Viral video: Shashi Tharoor is currently 'man of the moment'

Love him, hate him, but you can’t ignore Shashi Tharoor. The Congress leader has a fan following that goes beyond politics.

At a time when Shashi Tharoor is leading abroad a multi-party parliamentary delegation after Operation Sindoor, aiming to explain India's response on terrorism , a video of him from March 6, 2023, has surfaced online.

In it, a woman praises him by saying, “Sir, how can someone be so good-looking, charming, and also so intelligent at the same time? Please share your secret!” Tharoor responds to the compliments with a smile and some wit.

In the two-minute clip, the woman heard saying : “Sir, please explain yourself how can someone be so astonishingly good looking and charismatic, and even more implausibly brilliant and intelligent at the same time? Sir please spill some secrets."

To which, Tharoor laughed and said: “There are things you can’t help. And there are things that you can change yourself to do. So the way you look at all of that, honestly, all I can say is choose your parents wisely. It’s all in the genes. But everything else, you should work at it," adding that, “I mean, I must say that reading, as I explained earlier, became a habit in childhood. I’ve kept it up and therefore I’ve read a lot. So I think I know a lot because I have retained a lot of what I have read."

Tharoor said he’s proud to admit that it wasn’t always easy speaking fluently before a bunch of strangers, speaking before an audience. “But once you’ve done it often enough, you develop the confidence, and particularly when you know that your ideas are clear and it’s a question of expressing them before people, then that’s something you get to do. But you have to practice it by doing it," the Congress leader said.