Shashi Tharoor & The Tale of His Ex and Estranged Spouses
Tilottama Tharoor: Half-Bengali, half-Kashmiri, Tilottama (nee Mukherji) is a couple of years older than Tharoor. She studied at Loreto House and Loreto College, Kolkata, and was known for her debating prowess and 'Bengali ethnic' looks. Tharoor and she were both very popular with members of the opposite sex, and when they started seeing each other, their admirers in Kolkata would say, "Shashi is smart, but she is no less." The two married young and had twins, Kanishk and Ishaan - the first is an associate with the e-magazine, Open Democracy, and the second is a Hong Kong-based journalist with Timemagazine. Tilottama followed her husband as he progressed in his career in the UN ("she let him flower," say folks in Kolkata to this day). But the two split after they "grew apart", as Tharoor put it in an interview recently. Tilottama is a humanities professor at New York University, and is a prominent face on the intellectual circuit of both Kolkata an...