English definitely has a place on Indian soil: Tharoor

Though Congress MP Shashi Tharoor is proficient in four languages —English, Malayalam, Hindi, and French — it is in English, the language in which he has read the most, that his ideas come to him, he said in a packed session at the ongoing Bangalore Literature festival. 

Mr. Tharoor, who was in conversation with writer and scholar Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, also his niece, further added, “I should be vaguely ashamed of it…But I am not. Because I have learned most of my English in India.” English, he said, definitely has a place on Indian soil, “otherwise we wouldn’t have a crowd like this in an English language literary festival, right?” 

Anecdotes and trivia

Mr. Tharoor then proceeded to regale the crowd with anecdotes, ideas, thoughts, and trivia about language in his session titled “A Wonderland of Words”, largely focused on his book, A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays, published last year. In the discussion, Tharoor also argued that the English lexicon has become richer by borrowing Indian words like loot, thug, and shampoo.

Mr. Tharoor went on to discuss Virginia Woolf’s colourful insults of other writers, why spelling is important, the challenges presented by the autocorrect function, ChatGPT’s overdependence on the em dash, and how different forms of English can be the source of confusion.

“When an American talks about a mugging, he is talking about someone pointing a gun or knife and relieving him of his wallet,” he explained. On the other hand, in England, somebody who is mugging is making funny faces for the camera, while in India, mugging is linked to studying for an examination, he pointed out. “If an Indian student tells an American or Brit that he was mugging for an exam, incomprehension is guaranteed.” 

Ms. Srinivasan brought up Mr. Tharoor’s expertise at Wordle and how his father, her grandfather, invented a version of the game about 60 years ago. According to Mr. Tharoor, his father was obsessed with words, “from the time he migrated to England straight from a Kerala village and discovered the joys of the language.”

A version of Wordle

One of the things his father did, he said, was come up with “something like Wordle. He would imagine a five-letter word in his head and invite my sisters and me to guess it,” he said, going on to expand on why a game like this could be so engaging. “Believe me, it occupied us for maybe a long car ride. You would never notice Bangalore traffic if you were playing this game.”