I too don’t like intellectuals. First of all it’s a too-long word, ‘intellectual’, with far too many syllables, and anyone who needs to be described with a too-long word I’m suspicious of, like heavily. I prefer people you can describe with shorter words or a combination of not too many syllables, especially English syllables.
For instance, speaking Indian, I like names which include ‘Rishi’, ‘Rashtra’, ‘Swachha’ or ‘Purush’—I really, really love ‘Purush’ in any name—and ‘Rishi’ also floats my boat—so, for instance, ‘Mithya Rishi’ would get my vote every time, or even ‘Vikas Vehem’ or—this one has a really nice ring to it—‘Sarvanash Mahesh’.
In English names I like a simple label that describes what the person does, like ‘Anchor’, ‘Headline Huckster’ or even ‘Migraine’, with or without some country’s name attached.
Showing off
So, it makes me furious, not to mention irritated, when these (expletive deleted) intellectuals describe someone using too many long words when short ones would do better. This is the problem, you see, when these pseudollectual people have to show off the books they have read or how, at an early age, their English grammar teacher had his or her ruthless way with them till they managed to form long, correct sentences with clauses, sub-clauses and shifting yet consistent tenses.
I mean, is it the Nation’s problem if this Shashi Tharoor fellow was thrown into a bubbling vat of liquid thesaurus even before he could walk? And then again, how is it the Nation’s Uncle’s concern if the chap was massaged every day (till he reached 13) in Grand Elocution oil and washed down after with a tincture of ‘Correct’ Anglophone Pronunciation? Then, bilkul last straw, here we have Twitter, our precious platform for illiterates—one that we will fight to protect all our ignorant despots—and this man commits Twitter-Treason by sending forth a tweet that uses not one or two but several long words!
In a, surprise-bloody-surprise, grammatically impeccable sentence! I mean who does that, I ask? Just look at the first phrase: ‘Exasperating farrago of distortions’! This by itself is enough to make Chetan Bhagat tie a big Webster’s Dictionary around his neck and jump off the balcony of his penthouse.
The saving grace for Tharoor is that he laces his oratory with solid substance.
Exasperating or Insasperating for who, no, whom , one must ask. And then, what is this ‘farrago’ business? Are we in a tweet or a cowboy movie? Why khalipili refer to an old American stagecoach company like Wells Fargo when you merely mean a ‘mish-mash’? ‘Distortion’ is allowed, I suppose, because everyone uses it nowadays, even in Hindi, as in ‘ Yeh EVM machiney voting ka bahut distortion karti hain ’, but then look at the next phrase: ‘…misrepresentations & outright lies, being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist.’ Oho, too many long words to say something quite simple.
The problem, however, doesn’t lie only in the choice of this blast of vocabulary. Where it will hurt the intended target—let’s call him Migraine Purush—most is that he will see and hear Shashi Tharoor actually saying these words in front of a microphone, being heard by a packed and hushed audience reeling with admiration and desire.
While there are some anti-nationals/intellectuals (same difference no?) in our country who only express themselves through the written word, there are others, pesky creatures, who rise from the dark, festering maw of over-erudition and use their ill-gotten charm, charisma and public speaking abilities to attack the Pioneers of Patriotism like Migraine Moshai through actual oratory.
Oratorical skills
This English oratory is an interesting thing, for both intellectuals and anti-book-readers such as Shri Doorknob. When he was a young debating star in Calcutta, Shashi T and other Calcuttan student types including myself were all under the over-arching shadow of one Professor N. Viswanathan of St. Xavier’s College and All India Radio.
In a town then full of richly old-fashioned English accents, Prof. V had the plummiest accent, the razor-sharpest enunciation, and the slow speech of a great, dignified, aural Maha-Ganapati. While I was in awe of the man, there was no chance I could ever speak like him, so I decided never to try. Shashi T, a bit older than me, and far, far braver, clearly made the opposite decision: he would be Tendulkar to NV’s Gavaskar.
From the local precincts of south Calcutta, Shashi took his oratory, and that precious, gem-like Calcutta Queen’s English accent, to the greatest debating chambers of the world: to the UN, to the Lok Sabha and to Oxford. Everywhere, including at Oxford, Shashi T achieved total Shock and Awe—no man had spoken English like this since Anthony Eden resigned as British Prime Minister in January 1957.
I suspect what Doorknob Go-Slammy secretly, really, really wants is to be Shashi Tharoor.
The saving grace for Tharoor is that, more often than not, he laces his oratory with solid substance. He may use long words and pronounce them in a certain way but they often carry some inescapable truth. He tells you why secularism isn’t merely a fad, why India desperately needs to protect that definition of itself.
He points out in scourging detail what the British actually did while inflicting their ‘Raj’ on us, and why Churchill was a racist, genocidal bastard. This creates a problem for those who hate intellectuals who read books. And it creates a double-problem for someone who may have a love-hate relationship with Shashi Tharoor.
Man of the masses
Now, Migraine-slammy may strive to brand himself as a man of the toiling, sweating, desh-bhakting masses, but what we really have here is a chancer clawing his way up the slippery ladder of money and power. What he really wants is the adulation of the Lit-Fest attending glitterati, the fandom that Shashi Boss so effortlessly sweeps up.
I suspect what Doorknob Go-Slammy secretly, really, really wants is to be Shashi Tharoor, except with bright orange-coloured undergarments topped by a little boy’s fake military fatigues. And with the celebrity sleekness unburdened by any boring drag of principle. If you don’t believe me, just look at Doorknob’s new haircut—it’s totally modelled on young Tharoor’s hairstyle from the early 80s, with a touch of Sanjay Gandhi in the sideburns. If that’s not enough evidence, listen again to the wannabe-stentorian voice. What’s with the accent and the pompous tone? A small section of The Nation is bemused and curious, and I can help these people: Migraine Go-Slammy’s accent is an attempt at replicating Tharoor’s, but with no tedious baggage of truth or substance to weigh it down.
As I said at the start, it’s all the fault of these book-bothering intellectuals. Such is the pseudollectuals’ glow that even the most crass foot soldiers of the Vehem Vahini, the Liars’ Legion, want to copy them. The problem arises when these intellectuals let their reading and vocabulary interfere with what should be simple, straightforward invective.
So, perhaps a Twitter-friendly translation of his original line might be helpful to Shashi Tharoor. How about: ‘Poison khichdi of lies and half-truths brayed out on TV by an immoral clown pretending he isn’t the real Pasha of Presstitutes’?
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
