Tharoor episode : Political tweeting or chirping?

Shashi Tharoor's recent "cattle class" remarks, in the backdrop of Congress's austerity drive, created a political furore and recieved massive political attention. For the uninitiated, when asked by a journalist if he would travel economy class to Kerela, Mr. Tharoor replied that "he would travel cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows". The use of words "cattle class" and "holy cows" was condemned as insensitive and irresponsible by most of our politicians.

With excessive media hype about the same, I could not resist signing into twitter myself, to gather some first hand information. Unfortunately, by then, the comments had been removed (or was I unable to find them?). So I googled to find the exact meanings and origins of these words. This is how urban dictionary defines cattle class : "pertains to flying economy class (or 'coach' in America) on a flight. It is called this mainly because many people are crammed into such a small space for an extended period of time and most of the time are treated like animals". Basically , it is a common American word used interchangeably with economy class.

At the end of this excercise, when I reflected back on how our political fraternity reacted to this entire episode, I was shocked, once again, by their negligence and inability to think analytically. Now you must be wondering when did this happen earlier. Well, remember Jaswant Singh's book on partition and the political drama that followed? I wonder how many of our politicians actually read his book before commenting on it. Drawing cue from these episodes, I cannot help but point out the tendency of Indian politicians to escalate non-issues. We witnessed this when BJP fired Jaswant Singh for his remarks on Nehru and Patel and just when we thought that it was over, we are seeing this tendency yet again.If you take a look at Tharoor's tweets, you will notice that he is one of those politicians who shares a lot of the information and replies to messages from his followers.These politicians are giving our politics a new dimension in terms of transparency that we have always been fighting for.Its time that other politicians take cue from them and spend their energies on more relevant issues that are awaiting their attention.