Shashi Tharoor is not your garden-variety public relations executive.

He is the author of five books, the most recent of which, India: From Midnight to Millennium, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of Year and cited by former President Clinton in his address to the Indian Parliament last April. One of his novels, Show Business, was filmed as the motion picture, "Hollywood." In 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as a "Global Leader of Tomorrow."He is also the recipient of several journalism and literary awards, including the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize.

He earned a Ph.D. degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he also picked up two Master’s Degrees.

Despite the impeccable credentials, Tharoor demurs when an interviewer calls him, "an intellectual."

"I have not really done enough academic work, I think, to qualify - to deserve - that designation in the way you phrased it," he replies diplomatically.

For that is precisely what Shashi Tharoor is - a diplomat. And not just any diplomat either.

When United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, needed a trusted associate to be the U.N.’s first Director of Communications and Special Projects in 1998, he chose Tharoor. Earlier this year, when a vacancy occurred as head of the U.N. Department of Public Information, the Secretary-General named Tharoor as interim head of the 735-person unit. And, when the Iraqu delegation arrived at New York headquarters in late February to discuss its sensitive world role, it was Tharoor who sat at Annan’s side.

Recently, the Strategist talked with Tharoor about how he handles the challenge of, as he puts it, "promoting concern for poor and the victimized in the media of rich and the tranquil."

REFUGEES Strategist: How did a person with your background work his way into public relations? Shashi Tharoor : I have been writing since my childhood. I've been published in Indian newspapers and magazines since the age of 10. I won a young journalist award in India, for journalists under 30, when I was 20. I was writing throughout my student days. Strategist: When did you enter United Nations work? Tharoor: I began my career as a public information officer with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. But then I moved on to doing something very different. I headed the office in Singapore at the peak of the Vietnamese boat people crisis. Strategist: So you were on the line.

Tharoor: I was actually running the office. I was responsible for trying to get refugees to disembark from the ships that rescued them in the high seas and brought them into the port of Singapore. We negotiated with the ship owners and the captains and the agents and with the government of Singapore. And because the government of Singapore wouldn't let them disembark without guarantees of resettlement, we negotiated with the diplomats and the embassies of the countries. And then, of course, we ran the camp in Singapore where these people were.

Strategist: How did you react to a job with that kind of responsibility?

Tharoor: When I arrived in Singapore, we had over 4,000 in the camp. And, part of my job was to try to move them along to new counties as quickly as possible, but also to give them decent lives while they were there. I remember one family which had left Vietnam in a tiny little boat, with a cannibalized tractor engine which, sure enough, in a couple of days conked out. They were drifting at sea, surviving on rainwater and hope. And the parents had two small babies, and they actually slit their fingers to get the babies to suck their blood so they could survive. When they were finally rescued, by an American ship, as it happens, they couldn't stand up to climb the ladder up into the ship. They had to be lifted physically, and I saw those people immediately after they arrived. We rushed them to the hospital, treated them, brought them into the camp in Singapore, gave them English lessons and everything else. And, in a few months to see the same family dressed, healthy, well, heading off to a new life in the United States - there are few jobs that can give you satisfaction like that.

Strategist: What did you learn from that job?

Tharoor: It taught me a number of things about humanity about international affairs, the way in which the world works. It also taught me the great value of the U.N. Because there was   a great deal that only the U.N. could have accomplished.

 

PEACEKEEPING

Strategist: How do you go from a position like that into public relations?

Tharoor: In a sense, I came into public relations the hard way, when I was put in charge of the peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia.

Strategist: What did that job consist of?

Tharoor: Traveling to the field, helping devise the concept of operations, negotiating with the parties on the ground about what the U.N. would do, working at headquarters to submit reports to the Security Council, working with the troop-contributing countries, getting troops from them, working with them on what the troops would do on the ground, summarizing the work, and so on. I responded to 30 or 35 cables a day from the field.   I worked 18-hour days, seven days a week         

Strategist: And the public relations part?

Tharoor: Giving guidance for reporters. Also, of course, speaking to diplomats, journalists, to non-governmental organizations,  to universities to explain what we were doing. As the person handling operations, I was there debating with our critics on CNN, answering the tough questions.

 

PUBLIC IMAGE

Strategist: How did your current position come about?

Tharoor: When my boss, the head of the peace keeping, Kofi  Annan, was elected Secretary-General, he asked me to move into the office with him to work on a whole range of mainly political issues. But then he felt the need for a sort of David Gergen/George Stephanopoulos-type person on his immediate staff.

Strategist: To do what specifically?

Tharoor: Principally two things. First, he felt we needed to coordinate the external message fo the organization. He felt that the U.N. message was being slightly lost in the routine, in the shuffle. Second, He also felt -- and this was recommended by a task force he had  appointed in 1997 -- that he should have somebody on his immediate team, directly reporting to him, who would be concerned about the way in which the world saw the U.N. and would help put the Secretary-General's own point of view across to those conveying the message of the organization.

Strategist: So the communications director had never reported directly to the Secretary-General?

Tharoor: No, we didn't have a director of communications before. We had actually taken a bit of a beating in the 1990's in our public image, particularly in the Western world and particularly in the U.S.

Strategist: And was that one of the rationales for the post, to help refine the image in the U.N.

Tharoor: Yes. You would see the generals in the talking shop. You'd see the mountains of paper. You'd get some of the negative criticism on Capitol Hill. And I think it's fair to say that Kofi Annan felt that there was a greater need to rehabilitate the image of the U.N., not by spin doctoring, but by just letting the world understand what it was we actually did and understand it more clearly than ever before.

Strategist: How do you answer the criticism that the U.N. is little more than a glorified debating society?

Tharoor: We need to let Americans know that the U.N. is not merely this ‘talking shop’. It is a ‘talking shop’ part of the time, when there is the General Assembly meeting every year. As Churchill put it, ‘Isn’t jaw jaw better than war war?’ I mean wouldn’t you rather have these countries boring each other to death, if necessary, in the General Assembly chamber then boring holes into each other on the battlefield.

Strategist: What about the feeling the U.N. is a bloated bureaucracy?

Tharoor: The U.N. Today is actually 25% leaner than it was in the 1990's. Kofi Annan slashed 1,000 employees when he came in.  And every single  U.N. worker around the world, put together, still gives us fewer employees than Disney World.  So we’re talking about an organization, which is actually much smaller then the critics would have us believe. I mean you compare the U.N. worldwide to the Federal bureaucracy in this country, we have 51,000. The U.S. Federal bureaucracy has 3.1 million.

Strategist: How would you compare the U.N.’s image around the world to that of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund?

Tharoor: The World Bank and the IMF, of course, are also working in development. But they are seen in the developing world, very often, as run by the countries with money. I mean even the voting is weighted, whereas the U.N. is seen as a place where every country, however small or weak, has the same voice, the same vote. And Annan, in many ways, is hailed around the world as the voice of the voiceless. That’s the important role and the U.N.’s very important role.  

UN Communications Director Shashi Tharoor, oversees a 735-person global staff

 

GETTING ORGANIZED

Strategist: How have you organized the communications offensive of the U.N.?

Tharoor: I hold a meeting every Tuesday at 3:30 to coordinate various bits of the U.N. in New York that have a responsibility for public relations. In addition to the public relations officers and speechwriters, we include people in the substantive departments – economic and social affairs, peacekeeping, the political department, UNICEF, the U.N. Development Program.  We have an agenda. We might have a specific focus. How do we project the special session on AIDS for example? What’s the way to go forward with this? Do we get the Secretary to a press conference? Do we have enough new information to make news? We try to approach things strategically to get the U.N.’s messages across.

Strategist: Do you think this approach has succeeded?

Tharoor: Well, that would be presumptuous and immodest of me to suggest a direct correlation. What I can say is that now we have a systematic campaign for every major U.N. event or conference, which didn’t exist in the past.  For example, our background briefings result in most stories explaining what the U.N. and the conference are really trying to achieve, rather than the kinds of routine press releases that used to come out in the past.

Strategist: So have you received more articles?

Tharoor:   There have been more stories, yes.  We have made more systematic use of the op-eds. We have had more press conferences.  One of the first things we were able to do – but really, it wasn’t me, but the Secretary-General – was the issuance, for the first time in the 55 years of the U.N., of media guidelines, which authorize every single U.N. official to speak to the press, on-the-record, within his or her area of competence. This never existed before.

Strategist: What was the prior policy?

Tharoor:   The prior practice, frankly, was that bureaucrats were not supposed to speak to the press. And if they sometimes did, they did so very quietly and anonymously, on background or off-the-record, and they were just reluctant to tell the story.  People felt that if they saw their name in the paper, it was actually ‘bad news.’  There’s been a 180-degree change.

Strategist:  What if you have some rogue diplomat, who disagrees publicly with the Secretary-General?

Tharoor:   Well, we hope that our colleagues are responsible.  But, we’re willing to take the risk. So a window washer is authorized to speak, on-the-record, of what he does when he washes the windows. It’s an open, transparent policy.  Annan regularly reminds colleagues that he not only authorizes them to speak, he encourages them to speak.  The charter of the U.N. begins with the words, ‘We the Peoples.’  He believes that the organization exists to serve the peoples of the world, not just the governments, we will fail if we don’t get our message across to the people.

Strategist: Would you characterize your own role as a ‘catalyst’?

Tharoor:   Catalyst and coordinator and, I hope, a strategist, trying to think sometimes two steps ahead of the game.  After the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, for example, our ‘Rio plus Five’ anniversary was a public relations disaster, because people talked and nothing came out. We’re now coming up on ‘Rio plus 10,’ and we’re starting to think right now about how we can help shape the substantive message of the conference, so that expectations are right, we have a worthwhile story to tell and a worthwhile conference project.

 

PHILOSOPHY

Strategist: How do you view the importance of the communications function to the U.N.?

Tharoor:  I see communications as integrally linked to substantive work.  It’s not just a question of people doing what they want, and then have to sell it to the world.  It’s that ‘needing to be accountable to the world, that should help determine that we do the right thing.  We must ask, in shaping our conferences, ‘What do we expect the world public to get out of this meeting?  What is the story we have to tell them?  Why do we expect them to care?’  Our job is to help shape such conferences more constructively.

Strategist: What does the term ‘public relations’ mean to you? Tharoor:   Public relations is telling the truth, often to people who don’t have time to hear it.  It’s also about using the public to help shape what you really are doing, because the fact is that the public ultimately is why you’re doing it. I’ve told my colleagues in the U.N. that communications and information is not an end in itself.  It exists to make your substantive work successful. Therefore, our communications philosophy has to be to tell the world what we’re doing, truthfully and transparently, and use communications to be accountable for the faith the world’s peoples have placed in us as an institution.

Strategist: What about your new responsibility as interim head of a 735-person public information department?

Tharoor:   My role becomes slightly more complicated. As Director of Communications, I have one professional assistant and two secretaries.  In this latest position, I’m supervising over 700 people, giving instructions and running budgets.  I must say I’ve developed a real taste for it here. I’ve spent a lot of my career getting the best out of myself to assist the larger cause. Here I have to get the best out of other people, create a team and make sure the team delivers. And that’s something, the value of which I’d certainly like to continue, whatever function the Secretary may give me next.