Meet Shashi Tharoor, diplomat: Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations. His days and much of his evenings are spent working on the volatile situation in Yugoslavia. Since last October he has been at least seven times to that strife-torn country.

Meet Shashi Tharoor, family man, father to a pair or energetic twin boys and a modern day husband, he must share in the child-rearing with his wife, Minu, who teaches English at New York University and is working towards her doctorate in the evenings.

Meet Shashi Tharoor, writer: Acclaimed author of “The Great Indian Novel,” “Show Business”, and “Reasons of State,” which is a scholarly book on Indian foreign policy, and a book of short stories, “The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories.” Tharoor also writes a regular column for “The Indian Express", and occasional articles for American newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Which brings us to the obvious question – how does he ever manage to find the time to write?

While admitting to India-West that it’s increasingly hard to carve out the time to write, Tharoor quotes George Bernard Shaw to explain his compulsion to write: “I write for the same reason that a cow gives milk.” I’ve always tried to do both – studying and writing, or working and writing – because I see myself as a human being with a number of concerns about the world: some of which I manifest through my work, whether it’s for refugees or peacekeeping; and some of which I manifest through my writing.”

Tharoor, 36, has had a lifelong love affair with the written word. Born in London, he spent his growing years in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. An asthmatic child, books were his getaway vehicle to a larger world. In fact, at the age of 12 he read 365 books in a year as a challenge to himself.

He recalls, “There was no television in Bombay in those days, so the one diversion I could have for myself was to write. By the time I was ten, the stories started getting published in the children’s page of magazines and newspapers.” He continued to write through school and college, all the while shining at academics.

After graduating from St. Stephens with a degree in history, Tharoor received a scholarship from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the United States to do graduate work in international affairs. Fletcher is on the Tufts campus and is jointly administered by Tufts and Harvard. He continuously received the Best Student Award and, hard to believe but true, received his doctorate at the age of 22.

Tharoor then started his career at the United Nations, working with the High Commissioner for Refugees, and spent eleven-and-a-half years there, including three years in charge of their offices in Singapore, during the Vietnamese boat people crisis.

“It was a challenging job and at the same time it was a job where you could put your head to the pillow at night, feeling you’d made a difference in other people’s lives,” he says.

After another five years in Geneva, Tharoor moved in 1989 to New York and is now the Special Assistant to the Under Secretary-General for Peace-keeping Operations. The volatile situation in different parts of the globe has relegated his writing to the back burner, says Tharoor, “Saturdays and Sundays are not sacrosanct, one is very often at the office on weekends. Also, as the twins grow older they’ve a legitimate claim on my limited leisure time. Were I to spend all of it on my writing, then certainly the family would hardly know me. So right now, I don’t know when or where the next novel is coming from.”

Source : INDIA-WEST MAGAZINE
February 12, 1993
By Lavina Melwani