Shashi Tharoor Gives Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Lecture on “India and China: Competition, Co-operation, Conflict?” Real Media video clip.

March 4, 2009

Shashi Tharoor to Give Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Lecture

Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Chairman of the Dubai-based Afras Ventures and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization will be in New Haven to deliver the 16th Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Lecture on Wednesday, March 4th 2009. His talk, entitled �India and China: Competition, Co-operation and Conflict�, will be followed by a reception. The lecture, sponsored by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Yale Law School, and the Yale School of Management, is free and open to the public.

Born in London in 1956, Dr. Tharoor was educated in India and the United States, completing a Ph. D. in 1978 at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he received the Robert B. Stewart Prize for Best Student. At Fletcher, Shashi Tharoor helped found and was the first Editor of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs, a journal now in its 31st year. His career with the United Nations began in 1978, when he joined the staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. In 1989, he was posted to the UN Head Quarters in New York, where his responsibilities included peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. 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 as the Interim Head of the Department of Public Information. In 2002, he was confirmed as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the United Nations. In 2006, he was India�s official candidate for the succession to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2006, finishing a close second out of nine candidates.

Tharoor is the award-winning author of nine books, all of which have received much critical acclaim. His 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 President Clinton in his address to the Indian Parliament; Nehru: The Invention of India (2003), a biography of India’s first Prime Minister; a collection of literary essays, Bookless in Baghdad (2005); and the most recent, The Elephant, The Tiger, and The Cell Phone (2007), which was described in The Washington Post as �a chaotic, joyous, occasionally exhausting and often uplifting collage of India�. 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 and has since been made into a motion picture, “Bollywood”. Shashi Tharoor�s books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Malayalam, Marathi, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Spanish.

Tharoor has also written hundreds of articles, op-eds and book reviews in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek and The Times of India. He has served for two years as a Contributing Editor and occasional columnist for Newsweek International. Since April 2001, he has authored a fortnightly column in The Hindu and since January 2007 in The Times of India.

In January 1998, Dr. Tharoor was named a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He is the recipient of several awards, including a Commonwealth Writers� Prize, and was named to India�s highest honour for Overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, in 2004. He serves on the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute India, and the Advisory Boards of the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation and the human rights organization Breakthrough. He is also a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities.

Tharoor�s visit has been organized in conjunction with the Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale University, which was established in 1992 with the broad goal of bringing together the analytic resources of academic specialists and practitioners across established disciplinary lines to promote understanding of the international factors that play a decisive role in the conduct of private and public business. The Fund’s more specific goal is to support scholarly endeavors that enhance collaboration among specialists in the fields of international law, the management of international enterprises and organizations, and international relations.