Shashi Tharoor, a Congressman from Nagaland where the most recent Assembly elections were held, shared a brief video clip of his interaction with one of his self-described “biggest fans” in response to her request to “spill some secret” on how someone “so astonishingly good-looking and charismatic” can be “brilliant and intelligent” at the same time.
“Choose your parents wisely,” he quipped, on the way one looks, adding that it’s all in the genes.
“There are things that you can’t help, and there are things that you can change yourself to do,” Mr. Tharoor said, suggesting that one should work towards acquiring intelligence.
The senior Congress leader explained that reading became a habit for him in childhood, and he ‘knows a lot’ because he retained a lot of all he read.
He further advised practicing public speaking to get better at it. “There’s no foolproof thing, and you can’t sit at home and practice in front of a mirror,” he said, adding that one has to go out in front of a real audience and see how they react.
Shashi Tharoor was in Nagaland to campaign for his party for the recently concluded Assembly elections.
The NDPP-BJP alliance secured a comfortable majority in the 60-member Nagaland Assembly, winning 37 seats. The Congress, once a dominant force in Nagaland politics, failed to win any seat in the Assembly for the second consecutive time. However, it improved its vote share by 1.45 percentage points to 3.55 percent.
Shashi Tharoor is an Indian former international civil servant, diplomat, bureaucrat and politician, writer, and public intellectual who has been serving as a Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers.
