Shashi Tharoor born 9 March 1956 in London, UK is a member of the Indian Parliament from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala. He previously served as the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information and as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs.
He is also a prolific author, columnist, journalist and a human rights advocate. He has served on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. He has also served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough He is also a Patron of the Dubai Modern High School and the managing trustee of the Chandran Tharoor Foundation which he founded with his family and friends in the name of his late father, Chandran Tharoor.
Shashi Tharoor was born in London to Lily and Chandran Tharoor. Tharoor studied at Montfort School in Yercaud and Campion School in Mumbai. He attended high school at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School in Kolkata and obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi .He went on to win a scholarship to study at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and earned three degrees in three years - a Ph.D. and two master's degrees At the age of 22, Tharoor is the youngest person in the history of the Fletcher School to be awarded a doctorate. His doctoral thesis, "Reasons of State", was a required reading in courses on Indian foreign-policy making.. Dr Tharoor has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Bucharest, Romania, and the University of Puget Sound, USA.
Bharat Jyoti”, the Sunday edition of the "Free press Journal", 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. Each of his books has been a best-seller in India. The Great Indian Novel is currently in its 28th edition in India and his newest volume. The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone has undergone seven hardback re-printings there.
Bharat Jyoti”, the Sunday edition of the "Free press Journal", 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. Each of his books has been a best-seller in India. The Great Indian Novel is currently in its 28th edition in India and his newest volume. The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone has undergone seven hardback re-printings there.
Beginning
Shashi Tharoor's career in the United Nationsbegan in 1978 as a staff member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) inGeneva. From 1981 to 1984 he headed the UNHCR office in Singapore during the boat people crisis. In 1989 he was appointed as the Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, the unit that later became the Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Until 1996, he lead the team responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia
Under-Secretary-General at the UN
In 1997 Tharoor was appointed Director of Communications and Special Projects and as Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In January 2001, he was appointed as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, and as the head ofDepartment of Public Information (UNDPI). In this capacity, he was responsible for the communication strategy, enhancing the image and effectiveness of the UN. In 2003, the Secretary-General appointed him to the additional responsibility of United Nations Coordinator for Multilingualism[5]. During his tenure at the UNDPI, Tharoor reformed his DEepartment and undertook a number of initiatives, ranging from organizing and conducting the first-ever UN seminar on anti-Semitism[6], the first-ever UN seminar on Islamophobia[7] and launching an annual list of "Ten Under-Reported Stories the World Ought to Know About"[8].
On 9 February 2007, Tharoor resigned from the post of UN Under-Secretary-General on and left the UN effective 1 April 2007 [9].
[edit]Campaign for Secretary-General: 2007
| 2007 Secretary-General candidates[10] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Name | Position | |
 | Ban Ki-moon | South Korean foreign minister |
 | Shashi Tharoor | Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for public information; from India |
 | Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga | President of Latvia |
 | Ashraf Ghani | Chancellor of Kabul University, Afghanistan |
 | Surakiart Sathirathai | Deputy prime minister of Thailand |
 | Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad | Jordan's ambassador to the United Nations |
 | Jayantha Dhanapala | Former Under-Secretary-General for disarmament; from Sri Lanka |
 | Wikinews has related news:Shashi Tharoor withdrawing candidacy |
In 2006, Tharoor was nominated by the Government of India for the post of UN Secretary General[11][12][13]. Tharoor came a close second (behind Ban Ki-moon) in each of the four straw pollsconducted by the UN Security Council[14][15][16] and won the online poll conducted by the BBC News website[17]. After 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. Of the seven contenders for the post, Tharoor remained the only other to enjoy a majority in the Security Council. One Permanent Member (later revealed to be the US under the Bush Administration) opposed and China abstained from voting. After the vote, Tharoor withdrew his candidacy expressing his confidence for Ban to win[18].
Had he been elected, the then 50 year old Shashi Tharoor would have been the second-youngest Secretary-General to be appointed to the post. The first being Dag Hammarskjold who was appointed at the age of 46 years.[19][20]
Post-UN career
In February 2007, amidst rampant speculation about his post-UN future, it was presciently 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.[21] 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, though he withdrew his name from consideration at the final stage.[22] Instead, Dr. Tharoor—in addition to a variety of other activities in his private life— became chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures, which established the Afras Academy for Business Communication (AABC) in Trivandrum, Kerala, India. He also spoke widely around the globe about India and Kerala, the state where he spent increasing amounts of time before moving for good in October 2008.[23]
[edit]Political Career in India
In March 2009, Shashi Tharoor contested the Indian General Elections in 2009 as Congress Partycandidate from Thiruvananthapuram (Lok Sabha constituency) in Kerala. His opponents included P. Ramachandran Nair of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Neelalohitadasan Nadar of theBahujan Samaj Party (BSP), M.P. Gangadharan of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and P. K. Krishna Das of Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP). Despite being criticized as an "elite outsider" he went on to win defeating his nearest CPI rival P. Ramachandran Nair by a margin of approximately 100,000 votes. Subsequently Shashi Tharoor was selected as Minister of State in the Council of Ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. On 28 May 2009 he was sworn in as the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs.
Tharoor's use of his political website (www.tharoor.in) and new media technologies like Twitterquickly earned him a celebrity status. He went on to become the first Indian celebrity to get 100,000 followers on Twitter.. However, some of his tweets (or twitter posts) proved controversial and were quoted by the press and opposition parties to criticize his work. On 18 April 2010 Tharoor resigned from his post as Minister of State for External Affairs on instructions from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, following allegations that he had misused his office to get shares in the IPL cricket franchise of Cochin. Tharoor stoutly denied the charges and in his resignation speech called for a full inquiry. His position seems vindicated by the fact that there have been no adverse findings and no legal proceedings have been instituted against him.
On 2 May 2010, he was nominated to be a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for External Affairs by Lok Sabha SpeakerMeira Kumar.
erary career
Tharoor has written numerous books in English. Most of his literary creations are centred on 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 has been a highly-regarded columnist in each of India's three best-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindunewspaper (2001–2008) and in a weekly column, “Shashi on Sunday,” in the Times of India (January 2007 – December 2008). Following his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy issues in the "Deccan Chronicle". Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor toNewsweek 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 “B
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