Shashi Tharoor

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Young Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor (Malayalam: ശശി തരൂര്‍; Born 9 March 1956 in London) was the official candidate of India for the succession to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006, and came second out of seven official candidates in the race. Tharoor served as the UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information between June 2002 and February 2007. He is an author, journalist, and fellow of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Tharoor is an Indian national, from the state of Kerala.

Education

In India Tharoor studied at the Montfort School in Yercaud, the Campion School in Mumbai, attended High School at St. Xavier's Collegiate School in Kolkata and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from St. Stephen's College, Delhi. While at St Stephen's Tharoor was actively involved in the Debating Society, Quiz Club, and Students' union, of which he was the elected President. He then completed a Ph.D at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Massachusetts, where he also earned two Masters degrees.

UN career

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Shashi Tharoor showing replica of Cyrus Cylinder to a visitor at the UN headquarters.

• Since 1978, Tharoor has been working for the United Nations, serving with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat people" crisis.
• Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where, until late 1996, he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia.
• From January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
• In July 1998, he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the office of the Secretary-General.
• In January 2001, he was appointed by the Secretary-General as interim head of the Department of Public Information.
• On 1 June 2002, he was confirmed as the Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information. In this capacity, he is responsible for the communication strategy, enhancing the image and effectiveness of the UN.
• In 2003, the Secretary-General appointed him United Nations Coordinator for Multilingualism.
• Resigned from the post of Under Secretary General on the 9th of February 2007.

Candidacy for the post of Secretary-General

On June 15, 2006, the Government of India announced its backing for Tharoor's candidacy as Kofi Annan's successor for the post of UN Secretary General.

Tharoor came second (behind Ban Ki-moon) in each of the four straw polls conducted by the UN Security Council on 24 July, 14 September, 28 September and 2 October. In the fourth poll, Ban emerged as the only candidate with the support of all five permanent members, each of whom has the power to veto candidates. After the vote, Tharoor withdrew his candidacy, telling reporters he was “confident that Ban will win”.

Post-UN career

In February 2007, it was reported in the Indian press that Tharoor might be inducted into council of ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as Minister of State for External Affairs. In the same month, it was reported in an American gossip blog that Tharoor was a finalist for the position of dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles.

Literary career

Tharoor has written numerous books in English. Most of his literary creations are centered around Indian themes and they are markedly "Indo-nostalgic". Perhaps his most famous work is The Great Indian Novel, published in 1989, in which he uses the narrative and theme of the famous Indian epic Mahabharata to weave a satirical story of Indian life in a non-linear mode with the characters drawn from the Indian Independence Movement. His novel Show Business (1992) was made into the film Bollywood (1994). The late Ismail Merchant had announced his wish to make a film of Tharoor's novel Riot shortly before Merchant's death in 2005.

Tharoor writes a fortnightly column for The Hindu newspaper since 2001 and a weekly column, "Shashi on Sunday", in the Times of India starting January 2007. Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor to Newsweek International and the International Herald Tribune. His op-eds and book reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, amongst other papers.

Tharoor began writing at the age of 6 and his first published story appeared in the "Bharat Jyoti" in Mumbai at age 10. His World War-II adventure novel Operation Bellows, inspired by the Biggles books, was serialized in the Junior Statesman starting a week before his 11th birthday.

Works

Fiction

• Riot (2001)
• Show Business (1992)
• The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories (1990)
• The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Non-fiction

• Bookless in Baghdad (2005)
• Nehru: The Invention of India (2003)
• Kerala: God's own country (2002)
• India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997)
• Reasons of State (1982)

Awards and recognition

• In 1976, at age 20, he won the Rajika Kripalani Young Journalist Award for the Best Indian Journalist under 30.
• In 1990, he won the Federation of Indian Publishers-Hindustan Times Literary Award for the Best Book of the Year for The Great Indian Novel, which also won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1991 for the Best Book of the Year in the Eurasian Region.
• In 1998, Tharoor was awarded the Excelsior Award for excellence in literature by the Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP).
• He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in May 2000.
• In January 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a “Global Leader of Tomorrow”.
• In 2004, he was awarded the prestigious Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honour for non-resident Indians, but did not accept it owing to UN rules prohibiting acceptance of governmental honors.
• In 2007 he accepted the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award, India's highest honour for non-resident Indians which he had been unable to accept 4 years earlier due to UN rules .

Personal

He married Tilottama Tharoor, a journalist and scholar, at the age of 21, from whom he is now divorced. He is the father of twin sons, Ishaan and Kanishk, who have recently graduated from Yale. One of the twins, Ishaan lives in Hong Kong and works for Time magazine and the other brother, Kanishk, is a resident of London working for openDemocracy.

Tharoor is known for his passionate interest in cricket, especially Indian cricket, about which he has written in such publications as The Cricketer International, The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Hindu. An outstanding actor and debater in school and college, Tharoor won numerous prizes at inter-collegiate "winter festivals" and similar competitions. He played Antony to Mira Nair's Cleopatra in a 1974 production of "Antony and Cleopatra". At St. Stephen's in the early 1970s he founded the Quiz Club, which is still in existence, and revived the Wodehouse Society, which is not. Upon election as President of the College Union (campaign slogan: "Shashi Tharoor jeetega zaroor") he relinquished the editorship of the campus humour magazine "Kooler Talk". He was invited by St Stephen's College to deliver the college's 125th Anniversary Jubilee Lecture in 2005. He is an elected Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Advisory Board of the Indo-American Arts Council.

At the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976, he founded and was the first chair of the editorial board of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs, a journal examining issues in international relations.

External links

• Tharoor's Home Page - Parts of the author's bio data have been reproduced from this website with Tharoor's permission
• Resources from the Carnegie Council
• Tharoor's biography on UN.org
• BBC Q&A with Tharoor, 22 June 2000
• USC Center on Public Diplomacy
• Shashi Tharoor for UN Secretary-General Page
• Shashi Tharoor at PanIIT 2006,Mumbai
• Shashi Tharoor at nostaljigs.com