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Shashi Tharoor
(Class Of 1971)
Diplomat & poltician
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 Tom
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