SUNDAY SPECIAL: The Geneva Hotel Room That Changed Shashi Tharoor
✍️ Written by Saket Suman
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| Image Source: Shashi Tharoor on X |
Shashi Tharoor had
just begun his career at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), and found himself increasingly troubled by the optics of benevolence.
How charity is often less about transformation, and more about performance. How the giver occupies the centre of the frame, while the receiver is reduced to a token. And in that lonely room, wrestling with the quiet dissonance of it all, he wrote a short story that would come to define perhaps what is the making of his early literary voice: The Five Dollar Smile.
The story, first
published in The Illustrated Weekly of India, and later turned into the
title piece of his collection, flips the traditional charity narrative on
its head. Rather than glorify the magnanimity of the Western donor, it centers
the voice of the Indian orphan. The child in the story merely endures the
weight of being seen.
“Perhaps being
lonely and alone in an unfamiliar country where I didn't speak the language and
where I didn’t have too many friends contributed to the mood that shaped the
story,” Tharoor would later say. There was a rawness in that solitude, a mood
that bled into the prose. This was emotional reportage from the frontlines of
internal exile.
In many ways, The
Five Dollar Smile marked the beginning of Tharoor’s dual life: the public
servant and the private writer. At the time, his literary output was composed
mostly of short stories, reviews, and essays—brief pieces written between
diplomatic cables and UN briefings. These were the kinds of writings meant for
newspapers and magazines, ephemeral yet pointed, perfectly crafted for their
moment.
There were two
clear reasons for this rhythm. First, Tharoor had long mastered the art of
literary journalism; he was already writing columns and opinion pieces from his
youth, and had developed an instinct for reader-friendly form and editorial
tempo. Second, and more pragmatically, the demands of international bureaucracy
left little room for a full-length novel. “The job was fulfilling,” he once
said. “But taxing. There wasn’t time—or the mental space—for a book.”
And when it concluded, i was gratified to find i had readers and fans even in Moscow! (The last pic features the Russian Edition of #TheFiveDollarSmile — but the reader’s smile is worth a lot more!) pic.twitter.com/ynLxTOLHxB
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 26, 2025
But amidst
this pace of his early career, one fact became increasingly evident: everything he wrote
got published. And not just published—they began to be read, circulated, and debated. There was a
rare connection to his work that the then urban elite could relate to. The kind of face that editors loved. The kind of
bite that readers remembered. He became intoxicating. But it was also, in his own
words, transitory.
That’s when the
shift began. The short-form, he realised, had a short shelf-life. The essay
that goes viral today is forgotten by the weekend. The op-ed that stings in the
moment rarely outlives the week’s news cycle. For a writer obsessed with
endurance, that simply wasn’t enough. It was time to write something lasting.
“Chalo, kitaab
likhte hain,” he told himself.
That quiet internal decision sparked what would become his magnum opus: The Great Indian Novel. But Tharoor didn’t leap into the book blindly. Long before typing the first line, he paused to map what really mattered. What did he believe in? What did he want to challenge? What stories were going untold? At the heart of it all was history—Indian history, in all its vastness. He wanted to reimagine how power was exercised, how memory was weaponised, and how myths shaped a democracy still coming to terms with its own fault lines.
He was interested
in reframing the story. Could he turn Mahabharata into a
political allegory? Could epic be satire? Could Parliament and Kurukshetra
occupy the same stage?
The result was a
novel that was equal parts parody and prophecy. The Great Indian Novel that
became a declaration of sorts: that India’s story could be told on its own
terms, and with its own symbols. That literature could do what diplomacy often
couldn’t—speak plainly, without protocol.
But I would say a
lot of it began in exile. In the silence of an unfamiliar room, in the quiet
questioning of Western charity, in the loneliness that sharpens one’s view of
the world.
The Five Dollar
Smile was the first flare
from a writer who understood that to write well is to learn to subvert. To take
a narrative handed down by power, and flip it. To speak from the margins, and
force the center to listen.
That’s what makes Tharoor’s writing both provocative and relatable, even if that's only about a child and a smile that cost just five dollars.
(Saket Suman is the author of The Psychology of a Patriot. Among other roles, he was a Special Correspondent at The Times of India and the head of Arts/Books/Culture verticals of what was India's largest independent newswire.)
(Views Expressed Are Author's Own and Do Not Reflect The Views of This News Outlet)