New Delhi, Jan. 20 (PTI): Stressing India has a stake in the world order, writer-diplomat Shashi Tharoor today said the the country needs to enhance its "soft power" to make Brand India more acceptable to the world while it plays a leading role in ensuring global security.

Defining "soft power" as non-military assets such as culture, music, movies, sports, technological advancements, Tharoor, Under Secretary General at United Nations, said it was about all those things which make it the "land of better story" than its rivals. Tharoor was delivering the R N Kao Memorial inaugural lecture on "India and Global Security: Leveraging Soft Power."

Security threats are not just about nuclear proliferation, but also pandemics, poverty, starvation, environmental degradation and they are "problems without passports," Tharoor said.

"What does soft power mean to India?," Tharoor asked and went to give the answer himself. "It means giving attention, encouragement and active support to the aspects and products of our society that the world around finds attractive."

"This is not to directly persuade others to support India, but rather to enhance our country's intangible standing in their eyes," he said and added Bollywood was already doing it without the government's asking.

Tharoor said it was the soft power of the country which gets a boost when our cricket teams triumph, a player wins a Grand Slam, Bhanga beat is infused into Western pop, or 'Lagaan' claims an Oscar nomination.

Tharoor, however, cautioned that the soft power by itself was no guarantee of security, and reminded the audience of the humiliation of the 1962 Indo-China war, where instead of "speaking softly and carrying a big stick, we spoke loudly and carried no stick at all."

"Soft power becomes credible when there is a hard power behind it," he said, and added it was only "an arrow in a nation's security quiver, not an all-purpose panacea."

"A jehadi who enjoys a Bollywood movie will still have no compunction about setting off a bomb in Mumbai, and the US has already learnt that the perpetrators of 9/11 ate their last dinner at McDonalds," he said.

Underlining the importance of "immeasurable asset" of India's civilizational ethos, Tharoor said,"Let us not allow the spectre of religious intolerance and political opportunism to undermine the soft power which is India's greatest asset."

"When Americans speak of the IITs with same reverence they used to accord to MIT or Caltech, and Indianness of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence, India gains in respect," he said.

The writer-diplomat said soft power was not about "propaganda" and may not rely upon the government to build it, but its impact, though intangible, can be huge.

 "For example, in the US, Hollywood and MTV have done more to promote the idea of America as a desirable and admirable society than the Voice of America, or Fulbright scholarships," Tharoor said.

 "Soft power is created partly by the government and partly in spite of it," he added.

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