Shashi Tharoor is not your garden-variety public relations executive.

He is the author of five books, the most recent of which, India: From Midnight to Millennium, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of Year and cited by former President Clinton in his address to the Indian Parliament last April. One of his novels, Show Business, was filmed as the motion picture, "Hollywood." In 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as a "Global Leader of Tomorrow."He is also the recipient of several journalism and literary awards, including the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize.

He earned a Ph.D. degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he also picked up two Master’s Degrees.

Despite the impeccable credentials, Tharoor demurs when an interviewer calls him, "an intellectual."

"I have not really done enough academic work, I think, to qualify - to deserve - that designation in the way you phrased it," he replies diplomatically.

For that is precisely what Shashi Tharoor is - a diplomat. And not just any diplomat either.

When United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, needed a trusted associate to be the U.N.’s first Director of Communications and Special Projects in 1998, he chose Tharoor. Earlier this year, when a vacancy occurred as head of the U.N. Department of Public Information, the Secretary-General named Tharoor as interim head of the 735-person unit. And, when the Iraqu delegation arrived at New York headquarters in late February to discuss its sensitive world role, it was Tharoor who sat at Annan’s side.

Recently, the Strategist talked with Tharoor about how he handles the challenge of, as he puts it, "promoting concern for poor and the victimized in the media of rich and the tranquil."        

REFUGEES

Strategist: How did a person with your background work his way into public relations?

Shashi Tharoor : I have been writing since my childhood. I've been published in Indian newspapers and magazines since the age of 10. I won a young journalist award in India, for journalists under 30, when I was 20. I was writing throughout my student days.

Strategist: When did you enter United Nations work?

Tharoor: I began my career as a public information officer with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. But then I moved on to doing something very different. I headed the office in Singapore at the peak of the Vietnamese boat people crisis.

Strategist: So you were on the line

Tharoor: I was actually running the office. I was responsible for trying to get refugees to disembark from the ships that rescued them in the high seas and brought them into the port of Singapore. We negotiated with the ship owners and the captains and the agents and with the government of Singapore. And because the government of Singapore wouldn't let them disembark without guarantees of resettlement, we negotiated with the diplomats and the embassies of the countries. And then, of course, we ran the camp in Singapore where these people were.

Strategist: How did you react to a job with that kind of responsibility?

Tharoor: When I arrived in Singapore, we had over 4,000 in the camp. And, part of my job was to try to move them along to new counties as quickly as possible, but also to give them decent lives while they were there. I remember one family which had left Vietnam in a tiny little boat, with a cannibalized