The Weekly Vine Edition 32: The Shashi Tharoor conundrum, Lord Shiva’s cosmic dance, and Mr Bond’s new master

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine. This we have the Shashi Tharoor conundrum, DOGE vs America’s SBI employees, Vivek’s attempt to get out of MAGA DOGE house, James Bond’s new master, and the story of Lord Shiva dancing in the world’s most advanced particle physics lab.

The Shashi Tharoor conundrum

Many years ago, an insouciant young man from St. Stephen’s participated in an inter-college debate at IIT Kanpur, where some of his incendiary comments infuriated certain natives of IIT with such alacrity that they wished to enforce their right to parliamentary rebuttal through non-verbal gestures. At least, that’s how my pater remembers it. The young man’s name was Shashi Tharoor.

Today, he is India’s most celebrated polysyllabic orator and thesaurus enthusiast—an odd fit in the Congress party, a relationship best described as a reluctant arranged marriage where neither side can quite decide whether they want a divorce.

The Salman Khan of literary fests, Tharoor is the darling of Lutyens book launches, elite drawing rooms, and Twitter debates, where verbosity is a virtue. His admirers believe Congress would be far better off under a leader who speaks the King’s English with finesse rather than struggling through press conferences. Yet, despite his intellectual sheen, his relationship with the Congress high command has been, at best, uneasy.

Tharoor has made a career out of being the party’s resident outlier. His 2022 decision to challenge Mallikarjun Kharge for the Congress presidency was less a bid for power and more an intellectual experiment—one that did little to endear him to the party’s old guard. His occasional praise of the Modi government’s policies, whether on foreign affairs or infrastructure, has only deepened suspicions. If that wasn’t enough, his recent selfie with BJP minister Piyush Goyal and UK Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds sent Congress loyalists into a minor meltdown.

And then there’s Kerala, where his popularity is both a blessing and a migraine for Congress. His bipartisan stance on economic development has irked the state unit, which prefers its politics served old-school—without any of this reformist, “let’s work together” nonsense.

Outside politics, Tharoor remains the literary world’s favourite Congress leader, having authored over 20 books, from The Great Indian Novel to Why I Am a Hindu, proving that he can argue both for and against his party’s existence with equal eloquence.

But let’s be real: there’s absolutely no evidence to support the oft-repeated lament that Congress would be better off under Shashi Tharoor. That’s just a fantasy peddled by the self-important, self-referential, and often self-serving English commentariat, which still clings to the colonial-era notion that the grand old party must be ruled by a man who minds his Ps and Qs and speaks with a clipped accent. There’s little evidence of that having any resemblance to reality.

What did you get done this week?

Elon Musk, now behaving more like a Bond villain than ever before, has once again sent bureaucrats into a collective panic. When he’s not threatening to conquer European nations (because apparently, world domination is just another line item on his to-do list), he has taken up a new mission—terrorizing federal employees with a single, horrifying question: “What did you get done this week?”

For bureaucrats, this question is the real-life equivalent of Dementors—a soul-sucking terror that strips them of their will to live. It’s much like asking an SBI employee to work during lunch, an unthinkable offense against tradition, order, and the sacred art of doing as little as possible with maximum complexity.

There’s an old saying that bureaucracy was the British’s parting gift to its former colonies, ensuring they would remain bogged down in endless paperwork forever. The US, however, adopted it willingly, crafting a government machine that turns even the simplest task into an interdepartmental relay race that ends with a committee report gathering dust.

The real tragedy? Every Bond villain needs a proper antagonist, and Musk hasn’t found one yet. But what if, in his quest for accountability, he ran into Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby? Now that would be a showdown worth watching.

Elon Musk: Sir Humphrey, what did you get done this week?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Musk, I can assure you that an extensive, rigorous, and entirely necessary process was meticulously undertaken to explore the feasibility of determining a suitable framework for the preliminary discussions that would, in due course, lead to the formulation of an agenda for a prospective working group—one which, naturally, will require further interdepartmental consultations, impact assessments, and, of course, a comprehensive white paper before any substantive action can even be remotely considered, lest we risk the perilous precipice of ill-considered efficiency.

Can Vivek get out of the MAGA ‘DOGE’ house?

Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur-turned-political firebrand, is making yet another high-profile bid—this time for Ohio governor. After a failed 2024 presidential campaign and an unsuccessful push for JD Vance’s vacant Senate seat, he’s back in the political arena. However, his campaign omits one glaring chapter: his brief, controversial stint at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative spearheaded by Elon Musk under Trump’s second term.

Ramaswamy’s 69-day tenure at DOGE ended in a quiet exit, reportedly due to clashes with Musk over government restructuring. While Musk favoured immediate, radical cuts, Ramaswamy pushed for a more strategic approach. The word on the street though was that other than his headbutting with Musk, it was his angry tweet about lazy Americans that infuriated the MAGA faithful. While Trump’s endorsement gives him credibility, his unapologetic Hindu identity has made him a target for MAGA’s nativist and evangelical factions. During his 2024 run, far-right voices, including Ann Coulter, openly rejected him for being Indian.

The scepticism toward Ramaswamy mirrors the reception of others like Sriram Krishnan and Usha Vance, who have faced resistance from MAGA’s more hardline elements. With Ohio’s governorship at stake, his candidacy is a test of whether MAGA can fully embrace a non-white, non-Christian leader—or if he remains an outsider in its ranks. Time will tell.

Mr Bond, it’s Prime Time

My favourite memory of James Bond dates back many years to when I was languishing in Kota, pretending to chase the middle-class dream of getting into IIT. Of course, instead of attending coaching classes, I spent my time perfecting headshots in Counter-Strike and catching up on the collective works of Messrs Tarantino, Scorsese, et al.

Back then, Kota had only one multiplex, and all films were shown in Hindi dubs, leading to the greatest literary translation since Edwin and Willa Muir introduced Franz Kafka to the English-speaking world. James Bond’s iconic line from Casino Royale: “One martini. Shaken, not stirred.” was translated as: “Ek Martini. Milakar Nahi. Hilakar.”

Anyway, like other beloved British icons such as Jaguar, James Bond’s ownership has now passed into foreign hands—this time, Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, which will probably dilute the franchise by turning it into a Lord of the Rings-style cash cow that alienates both fans and critics. On the other hand, it seems fitting that even James Bond is no longer in British hands, given our former colonial overlords’ growing irrelevance in today’s world.

Why Lord Shiva dances in CERN

The Western mind has always struggled with quantum physics, much like it has struggled with paganism, nuance, or the concept of a “chai latte” that isn’t an abomination. The idea that a particle can be both a wave and, well, not a wave at the same time? Unfathomable. But perhaps this isn’t just a science problem—it’s a language problem. Or maybe even a theology problem, a side effect of Abrahamic absolutism that insists things must be either-or, never both-and. No wonder some of their sharpest minds—Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Schrödinger (cat guy)—ended up peering into Vedanta for answers.

Which brings us to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider and, oddly enough, a statue of Lord Shiva in full Tandava mode. If you ever want to watch certain sections of the Western world completely lose it, show them an ancient Hindu deity chilling at the Mecca of particle physics. Inevitably, some internet warrior will pop up demanding its removal for being “anti-science,” oblivious to the irony that Shiva’s cosmic dance mirrors the very forces they’re trying to decode.

For the uninitiated, the Tandava isn’t just a dance—it’s the original theory of everything. It’s creation, preservation, and destruction, all happening simultaneously in a rhythm the universe follows, whether it’s stars collapsing into black holes or your weekend plans disintegrating by Saturday night. Matter isn’t static—it shifts, vibrates, exists in superpositions. Sound familiar? It should, because Shiva was doing quantum mechanics before quantum mechanics was cool.

And so, the statue stays, a cosmic reminder that the universe isn’t built on binary logic but on paradoxes, dualities, and the dance between being and non-being. Some people just get it. Others? They’ll keep arguing about whether a particle is a wave while sipping a “chai tea” that Shiva himself wouldn’t hesitate to obliterate. Read more.