•Shubhojit Roy: After almost 30 years with the UN, you are now at the Ministry of External Affairs. How difficult is it to go from a UN mindset to the Indian spin on global issues?

SHASHI THAROOR: Not all that difficult. Even while I was at the UN, there was a good chunk of me that was anchored in India. My writing, I hope, testifies to that. When I wrote, it was as an engaged Indian citizen who is concerned about India. In that sense, I did not have to make a huge leap into understanding India. I don’t think I can recall having taking any particular position in my 29 years at the UN which would have been completely impossible for India to swallow. Also, when I left the UN it was a fairly definitive departure. But I did not just leap one day from the UN to South Block. I spent two years discovering what I wanted to do in India where I felt I could make a difference.

I came to politics not as someone appointed to South Block but as somebody anxious to do something about the development challenges facing India through a constituency. I came with the grassroots concerns of Thiruvananthapuram in mind, fought a campaign, won it and then came to South Block. But the problems that I deal with in this ministry are very much from the perspective of somebody who has come in from an Indian perspective.

•Shubhojit Roy: You have a website, you tweet, you write, you have written 11 books. But it is said that even the policy to de-classify South Block material is classified. How do you deal with the two different worlds?

... contd.