For most of his early life, 35-year-old Shashi Tharoor officially prepared for a career in government of administration, while unofficially, he relentlessly prepared to be a writer. His sprawling novel of modern Indian history, The Great Indian Novel (see excerpt and commentaries) published in India, Great Britain, and the U.S. to wide critical acclaim may seem the unlikely product of a career official of the United Nations. (Currently an official at the UN Headquarters in New York, he was for eleven years a bureaucrat with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.) And yet, Tharoor, at the tender age of six, began writing detective stores entitled "Solvers on the Trail," modeled after the adventure stores of famous British children's novelist Enid Blyton. 
        
        Throughout his school years in Bombay and Calcutta, and while doing his BA at the prestigious St. Stephen's College in New Delhi, he published articles and occasional short stories in several English language magazines in India, winning the Rajika Kripalani Young Journalist Award for Indian journalists under 30 in 1976. He is the author of Reasons of State (Vikas, New Delhi, 1982), a highly regarded scholarly book on Indian foreign policy-making, and a collection of short stories and full-length satirical play The Five-Dollar Smile: Fourteen Early Stories and a Farce in Two Acts (Viking, New Delhi, 1990). The Great Indian Novel has been a best-selling novel in India, having sold out even its third printing, and has won the Hindustan Times/Federation of Indian Publishers' Literary Award for the Best Indian Book of the Year, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best Book of the Year (Eurasian Region). 
        
        Following are highlights of an interview with Tharoor during his recent visit to Washington, D.C. 
        
        The World & I: What inspired you to use India's national epic, the Mahabharata, as the vehicle for your novel? 
        
        Shashi Tharoor: I had heard stories from the Mahabharata as most Indian children have done, everyone knows a little bit of it. I had even read earlier on C. Rajagopalachari's translation, which is not really a translation--it's an episodic [treatment]. His Mahabharata has been one of the best-selling books in India for a long time. 
        
        So this was there in the back of my mind, but I was reading a particular translation--P. Lal's which is one of the more recent ones, published in the mid-seventies. He has a very interesting introduction in which he makes the point--and I'm sure that it provoked my thinking--that no ancient epic is sacred in itself. What is important is what is relevant to the latter half of the twentieth century. If it means nothing to me now, it's irrelevant, it's dead. And it struck me in reading it, that "My gosh, what a wonderful story! It can actually work in twentieth century terms." 
        
        So I though about it, and I said, "Well, this ought to be worth trying." I dashed off thirty-two pages of double-spaced typed script, and found, as I was doing it, some of my ideas of Indian nationalism--how some characters affect other characters--were coming in. Then I put it aside and did something else for a few months. And my brother-in-law came over to visit--we were in the study--and he flipped through the pages and got to the end and kept looking for more. He asked "Where's the rest of this thing?" And I said: "There isn't any rest of it."