Some in the conservative media were peeved earlier this week when UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Shashi Tharoor (see former posts here and here) was quoted as saying that it was “the exercise of American power” that “may well be the central issue in world politics today.” Right-of-center bloggers pick up:

This is why the UN is useless. Whatever the original intention of the organization, the mission has morphed into trying to hinder anything the US wants to do. Oh, and by the way, the US is still expected to provide most of the funding, material, and other resources necessary for the UN to function. The situation is surreal.

Tharoor however doesn’t seem to be totally against the exercise of American power (if that is what his statement was implying as deciphered by right wing media). He likes the literary freedom it may have brought at least. He has just released his new book titled, Bookless in Baghdad which is a collection of essays inspired by walking through a Baghdad booksellers market:

Walking through Baghdad’s book souk, Shashi Tharoor, author and UN secretary general for communications and public information, couldn’t help being moved. “There were so many well-educated, middle-class people selling books on the pavement in Baghdad,” says the 48-year-old author. His stroll across the souk led to a compilation of literary essays…”

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Sorry, I can’t help you in this department. You may gain some insight however in extricating yourself from worldly attachments (and that includes American Idol you freaks), by taking a look through Pankaj Mishra’s new book, “An End to Suffering,” as profiled in the New York Times:

You occasionally hear of writers, especially when their books are of long incubation, coming to resemble their subjects, and my fleeting glimpse of Pankaj Mishra seems to offer uncanny proof of the phenomenon. For here, surely, was the young Siddhartha Gautama himself: a scholar-sophisticate, a personality both cosmopolitan and ascetic, at large and at home in the world.

I wonder if this is similar to the phenomena where dog owners come to resemble their dogs?

“An End to Suffering” is part biography, part history, part travel book, part philosophic treatise. But perhaps it could best be described as a work of intellectual autobiography. I say “intellectual” rather than spiritual, let alone religious. Mishra is not a Buddhist — he “couldn’t sit still” long enough to meditate successfully — and his story is not a narrative of conversion or a road map to inner peace, at least not in the expected sense. It is, rather, the tale of his attempts to delve into the legacy of one of the world’s greatest philosophers.

The Buddha, as Mishra describes him, was not a prophet — not a religious figure but a secular one. Indeed, “he had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgment.” He likewise ignored the question of why sin and evil exist in the world, which has obsessed nearly every major religion. The Buddha’s concern was purely practical: to relieve suffering, both material and existential. His precepts weren’t couched as revelations from on high, delivered with the crash of thunder; instead they came as small quotidian insights: “I well remember how once, when I was sitting in the shade of a jambu tree on a path between the fields. . . .”

“…I took out my laptop and typed a blog entry in hopes of relieving the people’s suffering with a brief distraction.” That’s how I would have ended that quotidian insight.

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