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Shashi Tharoor

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By Posted Tuesday, Aug. 11, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Most people I know would gladly find other ways of spending a week, but it's striking how many senior executives keep coming to the Aspen Institute to improve themselves.
And they don't do so just for the spectacular surroundings. There's hard work involved. A couple of months in advance, the institute sends out a formidable two-volume set of readings, culled from what Mortimer Adler used to call the "Great Books," though this set goes beyond his list. There's Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, of course, and Machiavelli, and those old standbys Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. (It's tempting to think of them as an Enlightenment law firm: "Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, specialists in contracts, especially social ones. Discretion not assured.") But there's also Confucius and the Koran and the Gandhi-Tolstoy correspondence, and even extracts from E.F. Schumacher and Nelson Mandela. The Great Books keep being written, because the Great Conversation about what life on this planet is really all about will never be over.
Great Books there may be, but fortunately what we get in our readings is only the Great Pages. Five hundred and fifty-six of them, not counting a slender copy of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, the only novel on our list.
I couldn't finish them all on the plane. That, and a bunch of pending U.N.-related work I have carried with me--not to mention the writing obligations of a Slate diarist--meant that I watched wistfully while the rest of my group went sightseeing and hiking at the picturesque Maroon Bells, leaving me at the computer. Logging on with the best of intentions, I rose four hours later, thoroughly distracted and having got little done. There's so much tempting material on the Web--a tensely poised cricket test match between England and South Africa, the latest political news from coalition-ridden India--that my other pressing deadlines were soon forgotten.

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By Posted Tuesday, Aug. 11, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
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Shashi Tharoor is a prize-winning Indian writer of both fiction (The Great Indian Novel, Show Business) and nonfiction (most recently, India: From Midnight to the Millennium). He is also director of communications and special projects in the office of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
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