Currently a Lok Sabha MP fromThiruvananthapuram constituency and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, Dr. Sashi Tharoor is an author, politician, and former international civil servant. During his nearly three-decade long prior career at the United Nations, he served as a peacekeeper, refugee worker, and administrator at the highest levels, serving as Under-Secretary General during Kofi Annan’s leadership of the organisation. India’s most-followed politician on Twitter, Dr. Tharoor straddles several worlds of experience.
Born in London in 1956, Dr. Tharoor was educated in India and the United States, completing a PhD in 1978 at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is also a recipient of several awards that include a Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman and in 2012 the King of Spain awarded him the Encomienda de la Real Order Espanola de Carlos III.
Following his long career at the United Nations, which included key responsibilities in peace-keeping after the Cold War and serving as senior adviser to the Secretary-General, in addition to his role as Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Dr. Tharoor returned to India and was elected to Parliament in 2009. He was vocal in many of the important debates of the 15th Lok Sabha in India, and in his current second term sits in the Opposition benches, also serving as the Chairman of the Standing Committee on External Affairs and a member of the Standing Committee on Rules.
Dr. Tharoor, fluent in English, French as well as in Malayalam and Hindi is the author of hundreds of articles, op-eds, and book reviews in a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, TIME, Newsweek, and The Times of India.
His first non-fiction book, Reasons of State (1981) is a study of Indian foreign-policy making, while his India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) is an acclaimed analysis of contemporary India, cited by President Clinton in his address to the Indian Parliament. Kerala: God's Own Country (2002) was a collaboration with the artist MF Hussain, dedicated to his home state while Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) is a biography of Pandit Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, and an exposition on his intellectual outlook and vision. Bookless in Baghdad (2005) is a collection of literary essays while The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone (2007) compiles essays about contemporary Indian politics, society, and culture.
His three novels are the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989), which is required reading in several courses on post-colonial literature and whose Silver Jubilee Edition, after 43 reprints in India, was out in September 2014; Riot (2001) a searing examination of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India; and Show Business (1992), which received a front-page accolade in the New York Times Book Review and has since been made into a motion picture, Bollywood. Many of Dr. Tharoor's books have also been translated into French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, as well as Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi.
A prominent human rights advocate, Dr. Tharoor was appointed an International Adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva for the period 2008-2011. He was also a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and the Patron of the Dubai Modern School, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Hague Institute for International Justice.
Dr. Tharoor's late wife, Sunanda P Tharoor, a businesswoman and philanthropist, passed away in January 2014.
In an exclusive interview with Bahrain This Week,Dr. Tharoor was asked why he uses rarely used words and terms in his speeches and books. Is it a way to attract your readers to the world words?
He said “There are various levels to answer that! The entire purpose of the communication is to understand. If you speak in words that no one understands, there is no point. I do really try to speak with clarity and precision, so that people understand what I am saying. Having said that there are people who don’t understand words said with clarity and precision. So, what I consider clearly emphasize may be a difficult word for someone else. So, the first basic point is that I use the most accurate word to communicate a particular idea precisely. Another level of answer is that when I deliberately use the so called unusual and complicated words, it is for fun than anything else. When I choose to say my newly released Indian book “The Paradoxical Prime Minister” is more than 500 pages of word exercise, but “floccinaucinihilipilification”, immediately the word got notified and through that word, my book got more publicity than it would have otherwise got. That’s the sort of words I would use for fun. I would say that I don’t particularly relish the young children being forced by their parents to learn these words by heart so that they can come up and tell it to me whenever we meet and take a video of that. That is more like a party trick! Far more important is to have a real curiosity, real knowledge and real reading. When you read, your vocabulary automatically increases, and you understand the same word in four different contexts. The person who reads more books in a year will have more vocabulary than a person who reads one book. I would encourage people to read more books than studying more words.