Shashi Tharoor was in Calcutta last week, his first visit to the city after assuming office as junior foreign minister in May. His packed schedule didn’t permit a stop at St Xavier’s Collegiate School, where he had enrolled as a 12-year-old in 1969. Metro caught up with the politician, author, columnist, former bureaucrat and Twitterer as he headed to the airport from a Rotary International District 3291 programme where he was conferred an award. Yes, he does speak Bengali, but it suffices only for conversations with Bangladeshi cab drivers in New York. Excerpts from the interview:

1969 and 2009… your thoughts on what you see on the streets today.

When I came here in 1969 for the first time we had traffic but it was never so outrageously bad. Driving through the city offers disappointments despite the fact that there have been improvements — the flyovers, the Bypass… the thing on top of Lower Circular Road didn’t exist earlier. In many ways, that maps the sign of the city’s renewed prosperity because for a long time there was no activity in Calcutta.

If you were given the brief of a communications officer for the city (Tharoor was the under secretary-general for communications and public information at the United Nations), what about Calcutta would you want the world to know of?

This is a city with a heart, with a legendary sense of connectedness to larger social purposes. It is also a city with a cultural soul though it helps if you understand Bengali, because a lot of the literature, the discussion, the theatre are in Bengali.

What would be the negatives?

The negatives that people assume of Calcutta are congestion, pollution, inefficiency, strikes and bandhs. Now reports of political violence in Bengal inevitably reflect on the capital of Bengal, and communication alone is not enough. To overcome those negatives the reality has to change.

Calcutta has the capacity to redevelop not just the culture but its politics. It has another negative perception — of being against the cardinals of the great developments of the 21st century. That wasn’t the case. In the early years of Buddhadeb (Bhattacharjee), there was a perception that Calcutta had embraced the reforms that were propounded by Dr Manmohan Singh and the first government of Narasimha Rao. Calcutta was seizing the opportunities to take itself and India to the 21st century. Recently that perception has dulled a bit. I joked even today about the line that when Calcutta catches a cold the rest of India sneezes. That is not true anymore.

Your book Midnight to Millennium and Beyond speaks of the huge expectations you had as a 12-year-old when you heard of your father’s transfer to Calcutta. How soon did disillusionment creep in?

I was going to say pretty soon. But the positives also came. For example, I went from a classroom environment in Bombay where so many of my classmates were asked what your father earned, how much gold your mother had. In Calcutta there was no curiosity about such matters. The interests were your academic and human qualities, your talents as a speaker and actor, athlete or whatever it was at Xavier’s. I will be forever grateful that Calcutta took me away to a higher level of human consciousness than I was enduring in my last couple of years in Bombay.

The disillusionment came from the visible and massive deterioration of public order in Calcutta. Remember, I came in January 1969… it was the height of the Naxalite movement — the murder of the vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University, the postponement of exams…You know as someone obsessed with history I had really thought there could be nothing grander than studying history in Presidency College, Calcutta. Yet by the time I got to Class XI, there were disruptions at university, classes were not being held, exams were being postponed, when exams were held, papers got lost, results took months, even when the results came you could not be sure if they were your results. So instead, I went off to St Stephens, Delhi, when I’d much rather have been at home in Calcutta in a good academic environment.

Some of the glamour associations of Calcutta also faded in this environment. The multinational companies, many of whom were the legacies of the imperial era, folded and left. Many left their shell and moved their real operation to Bangalore or Bombay.

The first discotheque in India was In & Out at Park Hotel. That glamour suddenly disappeared. Instead there were overwhelmingly dark pictures of poverty on the sidewalks, dying at Mother Teresa’s — my mother used to volunteer for Mother Teresa — the dislocation of public space, the burning of trams every time someone had a political grudge, and of course the stories of Naxalites causing anxiety…. It seemed very much a city on the edge. Therefore I was not sorry to go to away to college. Obviously, that Calcutta is long gone but the Calcutta rising in its place still has some way to go.

What was the most enduring impression in terms of events and personalities you met?

The final year of my school, 1971, was the year of the Bangladesh refugee crisis, the conjunctivitis epidemic that was called Joy Bangla, the war… I was one of the millions who went to hear Mujibur Rehman when he came here and delivered one of the most impressive and powerful speeches that I have ever heard live. He played the audience like a musical instrument. Indira Gandhi came and spoke first and, of course, she spoke in English. Mujib deliberately began his reply in English. Of course, the audience started expressing their disappointment. When he switched to Bengali, there was no missing who was the more popular leader on stage!

Cricket diplomacy

It promised to be a glittering evening with a heady mix of cricket and glamour. Rosewood Hall at The Park on the last day of October hosted every celebrity in the city, remotely connected or far removed from cricket. The occasion: the launch of Shadows Across the Playing Field, 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket co-authored by the junior foreign minister with his Pakistani counterpart Shaharyar Khan. There was academic Bharati Ray, tea taster Dolly Roy, kantha expert Shamlu Dudeja, jewellery designer Nilanjana Chakrabarty, all gathered to hear the dapper and debonair Tharoor on cricket diplomacy. That a foreign minister can also talk cricket seemed to reassure the chief guest, governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

The book is a part of Roli Book’s Crossborder Talks series, for which two authors across the subcontinent co-author a title. While Tharoor wrote the Indian side of the story, former Pakistan foreign secretary, cricket manager and administrator Shaharyar Khan told the Pakistan experience. Tharoor admitted he was a “passionate follower of the game but from outside”.

He wrote the book before winning the polls, “when I was not part of the Indian government”, said Tharoor, adding that while he had finished writing before 26/11, the book was yet to go to print then. “So I made changes because before the attacks, there was a lot of optimism. 26/11 changed all that. As M.S. Gill (sports minister) rightly said, ‘We cannot have one team going to Pakistan to play while another team comes here to kill people’,” said Tharoor, who said there was no possibility of the Indian cricket team resuming Pakistan tours unless the government punished the attackers. Terrorism has cast its shadow over cricket.