Of novels and nations: a diverse life in a diverse world. (Interview).

Huebner, David

Shashi Tharoor was appointed UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information as of June 2002. In this capacity, he manages the external communications and media relations of the United Nations. Mr. Tharoor joined the United Nations in May 1978 as a staff member for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Prior to his current assignment, he served in the United Nations as director of communications and special projects in the Office of the Secretary-General, executive assistant to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and special assistant to the undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations.

Mr. Tharoor is also an acclaimed writer, having authored six books and numerous articles in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Affairs. His most recent book, Riot (Arcade Publishing, 2001), has won widespread praise, while his last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (Arcade Publishing, 1997) was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Born in London in 1956, Mr. Tharoor was educated in India and the United States. He holds a PhD from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Senior Editor David Huebner recently spoke with Mr. Tharoor about the challenges of reconciling his literary and professional life and managing the image of the United Nations.

HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW:

You have led these two lives, your literary life and your life with the United Nations. While your writing is rooted in India, your job has taken you everywhere, most recently the United States. How do you lead this double life?

I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world I see around me. I manifest some of those responses in my writing and some of them in my work. I try to keep the two firmly apart, though, so in my writing I deal with nothing but India, at least so far, and then in my work I deal with almost everything but India.

I think they are both such essential parts of me that if I were to neglect either aspect of my life, part of my psyche would wither. As a UN official I am bringing to bear a lifetime of interest in international affairs, a PhD in international politics, and a concern with the fate of the world that goes back to my childhood; and as a writer, George Bernard Shaw said it better than I could: "I write for the same reason that a cow gives milk." It is something that has to come out. Both of these are choices that are not really choices; they are things I feel I have to do because of who I am.

Your most recent novel, Riot, focuses on an American girl who is killed in a riot while working for a nongovernmental organization in Uttar Pradesh. Was this riot inspired by a particular incident, perhaps the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque?

The book is actually set in 1989, and it is based on a period in Indian contemporary political history when a group of Hindu zealots led an agitation that ultimately led to the 1992 mosque demolition. In 1989, there was a movement to consecrate holy bricks and carry them to where the Babri mosque stood, in order to build a temple to replace the mosque. This movement actually did cause real riots in late 1989 and I had a firsthand account from a friend who was a district administrator at the time.

I was also struck by the tragic death of an American young woman named Amy Biehl in South Africa in 1994. Here again was somebody who had gone to do good and had been murdered by the very people she had been there to help, by black people who could not look beyond the color of her skin. Though this had no particular direct relevance to India, the image of this foreigner caught up in political turmoil and murdered by the forces of incomprehension, her own and those of others, struck me as very powerful. The two merged, this image of the young woman and the story of the riots, and I put them both together and created my own fiction.

I should stress that the overall situation of what we in India call communal conflict--the religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims--is something that I have been concerned about and written about for some time in non-fiction. My last book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, dealt in great part with the notion of the plural Indian identity and articulated a vision with which communal hatred is incompatible. And in my newspaper columns in India for the Indian Express and the Hindu, I have articulated this vision as well. These political and social concerns are very much present in my thinking and in my writing for Indian audiences. By putting them into a novel, however, I was able to reach a different sort of audience and to bring certain issues into sharper relief.

In Riot, the characters seem to be influenced heavily by history. Do you see this constant looking back into the past as being an inherent part of the difficulties that plague India? Do you see this as a main difference between the United States and the rest of the world, a difference in mentality with regard to the importance of history?

I do think in India we are unfortunately obsessed by history in a negative way. Many clashes and conflicts occur as a result of contending narratives, and these narratives are often based on recapitulations of history, in some cases contrived to make a point for its contemporary relevance and often not in a constructive way.

So yes, history can be misused. I have one of the characters say at some point in the novel that our problem in India is that we have both history and mythology and sometimes we cannot tell the difference. Whereas the same character says that when he wanted to study US history, his professors in India tell him that Americans have no history. So in that sense, the role of history in engendering conflict is a key issue. I have the American voice of this Coca-Cola executive saying we do not care about the past, we only care about the future, precisely to juxtapose a vision that perhaps allows the present to be undermined by the past against a vision that sees the present only in light of how it can be made better in the future. That juxtaposition is obviously a simplification, and one could argue that some Americans are obsessed with history and some Indians are looking to the future as well. But that juxtaposition was rather important to me to make this larger point.

You have a crucial role in ensuring the coherence and effectiveness of the United Nations's message, as well as dealing with the press. Is there one image, one aspect that you would like to see publicized more about the United Nations?

I hear so many negative stereotypes about the United Nations that are simply ill-founded. Just to take the first four that come to mind, the first would be the stereotype of the United Nations as a talking shop, that a lot of speeches are made here but nothing gets done. It is true that a lot of speeches are made here, especially during the General Assembly, but as Winston Churchill put it, "to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." Would you not rather have the representatives of 189 countries boring each other to death, if necessary, on the General Assembly floor, instead of boring holes into each other on the battlefield? And indeed a great deal does get done but that does not get talked about.

There is the stereotype about the United Nations being a paper factory, and true, many UN documents are produced every year. But we worked out that every single UN document on every single subject in every one of the six languages, if added up over the course of an entire calendar year, would consume less paper than the New York Times uses to print one single Sunday edition. So people just do not see this in perspective, and of course these documents often represent the state of the world's thinking about the key issues of our times.

Then you have the stereotype of the bloated bureaucracy, which is a favorite one in Washington. I sometimes ruefully concede that I am becoming a bit of a bloated bureaucrat myself, but for the bureaucracy as a whole, we are actually 25 percent leaner than we were in the 1980s, and if you add every single UN official in every single UN agency, including the specialized agencies, you get 51,000 people, which is fewer than they employ in Disneyworld. I like to think that we are not a Mickey Mouse operation.

And finally, the myth about cost: the United Nations is actually an amazingly inexpensive organization for what it does. The US taxpayer pays just over a dollar per US citizen for the US share of the UN regular budget every year. So we are not really talking about vast sums of money, it is a dollar that most Americans would not miss. In fact I was in Switzerland earlier this year, and I discovered that our entire human rights budget around the world is actually less money than they spend to maintain the Zurich opera house.

Dispelling these myths and correcting the facts is something I would like to see more of. Beyond that, I would say there is a lot the United Nations does that people just do not know about so I would certainly plead for much more awareness.

What do you believe the future of the United Nations holds, and how do you believe these myths are going to be corrected or accentuated? Do you feel the future will be much different, or will the United Nations continue to operate as it has in the past?

First of all, as Kofi Annan often likes to say, the world is full of problems without passports. Problems across international frontiers, including drug control, refugees, security crises, the environment, climate change, money laundering, and now terrorism, are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve on its own. This range of problems needs solutions without visas. There are truly global problems, and to deal with them the United Nations is the one indispensable global institution in our globalizing world.

We have seen with September II the horrors of terrorism, and the United Nations stands fully behind the efforts led by the United States to root out terrorism around the world. But the fact is also that if that horror taught us anything, it has to be that the cliche of a global village is true. A fire that starts in a dusty tent in one corner of this global village can melt the steel girds of skyscrapers on the opposite side. We are all in this together. I hope at least we will come to the realization that we need the United Nations to help tackle these problems and to make sure that the world as a whole can make collective progress in the name of our common humanity.

One of the first agreements that was passed in the United Nations was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and you said in 1998 that "paradoxical as it may seem, it is the universal idea of human rights that can in fact make the world safe for diversity." The debate between universality and diversity requires that we find a common ground to work with. Do you feel that we can establish more common ground in the future?

I think that moving toward universality through stressing individual national aspirations can work. In the case of human rights I have argued that you need to simultaneously affirm universal principles and indigenize human rights. You have to help convince each country that human rights are relevant, in its own national situation, and it is through that process we end up getting every country on board. As a writer, I believe it is vital that literature help express national identity, however varied, fragmented, or evolving it may be in each country. At the same time, literature should cross national boundaries so that through this process of interaction and exchange, the freedom of expression of all cultures, and not just any one dominant culture, you can really preserve diversity and universality at the same time. That is what I believe in all areas of life, and in the Indian context I define myself as somebody who is firmly committed to upholding Indian pluralism. And I would like to see pluralism around th e world as well. That is precisely what the United Nations exists to guarantee. We are not here to impose any one view of the world on everybody, but we are trying to get all these different views of the world to pull together for the common benefit of all, because so many of the problems we are dealing with affect everyone.

If I can refer back to your first question about history and the way I use history in my novel, in my afterword I quote Octavio Paz who said that we live between memory and oblivion. That is an essential part of my concerns as a writer: the way we go from memory to oblivion and back again. History is not created by some sort of inscrutable force; it is created by human beings. It is not, as the old saying goes, a web woven by innocent hands. Rather history emerges as a result of people either willfully using memory to drive others into oblivion or allowing the experience of recent oblivion to create new antagonistic memories. I feel that history has a very vital place, but I believe that a problem in history is that sometimes you learn the wrong lessons. It is very important to use history with a view toward the future. I often joke that the best crystal ball is sometimes the rear view mirror: you need to learn from it to avoid and remember what you left behind. You glance occasionally at the rear view mirror but you keep your eye firmly on the road. That is what the United Nations too would like to do.

What do you see as having defined Kofi Annan's career until today? How would you define the role of the UN secretary-general, and what do you see as the ideal characteristics of a UN leader?

I have enjoyed my work with Kofi Annan and learned greatly from him. I just think he is a fantastic human being. He is somebody who is a pleasure to work for in whatever capacity. He has also been an ideal secretary-general, if not the ideal secretary-general in the view of many who have studied this office for the last five decades. He embodies all the right qualities. First, he believes firmly in the principles of the UN Charter.

He has dedicated his life to international cooperation and coexistence and working in harmony with people who are not like him, people from different parts of the world, people of different races, colors, creeds, gender--he has always enjoyed working across those differences. Second, he brings personal qualities to bear to the job that are indispensable; he has an ability to listen, an ability to empathize with people and their different problems, and a tremendous internal strength from which I think a lot of his decisions flow. His calmness and certitude, not manifesting themselves as arrogance or inflexibility, give him the confidence to be able to listen and take into account the views of others. He has come into this job really with absolutely the right sort of attitude and mentality.

One British journal once called him the secular pope for the world, and he always laughs off such designations, so I will not hang one around his neck, but in some ways he does speak for the international conscience. He is somebody who stands up and tries to speak for the larger interest of humanity, above that of any set of interests of any one group of countries or one individual country. To be able to do that you need first of all to be a person whose views are respected, you need to be a person of compassion who cares about the right issues, you need to have a strong moral sense, you need to have a strong political sense of judgement because you are working with various governments, and at the same time you have to be able to reach human beings. Kofi Annan, I believe, does all of that. Every time I meet people who are not particularly interested in the United Nations or world affairs, I am always struck by how they say we have seen this man on television and he just comes across as somebody they would be glad to follow anywhere. And that is ultimately what I think makes him such a valuable leader for the United Nations today.

SHASHI THAROOR is UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information.