The old Bollywood Song  "Mera Joota hai Japani , ye patloon englistani , …phir be Dil hai Hindustani ………." springs to mind upon reading Tharoor’s endless reminders to the readers in his book "Bookless in Baghdad"; this vein runs strongly in promoting the cause of Indian English literature through his broodings and thoughts on his path to the global literary scene.

There are delightful insights into these meanderings which have lead Tharoor to write eight major books. From this present position, he can see the promise of the emerging Indian English literary horizons. John le Carre is put down very rightly for his neo-colonial cold war novels. The American marketing of Ernest Hemingway’s furniture memorabilia [ his Mont Blanc Pen , lamps, clocks, duck decoys ] is ridiculed in a chapter titled " For whom the Bill tolls" ; equivalent Indian literary memorabilia – a Mulk Raj Anand Coolie badge appear ridiculous.

George Orwell’s hopeful comment "tomorrow we will have coffee in Huesca " takes the reader, with Tharoor and his wife, to the Sierra de la Pena where this town was the stronghold of the fascist Franco and where George Orwell was wounded in action as one of the few writers to take up arms against Spanish fascism.

A tremendously simpatico chapter on Salman Rushdie , another on the painstaking efforts of V.S. Naipaul to become a writer is reflected in the exchange of letters between father and son. The power of the word as being mightier than the sword is brought through the chapters and words of Churchill , Neruda , Havel, the great Indian epic Mahabharata, and many other chapters on Kipling , Wodehouse, and Muggeridge

Most wonderful of all is the chapter devoted to the critical appreciation of an imperfect Indian book called "The Enquire dictionary of Quotations" by the editor T.J.S.George. Finally we read the cover chapter " called "Bookless in Baghdad, where at the height of the American sanctions, well-to-do Iraqis became so economically hard up that they started selling their prized collection of books .

One wonders if certain literary critics  even made the effort or expended the sweat to even trace and follow the footsteps of an Indian writer and his origins as Tharoor has done in the case of George Orwell. It is very convenient to trash and write negative reviews; very difficult to show the sort of passion with which Tharoor has fertilized the Indian literary soil.