Mumbai Mirror
UN Under-secretary-General Shashi Tharoor has been nominated by India to succeed Kofi Annan to what has famously been called ‘the most impossible job in the world’
New Delhi, Jun 16: Author and UN Under-secretary-General Shashi Tharoor has been nominated by India to succeed Kofi Annan when the UN chief’s second five-year term ends at the end of this year
“India strongly supports the principle of regional rotation under which the next secretary-general of the United Nations should be from Asia,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said on Thursday.
“India has decided to announce the candidature of Dr Shashi Tharoor, Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information at the United Nations,” he said. China, which took over the presidency of the UN Security Council in April, insists the next UN head should come from Asia.
Others Asians in the running include South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon, Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai and Sri Lankan diplomat Jayantha Dhanapala.
The last Asian secretary-general was U Thant of Burma, now called Myanmar, who served from 1961 to 1971.
The Global Leader of Tomorrow
Shashi Tharoor was born in London in 1956, and educated in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi. He completed his PhD at the age of 22 from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US.
He has worked with the United Nations since 1978, serving with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the “boat people” crisis.
Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at the UN headquarters in New York, where he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia till 1996. From January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
In July 1998, he was appointed Director of Communications and Special projects in the office of the Secretary-General. In 2001, he was appointed by the Secretary-General as interim head of the Department of Public Information. In June 2002, he was confirmed as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the United Nations.
Tharoor is also an author and has won several journalism and literary awards, including the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
His books include Reasons of State (1982), The Great Indian Novel (1989), The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories (1990), Show Business (1992), which was made into a movie titled ‘Bollywood’; and India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) and Riot (2001).
In 1998, he was awarded the Excelsior Award for excellence in literature by the Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP). He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in May 2000.
In January 1998, he was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a Global Leader of Tomorrow.