The New York Times
March 9, 2001
PUBLIC LIVES column

Polishing Public Profile of U.N. Is a Job for a Novelist
By LYNDA RICHARDSON

AT night and on weekends, Shashi Tharoor, whether in Singapore or Geneva or his East Side apartment in Manhattan, has sat typing into the morning's early hours.

Over 15 years, Mr. Tharoor has written elegant novels chronicling the fantasies and foibles of India, his spiritual home, including an unsparing contemporary satire on an epic Hindu poem. He also writes sharp-edged, often witty political commentary that appears in magazines and newspapers.

Writing through the Manhattan night, the 45-year-old Mr. Tharoor just finished another novel, "Riot," a look at communal violence and human passions in modern India.

But for the last six weeks, when the writing stops and the sun comes up, Mr. Tharoor has headed off to one of the more challenging temp jobs ever -- running, on an interim basis, the United Nations Department of Public Information.

The United Nations has never had the greatest success putting the best public face on its work. And this specific office has been widely derided over the years. Politicians think it is a wasteful propaganda office. The former United States ambassador, Richard C. Holbrooke, for one, wasted no opportunity to attack it. Working reporters also see the department as largely useless and terribly slow.

Mr. Tharoor didn't exactly seek out the job. He was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan in late January. He has 428 employees in New York City, and 307 more workers in offices around the world. If his office is unappreciated, he is not unenthusiastic.

"For the moment, I'm having a whale of a time," he says in a refined Anglo-Indian accent, sipping tea in his spacious 10th-floor office. He is gregarious and relaxed in a dark pinstriped suit.

Mr. Tharoor has been a loyal United Nations man for most of his adult life, and it has required every creative power you can think of.

His United Nations experience began in 1978 when he served on the staff of the High Commissioner for Refugees, heading its Singapore office at the height of the Vietnamese "boat people" crisis. His hazel eyes light up as he describes helping to rescue thousands: "The satisfaction of seeing what you do reflected in the eyes of real human beings is immeasurably invaluable."

Mr. Tharoor's profile rose even higher during the Bosnian war, when he led the team handling the United Nations' peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia and was Mr. Annan's chief aide in the peacekeeping department. He was most recently Mr. Annan's director of communications and special projects.

HOW Mr. Tharoor has balanced his novelist's introspection and publicist's mandate is something of a puzzle to his closest friends. "I do keep my two worlds firmly apart," he says, brushing aside his black hair. "In one part of my world, I write about nothing but India, but in my work, I do nothing on India. As a human being, I have a number of responses to the world, some of which manifest in my writing and some in my work. Both are coming out of the same person."

Indeed, the United Nations policy of neutrality during the Bosnian war created friction between Mr. Tharoor and his literary friends, many of whom thought the United Nations should have done more to help the Bosnian Muslims. To that, Mr. Tharoor answers like a diplomat: "Peacekeepers can't take sides. Our only side is peace itself."

But Mr. Tharoor notes that he had dinner just the night before with Susan Sontag, a critic of the United Nations' conduct in Bosnia. "I believe certainly in all the friendships and relationships I had at the time," he said. "I've survived the experience. People understand, I think, when you're acting out of integrity."

While some people at the United Nations see him as a certain type, the upper-crust Indian British colonial kind, Mr. Tharoor says he is anything but. He describes his upbringing as middle-class. "I'm very much a mainstream Indian type," he said.

Born in London, he was raised and educated in India, where his father was a newspaper executive and his mother a homemaker. He holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Mr. Tharoor is separated from his wife, a scholar who was his college sweetheart in New Delhi. He says his busy schedule did not play a role. "In some marriages, sadly, you sort of fall out of love with each other," he said. "It's very painful all around." They have 16-year-old twin boys.

Mr. Annan has indicated that Mr. Tharoor's tenure may last only months. But Mr. Tharoor, who has earned a reputation as an urbane, quick thinker, one not above appreciating the strategic value of small gestures, appears to be thriving.

On this day, for instance, he shows up for an interview he knew would touch on New York's difficult dealings with the world body wearing a rather hideous tie from the New York City Transit Museum, with a United Nations tie clip.

Did he wake up this particular morning with a fashion flash? "In the world of diplomacy," he says mischievously, "no coincidence is entirely accidental."
 
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