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Nov 28, 2021

Watch: 'I Adored My Daddy But Thought of My Mother as a Harridan, COVID Has Brought Us Closer'

Tharoor has written two essays on his parents, Chandran and Lily Tharoor.

It is extremely rate for politicians to write or talk about their parents, and almost exceptional for this to be done with a transparency which reveals both heart-wrenching emotions and candid judgements. Yet this is what Shashi Tharoor has done in two essays on his parents, Chandran and Lily Tharoor, which are part of a collection of essays and articles published in his latest book Pride, Prejudice and Punditry: The Essential Shashi Tharoor.

In an interview to The Wire, Tharoor said that he “worshipped and adored” his father, who he described “as my author”.

From the age of 12 onwards, Tharoor said, he lived with the growing dominant fear of his father’s death. “For a quarter of a century I had feared this moment. I had grown up thinking that every unexpected call at an unusual hour, every unannounced visitor was to convey the news that my father had suddenly been taken away… the fear of his loss had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to dominate me, my own heart shuddering whenever the faint hollow whine on the telephone suggested an unexpected international call.”

Tharoor also revealed why he blamed himself for his father’s death. “I felt that, in recent months, I had not tried hard enough to keep him alive. Into my mind I had admitted the possibility that he would go…my need of him, my need for his approval, his support, his help, had been diluted over time, while his need of my need had never changed…I had ceased to need him as much as before. I had allowed the urgency of our bonds to slacken, and now they have snapped for all time.”

The MP’s relationship with his mother, though, is very different to the relationship with his father. “My mother and I have not always had the easiest of relationships…she has always been a difficult person, in contrast to my affable father, who was generous to a fault and always anxious to please others. My mother isn’t. She is a direct, no nonsense woman who is blunt to the point of rudeness.”

Tharoor also revealed that his mother does not approve of him becoming a politician: “She disproved of my entering politics, and prays regularly that I quit and return to what she sees as respectability.”

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