New Delhi
23 September 2009
It was a baptism of fire for Shashi Tharoor, whose healthy appetite for tweeting
on the social networking site Twitter became a national obsession and something of an
embarrassment to his Congress party, and his every tweet was parsed for innuendo.
One of his latest tweets, about how he has a "ridiculously full schedule" on Thursday,
prompted remarks such as how Tharoor was now complaining about his workload.
"Have a ridiculously full schedule tomorrow with 17 meetings / engagements. You
always pay a price when u come back from a trip. Signing off[,]" Tharoor tweeted after his
meetings Tuesday with Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister
Manmohan.
Tharoor called on the two to clarify his position on the furore over his tweet about
travelling in "cattle class" out of solidarity with "all our holy cows", a comment which
was seen as ridiculing the party's austerity measures.
Tharoor, a Minister of State of External Affairs and the Member of Parliament from
Thiruvananthapuram, who recently returned from a six-day official tour of Liberia and
Ghana, also tweeted about "mountains of pending files" as he was away from office for
almost a week.
"Long day catching up with a week's absence from Delhi. Mountains of pending files.
Two journalists actually interviewed me on Africa!," he wrote in the tweet.
Tharoor posted similar tweets in the past: About how on one day 19 scheduled meetings
became 21, and on another occasion how he had had a "19-meeting day".
He made no bones about his dissatisfaction with having to do two full-time jobs that of a
Minister and an MP. "Our parliamentary system quite unreasonably expects 2 fulltime
jobs out of every Minister - 2attend2 pol constncy & ministry[,]" read a tweet.
"Politics in India is a fulltime profession, 365x24x7, except in leap yrs[,]" Tharoor said in
one of his many other tweets.
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