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Shashi
got his PhD at the age of 22 from the Fletcher School of Law &
Diplomacy.
Since 1978, he has worked for the United Nations, serving with the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during
the "boat people" crisis. Since October 1989, he has been a senior
official at UN HQ in New York, where, until late 1996, he was
responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. From
January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan. In July 1998, he was appointed director of
communications and special projects in the office of the
Secretary-General. In January 2001, he was appointed by the
Secretary-General as interim head of the Dept. of Public Information. On
1 June 2002, he was confirmed as the Under-Secretary-General for
Communications and Public Information of the United Nations.
Shashi is the author of numerous articles, short stories and
commentaries in Indian and Western publications, and the winner of
several journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth
Writers' Prize.
His books include Reasons of State (1982), The Great Indian Novel
(1989), The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories (1990); Show Business
(1992), which received a front-page accolade from The New York Times
Book Review and was made into a motion picture titled Bollywood; and
India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), published on the 50th
anniversary of India's independence and Riot (2001).
Shashi is the winner of numerous journalism and literary awards,
including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1991. In 1998, Shashi was
awarded the Excelsior Award for excellence in literature by the
Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian
Professionals (NetIP). He received the honorary degree of Doctor of
Letters in International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in
May 2000. In January 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, as a Global Leader of Tomorrow
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