Shashi Tharoor's tweet once again gets netizens looking up dictionaries

On Wednesday, he retweeted party colleague P Chidambaram's tweet and some of Tharoor's followers immediately reached for their dictionaries to search for the meaning of the word 'schadenfreude'

Wordplay

Congress Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor (pictured) has again got his Twitter followers to riffle through their dictionaries. On Wednesday, he retweeted party colleague P Chidambaram’s tweet of September 24, 2018. Chidambaram had tweeted the link of his interview to a newspaper on the alleged irregularities in the Rafale fighter jet deal where he sought to punch holes in then finance minister Arun Jaitley’s defence of the deal and said, "To a person running scared, every shadow will be a demon". Tharoor fished out the nearly year-old tweet and commented, "Well said P Chidambaram! It is a tribute to your strength of character that you are standing up to persecution and character assassination with courage and confidence. I believe justice will prevail in the end. Till then we will have to allow some malicious minds their schadenfreude." Some of Tharoor's followers immediately reached for their dictionaries and/or the internet to search for the meaning of the word "schadenfreude".

Supporters vs spokespersons

The drubbing faced by the opposition parties in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh not only put paid to the political prospects of their frontline leaders, but also brought bad news to their spokespersons appearing on television debates. With most prominent non-BJP parties — namely, the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party — barring their "official spokespersons" from representing their parties in televised debates, such debates now feature BJP spokespersons only, apart from the representatives of some lesser known and fringe political outfits. Some enterprising leaders of opposition parties, however, have devised a novel way of appearing in TV debates without breaching the ban edict: They are identified as "supporters" of their respective parties rather than "spokespersons"!

No takers

The Kamal Nath-led Madhya Pradesh government is desperately trying to sell its old seven-seater aircraft but with little success. In January, the state government had issued a global tender for its Super King Air B-200. It had fixed a base price of Rs 11.1 crore but there were no takers. This is the third failed attempt to sell off the plane. The aircraft is 18 years old and the state government has been forced to hire charter planes or choppers to fly its VIPs. The previous Shivraj Singh Chouhan government had also tried to sell the aircraft off, albeit unsuccessfully. The Congress (then in the opposition) had criticised the move. Selling it would be a “waste of valuable resources,” it had said.