Shashi Krishnan Chandrashekaran Tharoor is an Indian politician, author, and former diplomat and public intellectual , who has been serving as Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is currently the Chairman of Committee on External Affairs. He was formerly an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and unsuccessfully ran for the post of Secretary-General in 2006. Founder-Chairman of All India Professionals Congress, he formerly served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and on Informational Technology. He has about two dozen titles to his credit and was awarded by World Economic Forum as "Global Leader of Tomorrow".

Shashi Tharoor was born on 9 March 1956 in London, United Kingdom as Shashi Krishnan Chandrashekaran Tharoor to Chandra Shekharan Nair "Chandran" Tharoor and Sulekha Menon, a Malayali couple from Palakkad, Kerala. Tharoor has two younger sisters, Shobha and Smitha. Shashi's paternal grandfather's nickname was Chippukutty Nair. Shashi's paternal uncle was Parameshwaran Tharoor, the founder of Reader's Digest in India.

Tharoor's first wife was Tilottama Mukherji, a half-Bengali and half-Kashmiri academic, and the granddaughter of politician Kailash Nath Katju. Tharoor and Mukherji had been college sweethearts and were married in 1981. After their marriage, Tilottama took her husband's last name and began teaching English at Ngee Ann Polytechnic and also worked as a freelance writer. Their twin sons, Kanishk and Ishaan, were born prematurely in 1984 at the KK Hospital in Singapore. Ishaan is a former senior editor at Time magazine, and now writes on foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Kanishk is a former editor at Open Democracy and is the author of the highly praised short story collection Swimmer Among The Stars. Tilottama is currently a professor of humanities at New York University.