Novelist Shashi Tharoor juggles writing, U.N Work
Toronto Star
18 October 1993

If you want to start a lot of international trouble, call in Shashi Tharoor.

The novelist, who reads at the du Maurier Theatre Centre tonight at 8:15, has a parallel career in the United Nations department of peace-keeping.

Shashi Tharoor started working for the UN 16 years ago in the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. Refugees weren’t too plentiful then; but within six months there were displaced people in South-east Asia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Central America.

“We just had crisis after crisis. My organization quadrupled its staff,” says Tharoor with grim amusement.

Four years ago, he was called to his present post in New York. The U.N. had run only one minor new peace-keeping mission over the preceding 11 years. Today it has 17 forces at work around the world It is as if Tharoor’s mere presence could trigger conflict.

Elegant in Indian dress, with a refined Anglo-Indian accent to match, Tharoor talks with the speed of a man who can write novels on weekends and at night, while attending to the affairs of Bosnia/Herzegovonia by day.

Since being detailed to the horrendous situation in the former Yugoslavia, Tharoor, married and the father of twin 9-year-old boys, fears his next novel may be a long way off.

Praise for his Great Indian Novel and last year’s Show Business have already propelled the 37-year old writer into the rank of a respected generation of post-Independence English-language Indian writers, including Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Bharati Mukherjee and Anita Desai.

Among those names, Tharoor is the only southern Indian writer, his family seat being a century-old home in the state of Kerala.

But he shares with them one characteristic, a feeling “that we can afford to satirize ourselves.” The boisterous depiction of the Bombay B-movie industry in Show Business is a care in point.

The export of their works was not the motivating factor in their use of English, no longer, he says, considered the language of colonialism. Infused with the varied vocabulary of its many Indian speakers, it is, says Tharoor, “the language of Indian nationalism,” the lingua franca for a people who would be otherwise unable to communicate with one another.