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What ‘Exasperating farrago of distortions’ and Shashi Tharoor can teach you about Vocabulary Preparation for CAT

Friday, May 12th, 2017

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A couple of days ago, ‘The Republic’ was unleashed on India and my opinion about Arnab as a journalist is quite similar to my opinion about Chetan Bhagat as a writer. But then, who am I to question or even criticize the role-model of the masses. During the last week, a role-model of the classes came under fire – Mr. Dr. Shashi Tharoor. There are allegations of wrongdoing about his involvement in the death of his wife, Sunanda Pushkar. Somehow, the very serious allegations were ignored and what caught the attention of social media in general, twitterati in specific, was Shashi’s reactionary tweet to the super exclusive super duper prime time expose.

Here is the original tweet –

Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist

While this was a brilliant PR move as the concentration shifted from the very serious allegations to how Shashi Tharoor has better vocabulary than most of us. So, I thought it would be a good idea to explain the words that he used.

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Exasperating
Meaning: intensely irritating; infuriating.
Example: “they suffered a number of exasperating setbacks”

Farrago
Meaning: a confused mixture.
Example: “a farrago of fact and myth about Abraham Lincoln”

Distortion
Meaning: the action of giving a misleading account or impression.
Example: “we’re fed up with the media’s continuing distortion of our issues”

Masquerading
Meaning: pretend to be someone one is not.
Example: “a journalist masquerading as a man in distress”

So while it might take a little bit, ok a lot of effort, to speak and write like Shashi Tharoor but reading a few of his books would be a good start. Here are a couple that I recommend:

Top 5 Books by Shashi Tharoor

The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel is a satirical novel by Shashi Tharoor. It is a fictional work that takes the story of the Mahabharata, the epic of Hindu mythology, and recasts and resets it in the context of the Indian Independence Movement and the first three decades post-independence. Figures from Indian history are transformed into characters from mythology, and the mythical story of India is retold as a history of Indian independence and subsequent history, up through the 1980s.

Riot: A Love Story

It has a murder. It has mystery. It has drama. It has love.
It is a brilliant book that explores relations between two communities set in the tumultuous year of 1989. A great and riveting read.

Show Business

Show Business parodies and satirises formulaic Bollywood cinema, using it as a metaphor in an attempt to raise and answer questions about contemporary India and Indians. It is a fictional work that tells the story of Ashok Banjara, a Bollywood superstar. Ashok Banjara is critically injured while shooting for a film and his entire life in Bollywood flashes in front of his eyes as he lies suspended between life and death in a hospital. The character and many incidents of Ashok Banjara’s life are inspired by that of Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest superstar in Bollywood’s history.

India: From Midnight to the Millennium

Written in 1997, it discusses a wide range of topics like caste, democracy in India, Indira Gandhi, the partition of India, and its transition from a socialist economy to a free market economy.

Pax Indica: India and the World in the Twenty-first Century

Pax Indica, or the Indian peace, is Shashi Tharoor’s look at modern India. Tharoor’s basic hypothesis is that India can use a combination of her size, trade prowess, soft power and growing influence in the world to ensure an age of domestic transformation. As far as Tharoor is concerned, “pax Indica” is a foreign policy that allows India to play a role in developing a contemporary “peace system” that will help “promote and maintain a period or co-operative co-existence”.

Do you agree with our selection of top 5 books? If not, what else would you want us to put on the list? Please let us know with the help of the comment section.

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