The Rajpal Abeynayake Column: The man who would be next Secretary General of the United Nations?

Shashi Tharoor is ahead, they say, in the straw polls that has been held in the UN Secretary General stakes.

Tharoor writes sentences such as this:

A hillside in Kashmir. A camera pans across azure sky, verdant slopes, technicolour flowers. Maya runs laughing across the screen to the strains of a dozen violins, as Ashok Banerjee pursues her singing, You are my sunlight/ You brighten my life/ You are my sunlight/ Come be my wife Azure skies? Technicolour flowers? Who knows with prose like this, he might make Lebanon flow with milk or honey again, heh? Or he might get George W. Bush to make America as free as, well, a bird sanctuary.

Shashi Tharoor speaks with a clipped New York accent, which has however some hybridised Bombay overtones to it - none of which could be terms that describe Jayantha Dhanapala's way of speaking.

But, Tharoor writes potboilers....oops, I mean, he writes cerebrally, urm, unchallenging Indian novels about the show business culture in Bollywood, and such locations.

Would this qualify him to be the Vaclav Havel of the United Nations system? Havel was a novelist, before he went onto become the Czechoslovak President. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter went on from being President to being a C grade novelist.

So, its hardly novel for folks who want to run countries and run the world to flash novelist credentials. This is a world in which fact is stranger than fiction anyway.....

But, clipped accents and potboilers, oops, dogged celebrations to doggerel (...'you are my sunlight/come be my wife....) apart, Shashi Tharoor has perhaps the advantage of having gone where no aspirant from this part of the world for a top UN post has gone before.

That is to the belly of the beauty. (......not the belly of the beast, I do not want to be remotely literal, in a celebration of diplomacy and literature, which this piece is fast becoming......) Tharroor got his doctorate from the Fletcher school of Law and Diplomacy at the age of 22.

That's as American as anybody could get in the world of diplomacy, and Shashi Tharoor is also Indian, which meant that his candidature, though it remained unannounced, was no secret except for the absolute tyro in these matters.

The fact is that we in Colombo were talking about Shashi Tharoor's candidature years ago, while discussing his prose, another example of which goes like this: Cheetah was so moved she promptly gave him another drink, by emptying the glass on top of his head! GROWWWWL!

But India mandarins played their cards close to their chest, and so it was that Shahshi Tharoor's candidature came as a bolt from the blue for the uninitiated here in Colombo, who believed that Jayatha Dhanapala was a shoo in.

But seems America wants Dhanapala as badly as it wants no high-brow literature sullying the septic atmosphere of the corridors of the UN headquarters. In Tharoor, they may be having a whole septic tank in this regard.

Not because of what he writes, but because of the fact that Tharoor is a dashing and much vaunted (..pun intended) low-brow when it comes to diplomatic nicety. He comes from a country which at the present time at least knows on which side its bread is buttered. Americans almost equate to Indians in terms of general policy these days.

Even so, Shashi Tharoor does not have the best chance of becoming the next UN Secretary General, as that honour is due to the South Koran candidate. India is too big, and too important, and it's hardly likely that America could countenance an Indian candidate, however thoroughbred his avuncular and American credentials.

So, we have to ask, how did Jayantha Dhanapala get into a mess like this? Maybe because he did UNSCOM related work for the banning of anti ballistic missiles, while Tharoor wrote sentences like this: .....There was that "I shall chase you' song which became a hit even before the movie was released, with every street corner mastaan and eve-teaser in India singing it to accompany and justify their unwelcome pursuits.

***

Tailpiece:

The difference between a dinosaur and automobile is that you can get under the hood of an automobile and try to fix it.

But, you cannot get under a dinosaur and try to fix it, mainly because the narrative behind the dinosaur is different even though a broken car and a dinosaur connote the same thing - datedness. Civil society is now engaged in a process of fixing the dinosaur by the name of the 17th Amendment. But fixing the dinosaur is to try to make a pre historic animal come alive.

That's because the only dinosaurs that are available are those motorised ones that can be found in Jurassic Park.

The last laugh is on Sri Lankan civil society for expecting the 17the amendment, which established the constitutional councils to usher in ''good governance.'' To some extent, civil society in those heady years in which the idea of the CCs were mooted, took almost a perverse pleasure in thinking that through the CCs, governance could be taken away from governments.

This was the adult version of a schoolboy's dream: a class without teachers. Governance independent of politicians?? A Sri Lankan dream, except that it ran into a nightmare of politicians of all kinds.

- Rajpal