Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

Shashi Tharoor, Ph.D., Under-Secretary-General, United Nations Department of 
Public Information
Born in London in 1956, Shashi Tharoor was educated in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi (BA 
in History, St. Stephen's College), and the United States (PhD, Fletcher School of Law & 
Diplomacy at Tufts University).
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 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 
1997 to 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In 1998, 
he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the office of the 
Secretary-General. In 2001, he was appointed by the Secretary -General as interim head of 
the Dept. of Public Information. In 2002, he was confirmed as the Under-Secretary-
General for Communications and Public Information of the United Nations. 
Tharoor 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), a scholarly 
study of Indian foreign policy; The Great Indian Novel (1989), a political satire; The 
Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories (1990); a second novel, 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. On August 13, 2001 

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Penguin Books (India) published Tharoor's latest novel Riot. The US edition was 
published by Arcade on September 28, 2001. 
Shashi Tharoor is the winner of numerous journalism and literary awards, including a 
Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1991. In 1998, Shashi Tharoor 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.