Shashi Tharoor charms Dubai with wit and wisdom at Emirates Literature Festival

Over the weekend, the Emirates Literature Festival was filled with insightful conversations and sharp discussions. But Shashi Tharoor’s session titled A Wonderland of Words, which is also the title of his latest book, was the highlight. The engaging discussion was followed by a book signing that turned me into a fangirl.

The session was moderated by award-winning British presenter Amandeep Bhangu, who kept the discussion brisk, warm and focused on language rather than personality. Tharoor, an Indian politician, author, and former diplomat, was at his finest, oozing charm and wisdom built on decades of reading, listening, and making a living from words. He greeted the audience with “it’s great to see this small, but I hope, engaged audience. It’s lovely to be with you all”. There was light laughter, and then the audience settled into the kind of attention you usually only see when someone has earned it.

Tharoor described his book as a collection of short reflections designed for the casual reader. The chapters are not long, scholarly arguments. “These are bursts of thought,” he said. He pitched them as “bite-sized chapters, ideal for dipping in and out”. I felt that my own reading habits were being politely validated.

The appeal of the session lay in how Tharoor delved seamlessly into his private and public life. When Bhangu asked about the roots of his love for language, Tharoor spoke about his father teaching himself English through sheer persistence.

“When he arrived in London, he rapidly realised the inadequacy of what he’d learned, so he taught himself the language,” he said. His father kept notebooks in which he jotted down quotes from literary giants such as Byron, Shakespeare and Dickens. This detail matters because it was not an exercise in appearing polished, but simple curiosity. It was about a man taking pleasure in words.

Tharoor described his father as the kind of man who treated language like a game and made it irresistible for his children. “He became a Scrabble nut before it was fashionable,” he said, adding that when his father returned to India, he was “literally looking around in Mumbai for someone to play Scrabble with”.

Tharoor’s father would write a long word and challenge his children to create smaller words out of it. “Because I was older, I had to make a minimum of four-letter words,” Tharoor said, “and my sisters would do three-letter ones.” He slipped in a small, satisfied confession: “I usually won, I have to admit.”

Then came the anecdote that made the whole room lean forward. His father, decades ago, invented something eerily similar to Wordle. There was no internet. No coloured squares. No gentle nudges. “He gave us 20 turns, not five,” Tharoor said, and “he wouldn’t tell us if any letters were in the right place. It was a tremendous amount of fun.”

There was also an emotional side to his father’s love of words. “He wrote the most wonderful letters,” Tharoor said. “When he passed away, so many people spoke about how moved they were by the things he had written to them.” Be it “a bereavement, a promotion, a setback, a challenge”, Tharoor said his father “had the gift of using the right word in the right place”. Words were not decorative, but precision tools. “He conveyed to us that words are both a pleasure in their own right and valuable because of what they convey.”

From there, the conversation grew into what Tharoor does best: Making language accessible. At this point, Bhangu brought up his reputation for difficult vocabulary. Tharoor handled it with dry humour and a little exasperation. “I unfortunately have an undeserved reputation for difficult words,” he said. “I use the most appropriate words for what I’m trying to convey.” He framed it as a duty. “If I can’t convey my thoughts to the audience, I’m a poor communicator,” he said. “I use language to get my message across, not to confuse or impress.”

That line earned a ripple of approval. It was the sort of sentence that sounds obvious until you remember how many people use words as smoke.

Tharoor’s humour also works because it is rooted in observation. He spoke about the illogical quirks of English with the pleasure of someone who still finds it funny. “Languages don’t have to be rational, but English probably wins the irrationality prize,” he said. It landed because it felt true, and because he delivered it as a fond complaint rather than a lecture.

The session dipped into wordplay that makes you laugh before you think. Tharoor explained “paraprosdokians” as “remarks, sentences, observations that end in ways you don’t expect at the beginning.” He added: “They pack a surprise. They’re usually very funny.” Then he delivered his favourite example, quoting British comedian Bob Monkhouse: “I would like to die peacefully in my sleep, as my father did, not screaming and terrified like his passengers.”

The room reacted exactly as you’d expect. A beat of silence, then laughter, then the second wave when people replayed the sentence in their heads.

Tharoor also spoke about how English behaves like a magpie. He mentioned the German “schadenfreude” and pointed out, with a grin, that the English often prefer the German word to the English equivalent. “There is an English word for it — epicaricacy — but I don’t think many people use it,” he said, adding that it was not going to “trip off their tongues”.

The discussion on multilingualism felt especially relevant in Dubai, where language-switching is a daily sport. “You don’t really choose a language,” Tharoor said. “A language chooses you through the circumstances of your life.” He traced his own story across cities and schooling, and offered a simple admission when asked what language he thinks in. “I’m afraid it’s probably English,” he said, even though he also speaks Hindi, Malayalam and French. Quoting Nelson Mandela, he said: “If you speak to someone in a language they understand, you reach their mind; if you speak to them in their language, you reach their heart.”

Tharoor also defended the often maligned Indian English. He framed it as a living, practical language shaped by time and usage. “If enough people find a word or phrase useful and meaningful, it is legitimate,” he said. He talked about “mugging” for an exam, and how telling a Brit you were “mugging” would produce the wrong kind of alarm. He mentioned “What is your good name?” and the cultural logic behind it. He also had the room in splits with “kindly adjust”, offered apologetically to the seventh person squeezing on to a bench meant for four. He ended with a sentence that felt like a wink at every Indian in the room: “After all, we are like that only.”

The Q&A segment was lively. One audience member asked Tharoor to describe his relationship with English in a single word. “Intimacy,” Tharoor said, then added, “though some might say promiscuous.” Another question dug into the relationship between thought and language. “Thought comes first,” Tharoor said, observing that “increasingly… thought is shaped by language.” He compared it to sculpture. “Language is the chisel that gives shape,” he said. “The thought is there already.”

Tharoor answered a question on punctuation in his inimitable style. In the era of WhatsApp, the questioner observed, a full stop can read like anger. Tharoor refused to cancel punctuation. “I wouldn’t banish any of it,” he said. He flagged the apostrophe as endangered and warned that missing punctuation could be “calamitous”. Then came the punchline: “Take a restaurant called Anu’s Kitchen,” he suggested. “Drop the apostrophe and the name takes on an entirely different, and very unfortunate, meaning!” Tharoor also batted for the comma. “The punctuation mark I think is indispensable is the comma,” he said. Then he delivered the classic demonstration: “Let’s eat, Grandma.” Without the comma, Grandma becomes dinner. The room laughed, and the copy editors in the audience probably felt seen.

The questions also touched on writing discipline, attention spans, abbreviations, and AI. Tharoor admitted that his productivity came at a cost. “I don’t sleep enough,” he said. “It’s not easy. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.” Then he added a line that felt like a promise to himself and a joke for the room: one day, he said, “the voters will return me to the world of literature”.

On the business of getting children to read instead of scrolling, Tharoor asked parents a simple question: Are you reading yourself? “If a child cares about football, give them books on football,” he said, describing reading as pleasure first, homework second.

Then came the AI question, and his tone sharpened. Tharoor spoke about the danger of students using AI to outsource thinking and eventually sacrificing individuality. “We risk giving up the ability to craft words that reflect your personality and style,” he said, and that loss matters.

I did not raise my hand up during the Q&A because I knew my brain would empty itself the second I held the microphone. I told myself that I would say something articulate to Tharoor at the book signing. Then I reached the front of the line. Tharoor looked up, smiled, and greeted me with the calm ease of someone who has spent his life meeting strangers who feel like they know him. My planned sentence vanished. I managed a polite hello, handed him my copy, and watched him sign it with a hand as steady as the voice that had just held a room.

I walked away with a signed book and the odd satisfaction of being happily inarticulate. A session about words gave me my weekend’s best silence.