Certainly not class apart

When Shashi Tharoor was dropped from the Cabinet a few days ago,some of his supporters wanted people to believe that he was probably too sophisticated and too educated for the political class. They cited his 1978 PhD from Tufts University in US as evidence of his brilliance. What Tharoor and his supporters overlooked is that the current establishment has a glut of people with PhDs and degrees from reputed foreign universities. While Home Minister P Chidambaram and HRD Minister Kapil Sibal have both studied at Harvard University,Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh went to Carnegie Mellon. Prithviraj Chavan has a masters from University of California,Berkeley,Sachin Pilot has graduated from Wharton,Jyotiraditya Scindia from Harvard while Montek Singh Ahluwalia studied at Oxford. Foreign Minister S M Krishna has been a Fulbright scholar. And,of course,Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has studied both at Oxford and Cambridge.