External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has been going viral on the internet for his analogies and this time, he has one from the movies. Making a reference to SS Rajamouli’s RRR on India and United Kingdom’s complex history, the Minister Friday took a humourous jibe at the colonial era and told former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “If I put it delicately, you weren’t the nice guys in the movie.”
Speaking during an interactive session at the Raisina Dialogue with Blair and former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, Jaishankar said that India was in an unusual situation as it was once more a very “decisively upwardly mobile nation”, which a lot of other civilisation states, barring one, are not anymore in a position to do.
“Where the UK is concerned, it is a very complex relationship. The most popular film in India last year was RRR and this had to do with the British era and just I would like to put it delicately ‘you weren’t the nice guys in the movie’,” Jaishankar said in response to when he was asked about India being a bigger economy than the UK.
The external affairs minister said that when there is a complex history between two nations, there would be a downside to it. “There would be suspicions, there would be these unresolved problems at the same time there would be bonds, there would be similarities, and cricket happens to be one of them,” he said.
Soon as Jaishankar made his remarks on RRR, Keven Pietersen, jokingly asked, “Can I sit here as a South African?”
When asked if India’s dominance in the sport of cricket was an indication towards reversal of power, Jaishankar said, “I would call it rebalancing.” “I would also say it is history which is switch-hitting. It’s hitting the other way. But seriously, in history, you have these ups and downs. It’s not often that actually, countries get a second or third bite at the apple,” he said.
During the session, Jaishankar also compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a cricket team captain and said he (Modi) gave his bowlers a certain amount of freedom while expecting them to take wickets. This, he said, was on display when when India decided to announce the lockdown after the Covid-19 outbreak, step up production of vaccines, roll out an inoculation programme and help countries in need of vaccines.
“With Captain Modi, there is a lot of net practice. The net practice starts at six o’clock in the morning and goes on till fairly late… If you have a particular bowler you have trust in or you have seen perform, you would give them the latitude, you throw the ball to them at the right moment. You trust them to deal with that particular situation,” he said, news agency PTI reported.
The minister also recalled how he had worked closely with Blair to ensure supply of raw materials for production of AstraZeneca/Covishield vaccines.
The Raisina Dialogue is the flagship think-tank event organised by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in partnership with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
With PTI inputs