Shashi Tharoor, the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, keeps reminding us of his several talents.
Shashi Tharoor, famous for unmatched vocabulary in the English language and his witty comments and comebacks to fellow politicians, tweeted a picture of himself and Mira Nair, an Indian-American filmmaker based in New York City with nominations by the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award, back from 1974 when they acted in St. Stephen’s play on Shakespeare's "Antony & Cleopatra".
In a 2015 GQ interview, Shashi Tharoor has talked about the play he did with his then classmates and now renowned Indian names across the globe. St.Stephen’s has seen and educated many Indians who have gone on to become experts in varied fields and teh current Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram is only one of them.
The story behind the age-old but precious photograph of Shahsi and Mira back from days has a long history with the prestigious St Stephen College in the national capital Delhi. The college at that time was an only-boys college and has to ask another renowned all-girls college in Delhi, Miranda House.
In the year 1974, the St Stephen’s College Shakespeare Society produced a version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The play’s cast had a young Shashi Tharoor and Mira Nair in the lead roles of the play.
The play had cast Aamir Raza Husain, the renowned theatre director and impresario, as Pompei and Ramu Damodaran, served as private secretary to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao as Enobarbus. Arun Singh, Asoke Mukerji and Gautam Mukhopadhyaya who then held the position of Indian Ambassador in Paris, New York and Yangon as Roman legionaries. Amitav Ghosh, who recently wrote Gun Island and advertising guru Piyush Pandey graced the stage as slaves and spear-carriers.
Funnily, in a 2012 interview for the Entertainment Times, Mira Nair has recalled the time she played Cleopatra to Shashi Tharoor as Antony. She has been quoted saying, “I used to eat onions before my love scenes with Shashi Tharoor because he was so pompous.”
Only recently Shashi Tharoor debuted on a one-time comedy show ‘One Mic Stand’, that was released on the OTT platform, Amazon Prime. Shashi Tharoor definitely knows how to have people talking about himself in the nicest ways.
