Shashi Tharoor Becomes Unwitting Brand Ambassador for Online English Class That Used His Name in Ad

If you ever thought that Congress MP Shashi Tharoor would make for a good poster boy for English coaching classes, you aren't alone. The Thiruvananthapuram MP, who is known across the world for his gift of the gab, recently featured in an online advertisement for an English coaching class.

In an ad that went viral on social media, KD Campus Live - an online, video-based teaching platform - used the following phrase in Hindi to promote an online English coaching class:

"Angreji ke maatra 50 shabd seekh kar bane Shashi Tharoor aaj raat 10 baje". Roughly translated, the line reads, "Learn just 50 english words and become Shashi Tharoor tonight at 10 pm".

The advertisement also features the name of the teacher, Neetu Singh, who was meant to be conducting the class.

Posted last week, the ad has since been going viral. So much so that it reached Tharoor himself. The witty politician and author took to Facebook to share an image of the ad on his page and take a dig at the ad.

"Mujhe nahin lag raha hain ki 50 shabdon se Shashi Tharoor banega," Tharoor wrote. Meaning, "I don't think anyone can become Shashi Tharoor by just learning 50 words".

The post has been going viral on Facebook where it has already been shared by hundreds of users and gathered over 19,000 likes.

While the ad seems to have made its mark, the fact that Tharoor unwittingly (we hope) made it to the ad is perhaps not a surprise. He did, after all, wrote The Tharoorosaurus, a thesaurus-style book in which he teaches people how to be more eloquent by replacing common verbiage with terrifyingly complex words to up your dinner party game.

In case you forgot, the last time Tharoor strung together a sentence full of complex words, it made it to Herge's Tintin graphic novel series where the verbose Captain Haddock spoke the words, "Exasperating farrago of distortions" - a phrase tweeted by Tharoor in 2017.