Shashi Tharoor: A Distinctive Individual Who Commingles Authorial Accomplishment With Political Subtleties

 

Shashi Tharoor is applauded across the world for some of his fictional and non-fictional books written in superb English language which have conquered the hearts of millions of readers. Riot, Bookless in Baghdad, Why I Am A Hindu, An Era of Darkness, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, Pax Indica are some of the most celebrated literary creations by Shashi Tharoor.

Shashi Tharoor was once upon a time UN Under Secretary General and he also held the echelon of a higher official in the Indian External Affairs Ministry for several years.

Indian Congress Member of Parliament (MP) and acclaimed author Shashi Tharoor on 7 January 2026 took a wily dig at US President Donald Trump after the US launched strikes on Venezuela and captured its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife very recently. In an X post, Shashi Tharoor lashed out at Donald Trump, saying that international law has been honoured in the breach and that "'might is the right' is the new creed".

Shashi Tharoor was born into a London-based Indian expatriate family, which returned to India after his birth. He received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Delhi in New Delhi, and in 1978, at age 22, he received a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. At that time Shashi Tharoor was the youngest person to earn a doctorate from the Fletcher School.

Shashi Tharoor became a staff member in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva in 1978. For nearly the next 30 years he served as a diplomat in the United Nations (UN) in various capacities, including head of the Singapore UNHCR office (1981–84), director of communications and special projects in the office of the secretary-general (1998–2001), and under-secretary-general for communications and public information (2002–2007).

In 2006 India nominated Shashi Tharoor for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations. He finished second out of the seven candidates in the election conducted to choose the secretary-general, which was won by former South Korean diplomat and politician Ban Ki-Moon. Following his defeat, Shashi Tharoor resigned from the UN in 2007 and became the chairman of Afras Ventures, a Dubai-based company.

In 2009 Shashi Tharoor joined the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). In May of that year he contested and won the elections to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian Parliament) from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Shortly after the election, he was appointed the union minister of state (a sub cabinet-level position) in the Ministry of External Affairs in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

Shashi Tharoor is renowned for his eloquence and rhetorical prowess. His linguistic flair has entered Indian popular culture by way of his posts on X, which often features recondite words. In January 1998, Shashi Tharoor was named a "Global Leader of Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He is the recipient of several awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was named to India’s highest honour for Overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, in 2004. He serves on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute India, and the Advisory Boards of the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough. He is also a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities.

An extract can be borrowed from a speech by Shashi Tharoor which he gave on the Indian Independence Day several years back “Today, whether you are a resident of Delhi or Dili, Durban or Darwin, Aligarh or Alabama – whether you are from Noida or New York– it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of your own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction. People, goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and ease. We are increasingly connected through travel, trade, the Internet; what we watch, what we eat and even the games we play.

These benign forces are matched by more malign ones that are equally global. When I was only a few years older than most of you, I began my United Nations career dealing with people without passports, refugees caught in the conflict in Vietnam and Cambodia. In my later career, I learned that these people personified what the United Nations was increasingly called upon to deal with, "problems without passports" — problems that cross all frontiers uninvited, problems of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement.”

The Straits Times has adulated Shashi Tharoor with the following compliments “It is no secret that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi would welcome Dr Shashi Tharoor in his corner.

The affable Congress politician, an opposition stalwart with nationwide popularity exceeded perhaps only by a handful of public figures, including Mr Modi himself, would be an asset to any political party – especially one like the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose popularity suffered a hit in the last parliamentary polls.”

Shashi Tharoor has praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on multiple occasions, much to the displeasure of his own party. He praised the Indian Premier for his US visit when Donald Trump called Narendra Modi "a tough negotiator", a remark which Shashi Tharoor hailed.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers 
and magazines.