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Shashi Tharoor
July 21, 2008
One of the 2007 season's most
popular speakers, Shashi Tharoor is Chairman of Dubai-based Afras
Ventures; a prize-winning author of ten books, both fiction and
non-fiction; and a widely-published critic, commentator and columnist
(including for The Hindu, The Times of India and Newsweek).
In 2007 he concluded a nearly
29-year career with the United Nations having most recently served
as the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public
Information. Early in his career, he headed the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees office in Singapore during the peak of the Vietnamese
"boat people" crisis. Beginning in 1989, he was a senior
official at UN headquarters in New York, where, until late 1996,
he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former
Yugoslavia. He was executive assistant to UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan, and he was appointed director of communications and
special projects in the office of the Secretary-General in 1998.
In 2006, he was India's candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN
Secretary-General, and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders.
Dr. Tharoor's books include
the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989), India: From Midnight
to the Millennium (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003),
Bookless in Baghdad (2005), and most recently, The Elephant,
the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on 21st Century India
(2007). He has received several journalism and literary awards,
including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Born in London, Dr. Tharoor
was educated in India and the United States, completing a Ph.D.
at the age of 22 at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
at Tufts University, where he also earned two Master's degrees.
He was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998 as
a "Global Leader of Tomorrow." He has also been awarded
the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honor for overseas
Indians. |
