"There is practically no such thing as a full-time Indian novelist," proclaimed Shashi Tharoor, the 36-year-old author of "Show Business," who, in his other life, is the special assistant to the Under Secretary General of the United Nations charged with peacekeeping operations. "Most of the major Indian writers have other jobs."

"There are 400 million literate Indians; a best seller is a book that sells 10,000 copies," he continued in a telephone interview between emergency meetings on Yugoslavia -- the current hot spot -- from his office at United Nations headquarters in New York.

Born in London, raised and educated in India, Mr. Tharoor, who holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, has been assigned to the peacekeeping team for just under three years; he now leads the team's efforts in Yugoslavia. Earlier he spent 11 years with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, a post that included three years in Singapore, dealing with Vietnamese boat people. "You could put your head to the pillow at night feeling you had made a difference in people's lives."

His writing -- which has produced a scholarly study of Indian foreign policy, two novels, a book of short stories and a play -- is relegated to evenings and weekends, though the current crisis in Yugoslavia has cut severely into that time. These days he typically leaves the office after 9 P.M. and often works on weekends: "I finished this novel and somewhat optimistically embarked on my third shortly thereafter -- wrote five pages and have since been overcome by events."

Mr. Tharoor regularly returns to India, where his parents still live, for inspiration. "I've found fiction a more practical means of expressing my concerns about the world than scholarship," he said, although he does still write occasionally for Indian and American publications. "The issues are important to me, but in my fiction I've always been inspired by Moliere's credo; that is, you've got to entertain in order to edify."