Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor (born 9 March 1956) is an Indian diplomat, politician, and writer who has been known mostly for his having worked as an Indian diplomat at the United Nations. In 2006, he was the official candidate of India for the office of United Nations Secretary-General, and came second out of seven official candidates in the race. Tharoor served as the UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information between June 2002 and February 2007, during the term of Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is an author, journalist, and fellow of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
His Father name is Tharoor Chandran Menon hailing from a aristrocratic Nair Tharavadu in Ottapalam. In 1977, at age 21, he married Tilottama Mukherji from Kolkata, India, a journalist and scholar, from whom he is now divorced. He is the father of twin sons, Ishaan and Kanishk, who have recently graduated from Yale. One of the twins, Ishaan lives in Hong Kong and works for Time magazine and the other brother, Kanishk, is a resident of London working for openDemocracy. In 2007 he married Christa Giles, a Canadian who is Deputy Secretary of the United Nations Disarmament Commission. Tharoor is also the maternal uncle, through his sister Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, of Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, editor of India Currents.
Tharoor is known for his passionate interest in cricket, especially Indian cricket, about which he has written in such publications as The Cricketer International, The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Hindu. An outstanding actor and debater in school and college, Tharoor won numerous prizes at inter-collegiate “winter festivals” and similar competitions. He played Antony to Mira Nair’s Cleopatra in a 1974 production of Antony and Cleopatra. At St. Stephen’s in the early 1970s he founded the Quiz Club, which is still in existence; he also revived the Wodehouse Society, which is no longer in existence. Upon election as President of the College Union (campaign slogan: “Shashi Tharoor jeetega zaroor”) he relinquished the editorship of the campus humour magazine “Kooler Talk.” He was invited by St. Stephen’s College to deliver the college’s 125th Anniversary Jubilee Lecture in 2005. He is an elected Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a member of the Advisory Board of the Indo-American Arts Council. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Breakthrough, an international human rights organization, the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute, and serves as an International Adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross. He is also Patron of the Modern School in Dubai, UAE. He is a member of Indian National Congress.
At the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976, he founded and was the first chair of the editorial board of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs, a journal examining issues in international relations [22].