Member of Parliament; Author

An author, politician, and former international civil servant, Shashi Tharoor straddles several worlds of experience. Currently a second-term Lok Sabha MP representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency and Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, he has previously served as Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. Before that, he worked for nearly three decades with the United Nations, where he served as a peacekeeper, refugee worker, and administrator at the highest levels, including as Under-Secretary General during Kofi Annan’s leadership of the UN.

Born in London in 1956, Dr. Tharoor studied in India and the United States, completing a PhD in 1978 at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He also received an honorary D.Litt from the University of Puget Sound, and a Doctorate Honoris Causa in History by the University of Bucharest. He has received several other awards and honors, including a Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and the Encomienda de la Real Order Espanola de Carlos III from the King of Spain.

Dr. Tharoor was a pioneer in using social media as an instrument of political interaction. He was India’s most-followed politician on Twitter until 2013, when he was overtaken by Mr. Narendra Modi, who subsequently became Prime Minister of India.

Following his UN career, Dr. Tharoor returned to India and was elected to Parliament in 2009. Between his stints as a government minister, he also served as Member-Convener 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. In his current second term, he sits in the Opposition benches, also serving as the Chairman of the Standing Committee on External Affairs and a member of the Standing Committee on Rules.

He is the author of hundreds of articles, op-eds, and book reviews in a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, TIME, Newsweek, and The Times of India. He served for two years as a Contributing Editor and occasional columnist for Newsweek International. He is also an award-winning author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books, the most recent of which is Why I Am A Hindu.