"This book is about how foreign policy can make a difference to the lives of people. It also takes a look on India's current state of relations with its near and distant neighbours and its future," he said.
Tharoor was speaking at a panel discussion on the book organised by the Observer Research Foundation.
Former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said the book analyses India's problems with Pakistan and our relationship with the United States, China and other countries.
"At a macro level, there is little one can disagree with what is written in the book," he said.
Admitting that a large segment of foreign policies are generally not taken up in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and are instead decided by the Prime Minister's Office, Sibal asserted that foreign ministers should be exposed to other ministries' so that they can gain experience and get better understanding regarding policy framing.
Maintaining that India should play a proactive role in the current global scenario, Sibal said that no country can afford to leave out India in the contemporary global power structure because of its sheer size.
On India's relations with its immediate neighbour Pakistan, former head of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) Vikram Sood said that there is a liberal section in Pakistani society today but this society is dependent on those who are opposed to India.
Sood said, "A liberal polity in Pakistan doesn't guarantee a strong relationship with India. On the contrary, it may even backfire. It might be easier to deal with fundamentalists' than with a liberal polity."
He said that we can't follow the Israeli example, which Tharoor's book endorses, but can learn from them, adding that India has to come up with its own unconventional methods to deal with its strategic issues and maintain its regional hegemony.
To a question that Pakistan Foreign Services (PFS) officers have outwitted their Indian counterparts on many occasions, the panelists and Tharoor replied in the negative but admitted that India does need a different breed of recruitment process that can help the country identify raw talents who can contribute to foreign affairs.
Tharoor said the central problem between India and Pakistan is not Kashmir, as Pakistani propagandists say, but the state of Pakistan's civil society.
