IndianRepublic.in

✍️ Written by Saket Suman In a quiet hotel room in Geneva—far from the chaos of home, surrounded by a foreign tongue, and engulfed in the solitude that often comes with idealism lived abroad—a young Indian diplomat sat with a question gnawing at him: What does charity really mean? 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 th...