Shashi Tharoor

United nations career

Dr. Tharoor started off as a staff member for the UNHCR and was a staff member of its Singapore office from 1981 to 1984, and helped resettle a backlof of Vietnamese refugees and and led rescue efforts at sea during the boat people crisis. In 1989 he was appointed special assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs. He also led the team responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia and spend a lot of time on the ground during the civil war. He also served the role of Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information under Kofi Annan. He conducted the UN's first-ever seminars on Antisemitism and Islamophobia. He ran for the seat of Secretary-General in 2006, but lost to Ban Ki-Moon.

Indian political career

Dr. Tharoor was first elected to the Indian Parliament in 2009, and represented the Congress party from the Kerala's capital city, Thiruvananthapuram. He also served as Member-Convenor of the Parliamentary Forum on Disaster Management, and as a member of the Standing Committee on External Affairs; the Consultative Committee on Defence, the Public Accounts Committee; and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Telecoms. As Minister of State for External Affairs for Manmohan Singh, he was in charge of Africa, Latin America, and the Gulf, including the Haj pilgrimage, and the Consular, Passports, and Visas services of the Ministry. He re-established long-dormant diplomatic relationships with African nations, where his fluency in French made him popular with Francophone countries and their heads of state. In 2012 Tharoor was re-inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with the portfolio of Minister of State for HRD. In this role he took special interest in the problems and challenges of adult education, distance education and enhancing high-quality research by academic institutions. He also made efforts to amend Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlawed homsexual sex, which bore fruit later when the Indian Supreme Court ruled in favour of amending the draconian law.

literary career

Dr. Tharoor has written 19 books in English. Tharoor's most famous non-fiction works are mainly focussed on Indian politics and the effect of British colonialism on India. Works like "Why I Am A Hindu" and "The Paradoxical Prime Minister" are bestsellers in India and talk about the political climate of the country and the idea of secularism in India. "An Era of Darkness", a book on the British Empire's destruction of the Indian subcontinent, is still a bestseller in the United Kingdom. Through his works he has provided a detailed and well-written account of India's colonial past and it's independent present.

Achievements

Dr. Tharoor also served on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute, and the Advisory Boards of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough, which fights to empower women and girls in India. He was also a human rights advocate, and 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 GEMS Modern Academy, Dubai(my previous school), and serves on the Advisory Council of the Hague Institute for International Justice.

Sources

Wikipedia contributors, "Shashi Tharoor," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shashi_Tharoor&oldid=991519663 (accessed December 9, 2020).

https://shashitharoor.in/biography

Image Sources

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