and scrambled eggs and can’t make anything else, and as a human being, that’s how we think of our father first before we think of him in any other way.
Is Shashi Tharoor more active on Twitter than his sons?
Shashi: He’s the one who told me about it! I had no idea what it was...
Kanishk: I told him about it at a time when I used it to talk to my friends. Not as a public broadcast mechanism.
Shashi: No, he said it’s a place where you can tell people you’re having coffee right now and you’re enjoying your idli s. I said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ So I didn’t. One of my young aides, in my election campaign said, ‘No no, you really have to do this’. It languished for a while and then I started using it during my first election counting. And it was amazing watching my followers go up from 10 to 100 to 300 and I thought, ‘My god, 300 people are reading everything I write. Wow, what an audience!’ So I kept at it and the numbers grew.
Is it fair to say he appropriated the medium from you?
Kanishk: When I joined Twitter, I was working full-time as a journalist. So, for my day-to-day life, I had to use Twitter as a way of getting information. I have to confess that the last six years or so when I haven’t been a full-time journalist and I’ve been trying to explore other kinds of writing and academic study, I have retreated from Twitter a bit. One of the ways I avoid doing the work I should be doing is by looking at my brother’s and my father’s Twitter mentions, which can be kind of terrifying. As a daily tool, it’s no longer something I use; in that sense, my father has definitely appropriated it from me...
Do people now recognise you as Kanishk and Ishaan’s father? Do you think it’s going towards that?
Shashi: I have the highest expectations of the development of Kanishk’s literary career and Ishaan has already made quite a mark as diplomatic affairs writer for the Washington Post . I’m actually relishing being eclipsed in their own fields by them, and I’m not embarrassed to say that they are definitely better than me. I think Kanishk is a better fiction writer and prose stylist than I was and Ishaan is a better journalist than I would’ve been. I accept honourably ( laughs ) the inferior position in the family hierarchy!
Kanishk: I think that’s going to take some time; our father’s accomplished so much and is accomplishing so much. I see the headlines for my book, and they do tend to have to do with him more than me. So, in terms of my own writing, it’s incumbent upon me and my work to advance to the point that what you’re suggesting actually happens.
