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Indian mission to host talk by Shashi Tharoor

DUBAI — The Consulate General of India will host a talk on “What it means to be an Indian” by Dr Shashi Tharoor, eminent writer and former Under Secretary General of the UN.

According to Venu Rajamony, Consul General of India, the function would be held at the Indian Consulate Auditorium on April 26 and will start at 7.30pm.

Entry to the talk — which is supported by Borders Book Store, an Al Maya Group Company — is free.

Born in London in 1956, Dr Tharoor was till recently Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information in the United Nations.

Kamal Vachani, Director Al Maya Group, said it was indeed a privilege to sponsor the event featuring of such an award-winning author, who was the official candidate of India to succeed UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006. Dr Tharoor came a close second out of seven contenders in the race.

Dr Tharoor’s five non-fiction books include: Reasons of State (1981), a study of Indian foreign-policy making; India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), which was cited by former US president Bill Clinton in his address to the Indian parliament; Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) a biography of India’s first prime minister, and a collection of literary essays, Bookless in Baghdad (2005).

His three novels are the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989) which is required reading in several courses on post-colonial literature; Riot (2001), a searing examination of Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India, and Show Business (1992) which received a front-page accolade in the New York Times Book Review.

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