By Ruth Sullivan

Shashi Tharoor, Director of Communications and Special Projects at the United Nations, is a man to watch. The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland tips him as a global leader of tomorrow.

A diplomat and a writer, he has carved himself a 22-year career to notice at the UN, and won several journalistic and literary awards including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize for his latest book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, an insightful look at the past and future of his home country, published on the 50th anniversary of its independence in 1997.

At the UN, he directs the organisation's communications' strategy and follows special projects for the secretary general relating to human rights.

His curiosity about the wider world drew him to a diplomatic career. Mr Tharoor describes himself as "a human being with a number of concerns about the world around me".

His way of dealing with this is through his work and writing. People who have worked with him say that he has not lost any of his human caring over the years.

A large slice of his early career was spent at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore where he was in charge of the Vietnamese boat people crisis at a young age. Looking back he sees that the hands-on approach to human tragedy meant that "I was able to put my head on the pillow every night knowing that things I had done in the day had made a concrete difference to real human beings".

After 11 years of working with refugees, he moved to peace-keeping where he began learning about diplomacy in earnest. In 1989 he became special assistant to the under-secretary general for peace-keeping operations, and led the UN team in the former Yugoslavia. For almost six years he worked 18-hour days but knew that "the blood was still going to flow in the Balkans".

By 1997 his UN career had taken another turn when he was appointed executive assistant to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general.

r Tharoor was born in London during a period when his father worked as a manager of the Statesman, an Indian newspaper. The family later returned to Bombay and Calcutta where he grew up.

Although his family were not wealthy, he attended India's best Jesuit schools but missed classes because he suffered from asthma. He was often forced to stay in bed and became an avid reader. His first story appeared in print by the age of 10, and his first novella was serialised in a magazine before his eleventh birthday.

He describes his education as "hasty". After studying humanities in Delhi, he won a scholarship to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the US. He finished his PhD there at the age of 22 because he had a powerful incentive.

"Fear. I was terrified that my scholarship would run out while I was halfway through research and I would spend the rest of my life working hard to find the time to write it."

He may have been right.