Voting against Shashi Tharoor

I'll be writing a detailed blog post on this later, but Shashi Tharoor, who is the Congress candidate from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala (my home state) is, in my opinion, the worst kind of carpetbagger ever in my electoral district's history and I will not be voting for him.

He has never lived in Kerala (as far as I can make out), leave alone Thiruvananthapuram, can't speak the local language (http://ibnlive.in.com/news/tharoor-campaign-hampered-by-language-barrier/89617-37.html), has no political experience (I guess losing the fight to be the UN Secretary General *is* experience ;-)), can't stand being questioned on his beliefs (he walked out of a TV interview because he thought the crowd was "unruly") and has no distinctive ideas I can make out from his writings. Apparently his academic qualifications and his diplomatic experience, such as it is is supposed to make up for his not being able to converse with his constituents, leave alone understand them. He was imposed on this constituency as a candidate, over ruling local part sentiment by the Congress "high command" which is another strike against him in my eyes.



I am electorally neutral and I don't belong to any political party, but I'd vote for anyone but Mr.Tharoor in this election.

Any Tharoor supporters on the intarwebz please don't bring up the Obama comparison. Obama is a Harvard grad , but he also has the street smarts of a Chicago politician, superb communication skills *and* ideas of his own.

I hope and pray Mr.Tharoor goes down to a massive defeat, thus sending a signal to other would-be carpetbaggers. I'll go out on a limb here and predict that Mr T will lose badly in the 6 way contest.

Of course, India being a democracy, I can only cast *my* vote as I see fit. If the majority vote goes to him, then he becomes my MP and that is as it should be. May that day never come!