India Shastra: reflections on the nation in our time
- New Delhi Aleph Book 2015
- 473p.
SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of fourteen previous books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist, a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He served 29 years at the United Nations, culminating as Under-Secretary under Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s leadership. As India’s official candidate to succeed Annan as UN Secretary-General, he emerged a strong second out of seven contenders. On returning to India he contested the 2009 elections on behalf of the Indian National Congress, and was elected to Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram. Re-elected in 2014, he chairs Parliament’s External Affairs Committee. Shashi Tharoor’s books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) and most recently, the visionary Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012). He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, was honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV, and pioneered among Indian politicians the use of Twitter, where he has over two and a half million followers, as of 2014.