Shashi Tharoor, a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of twenty-five books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India. He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Award for his nonfiction book An Era of Darkness (2016). He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilisers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.