Shashi Tharoor Made Indians Google ‘Recalcitrance’ After His First-ever Stand up Act

Shashi Tharoor has done it again.

If you've been following the Congress MP on Twitter, his extravagant arsenal of English vocabulary needs no introduction.

But our favourite English professor has stepped up his game and recently tried his hands at stand up comedy - something he can rodomontade about for years to come. Of course, his stand up preview clip once again made Indians google puzzling English words.

Here's what happened.

On Wednesday, Tharoor shared a "sneak preview" of his upcoming comedy stint on Amazon Prime. Called "One Mic Stand", the series will have five celebrities up against five full-time professional comedians performing in front of a live audience.

In the 3-minute long snippet (the full version will be out on November 15), Tharoor narrated about his "embarrassing" childhood days when his father would ask him to speak in English to the guest.

But you aren't here for jokes, right?

In the video, Tharoor also took sneaky digs at himself and his illustrious vocabulary, while introducing Indians to new, complicated words. Again.

"I had a normal childhood like all of you guys, my parents embarrassed me too when guests came over and said Shashi, Uncle ko angrezi bolke sunao na (Talk to uncle in English)," he said.

To which the young Tharoor responded by saying, "Daddy, please. I can't entertain this! Pardon my recalcitrance."

Read that strange R-word? As soon as Tharoor's video went viral, there was a spike in Google Trends.

In fact, a simple "Shashi Tharoor" google search will throw different spellings of "recalcitrance" back at you under "related queries".

So, what does recalcitrance mean?

According to the Oxford Dictionary, recalcitrance is the quality of being unwilling to obey rules or follow instructions; the quality of being difficult to control.

But the Google searches didn't stop there. In his bit, Tharoor also emphasized on the fact that anything that comes out of his mouth is automatically assumed by people to be more complicated than it actually is.

"Today I was ordering lunch at a restaurant. So I said, 'Please may I have a Caesar Salad?'"

"And this woman goes, 'Oh Shashi! Always quoting Shakespear.'"

And Indians wanted to know the meaning of "caesar salad".

In case you're wondering, caesar salad is a "salad of lettuce and croutons served with a mixture of oil, lemon juice, egg, etc," according to Oxford dictionary.