Shashi Tharoor (Malayalam: ശശി തരൂ൪; born 1956) is an author of Indian origin who writes in English. He is also known as a journalist contributing regularly to The Hindu and other newspapers. He studied at the Campion School in Mumbai and is a graduate from St. Stephen's College, Delhi and obtained his PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the winner of numerous Literary and Journalism Awards.

Since 1978, he has worked 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 of the United Nations.

Perhaps Tharoor's 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

He is a winner of numerous journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1991. In 1998, he 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.

Tharoor is currently a fellow at USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

Works

Fiction

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

Non-Fiction

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

Reference and External links

Parts of the author's biodata has been reproduced from the above website with permission of the author.

Quotes

• India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.