A Ramasamy has been with the Pondicherry University and a visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland (Indology) and is currently professor at the Department Tamil Studies at the Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli. Recipient of many awards from different forums in Tamil Nadu for his publications, he was the director of the Centre for Ambedkar Studies for two years. He has 18 publications on contemporary Tamil literature, popular culture, cinema and theatre to his credit. A culture writer with a deep focus on the popular and subaltern cultures, his writings fill a special space in Tamil literary milieu, which has been hitherto unaddressed.
A Srivathsan is an architect and urban designer. He is the Academic Director of CEPT University, Ahmedabad, which focuses on designing and managing human habitats. Srivathsan was a Senior Deputy Editor with The Hindu for eight years before shifting to CEPT University. He holds a doctoral degree from IIT Madras and is a recipient of the Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship. His areas of research and writing include urban planning and policies, and architectural criticism.
A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY, Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, has taught at universities in Tirunelveli, Chennai, Singapore and Chicago. Apart from the V.K.R.V. Rao Prize (History, 2007), he has received the Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award (2018) and Iyal Virudhu (2021), both for lifetime contribution to Tamil. He has published widely on the social, cultural and intellectual history of colonial Tamil Nadu. Apart from his scholarly writings in English, he has written/edited over 30 books in Tamil. His publications in English include The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia, Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture; Who Owns That Song?: The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright; The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu; In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History. Presently he is working on biographies of Periyar and V.O. Chidambaram Pillai.
Aatish Taseer is the author of Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands; a Costa-shortlisted first novel The Temple-Goers; and the highly-acclaimed Noon. His new novel --The Way Things Were -- was published in December 2014.
Chef Aditya Bal started cooking about seven years ago. Despite others’ scepticism, he moved to Goa to put his skills to the test at a friend’s eatery. He rose to be a chef in three years. His steep learning curve enabled him to train in the nuances of Goanese, Italian and European cuisines quickly. He has hosted a slew of successful cookery shows for NDTV Goodtimes, worked alongside some of the food and beverage industry’s biggest names not just in India, but also in Southeast Asia. He is the author of The Chakh Le India Cookbook. He continues to host new shows with TV channels.
Ahdaf Soueif is a political and cultural commentator. Her account of recent Egyptian events, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, was published in 2012 and an updated edition, Cairo: A City Transformed, was published in January 2014. She is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. She has translated Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah from Arabic into English and commissioned and edited Reflections on Islamic Art. In 2007, Soueif founded Engaged Events, a U.K.-based charity. Its first project is the Palestine Festival of Literature, which takes place annually in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. She has received the Metropolis Bleu and the Constantin Cavafy Awards (2012), was the first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2010) and was shortlisted for the Liberty Human Rights Award (2013).
Alarmel Valli is a leading Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer, acclaimed internationally for her ability to turn traditional grammar into subtle, deeply internalized, personal dance poetry. Her dance has been described as uncompromisingly classical but, at the same time, an undeniable language of self-expression. Among her numerous awards are the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan, the Chevalier of Arts and Letters Award from the French Government, the Grande Medaille de la Ville de Paris, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Kalaimamani from the Tamil Nadu Government.
AMISH is an author and a former diplomat. He published his first book in 2010 and has written 11 books (both fiction and non-fiction) till date. His books have sold seven million copies and been translated into 20 Indian and international languages. He is the fastest-selling author in Indian publishing history. Forbes India has regularly ranked Amish among the top 100 most influential celebrities in India. He was selected as an Eisenhower Fellow in 2014 and won the 21st Century Icon Award in the UK in 2021 and the Golden Book award for his novel Suheldev in 2022. He is also a host for TV documentaries, including for Discovery TV’s highly acclaimed and award-winning Legends of the Ramayan with Amish. In his diplomatic role, Amish worked as the Minister (Culture & Education) at the Indian High Commission to the UK and the Director of The Nehru Centre in London. Amish is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta. He received the Eminent Alumnus Award from IIM-Calcutta in 2017. He worked for 14 years in the financial services industry before turning to writing. Amish is a voracious reader, a music aficionado and was the lead singer in his college band in IIM-C. He was an active sportsperson, particularly in boxing and gymnastics, in his school and college days.
Amitabha Bagchi is the author of three critically-acclaimed novels: Above Average, The Householder and This Place. His first novel, Above Average, has sold 25,000 copies since it was published in 2007. Amitabha grew up and went to school and college in Delhi, where he now lives with his wife and son.
Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore, writing primarily on issues relating to gender, human development and the media. Among her publications are Whose News?: The Media and Women’s Issues (1994/2006); Making News: Women in Journalism (2000/2005); Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers (2003); Just Between Us: Women Speak about their Writing (2004); Interior Decoration: Anthology of Poems by Indian Women (2010); and Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (2003). She has contributed chapters to several other books; among them, most recently, Missing Half the Story: Journalism as if Gender Matters (2010); the IFJ-WACC Learning Resource Kit to Strengthen Gender-Ethical Journalism (2012); The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism (2013), UNESCO’s World Trends in the State of Freedom of Expression and Media Development (2013) and UNESCO-IAMCR’s Media and Gender: A Scholarly Agenda for the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (2014).
Anandh Kumar is a software engineer and aspiring musician trained in Western classical piano and keyboards. He has been part of various rock and light musical bands. His favourite artists and inspirations include A R Rahman, John Williams, The Queen, Michael Jackson, John Mayer, Mehdi Hassan and M.S. Subbulakshmi.
NAIR, ANITA is a novelist, though in the past she has been a journalist and an advertising executive. Her works include The Better Man and Lessons in Forgetting. The movie adaptation of Lessons… was a part of the Indian Panorama at IFFI 2012 and won the National Award in 2013. She has a collection of poems (Malabar Mind), and essays (Goodnight & God Bless) to her credit. In 2006, she one of India Today’s 30 Power Women in India, and has won many awards for her contribution to the field of literature, including the JFW Award for Literary Excellence (2010), the Kerala Sahitya Akademi (2012) and the Arch of Excellence Award (2012) by the All India Achievers’ Conference, New Delhi, for Literature. For her contribution to Children’s Literature, she was presented the Central Sahitya Akademi award. Her most recent novel is Idris – Keeper of the Light.
ANITA RATNAM is a celebrated performer of dance and theatre. As choreographer, writer, speaker and mentor her impact on the Indian performing arts has been recognised with awards and honours. As a culture catalyst, Anita’s work traverses a wide range — academia, youth outreach, motivational speaking and digital creation.
“Arunava Sinha is a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction. His latest published translations are The Chieftain’s Daughter by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Three Women by Rabindranath Tagore. His earlier translations include What Really Happened and Other Stories by Banaphool, By The Tungabhadra by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Striker Stopper by Moti Nandy, and My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose. His translation of Shankar’s Chowringhee won the Vodafone-Crossword Translation Prize in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Independent Best Foreign Fiction Prize in UK in 2009. “
His stories have appeared in various anthologies and periodicals in India, Australia (Luna and Helix) and England (Stand, Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Encounter bought the First English Language Rights to, “Whale Song”. He was the Director of the Indian Cultural Centre with concurrent accreditation as First Secretary in the Indian Embassy in Surinam, Latin America, after a career in publishing. He was the founder-editor of Indian Horizons; he founded/published quarterly journals in Spanish (Papeles de la India), French (Rencontre Avec l’Inde), Hindi (Gagananchal) and Arabic (Thaqafat-ul-Hind).
Bahar Dutt is a conservation biologist and environmental journalist. She has worked as environment editor for the news channel CNN-IBN. She used to run an animal ambulance for injured primates and helped set up a rescue centre for them. She’s spent the last decade reporting from some of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots on the Planet. Her celebrated TV series -- Saving the Ganga for CNN-IBN -- ran in six regional languages including History India and was one of the highest-rated TV shows. Broadcaster, environment editor, writer and closet baker, she now lives a more ordinary life in New Delhi with her dog Musibat (Trouble) and her husband Vijay, a wildlife filmmaker.
Baradwaj Rangan is a film critic. He won the National Award (Swarna Kamal) for Best Film Critic of 2005. His writings on cinema, music, art, books, travel and humour have been published in various national magazines like Open, Tehelka, Biblio, Outlook and Caravan. He has co-written the screenplay for the Tamil rom-com Kadhal 2 Kalyanam. He teaches a course on cinema at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He has contributed to various anthologies, the most recent being an essay in Subramaniyapuram: The Tamil Film in English Translation. His first book, Conversations with Mani Ratnam, was published in 2012 and his second, Dispatches from the Wall Corner, in October 2014.
Bhavna Bhagat was introduced to Angel Therapy in 2005 and is a qualified Angel Teacher from The Diana Cooper School and a Past Life Healer (Certified by Doreen Virtue). She is also a Certified Reiki practitioner and a Traditional Reiki Master.
Charles Allen historian, broadcaster and traveller, was born in 1940 in Cawnpore (today Kanpur) in India. He left in 1947 to be schooled in England, returning to the Indian subcontinent in 1966 as a VSO (British volunteer programme) to teach in Kathmandu, where he met his future wife Lizzie. With more than 23 books to his name, Charles is today an acknowledged authority on British Indian and South Asian history, and in 2004 was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Gold Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution to Asian studies. He is an active Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, a Council Member of the Kipling Society and a Member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and the Frontline Club. Charles’s most recently published work is an Orientalist biography of emperor Ashoka, published in October 2011 as Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor. He is currently working on a biography of Brian Hodgson, the ‘father of ‘Himalayan studies’, as well as a more ambitious project: an exploration of Dravidian India under the working title of Coromandel.
Chef Kunal Kapur is one of the most celebrated faces of Indian cuisine today. He is a chef extraordinaire, TV show host, winner of several culinary awards and the author of A Chef in Every Home. He is living his dream of making Indian cuisine the number one cuisine in the world and empowering everyone through power of cooking to become self sufficient. He recently won the Indian Television Academy Award and Dr. S. Radhakrishnan National Media Award 2014 for his contribution to the television industry through Junior MasterChef and MasterChef India.
Chetan Bhagat is the author of five novels and one non-fiction, all bestsellers. His seventh book, Half-Girlfriend, was released in October 2014. Four of his novels have already been adapted into successful Bollywood films. He has been hailed by The New York Times as ‘the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history’. Time magazine named him amongst the ‘100 most influential people in the world’. Chetan writes columns for leading English and Hindi newspapers, focusing on youth and national development issues. He is also a motivational speaker and screenplay writer. He quit his international investment banking career in 2009 to devote his entire time to writing. He lives in Mumbai with his wife, Anusha, and his twin boys, Shyam and Ishaan.
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1963. He has published eight books and has been shortlisted for numerous literary prizes, including the Man Booker Prize (twice), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Impac-Dublin Award. He lives in Cape Town.
DAVID DAVIDAR is a writer, anthologist, and publisher. Aleph Book Company, the literary publishing firm he co-founded with Rupa Publications India, won the Publisher of the Year in 2020 and 2022. His latest book, A Case of Indian Marvels, published in 2022, is an anthology that features the best Indian writers belonging to two cohorts: the millennial generation and Gen Z.
Dayanita Singh is an artist whose medium is photography. Her form is often a book or forms inspired by the Book. Last year she had a solo at the Hayward Gallery in London and represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. She has authored 12 books including Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Privacy (2003), Chairs (2005), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent a Letter (2008), Blue Book (2009), Dream Villa (2010), House of Love (2011), File Room (2013) and Museum of Chance (2014).
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, U.P. She grew up in various towns and cities across India, including Bombay, Bhopal and Dehra Dun, and also spent four years of her childhood in Bahrain. In Delhi, she studied Journalism and later completed an MA in Psychology. After finishing university, she worked for a decade as a reporter, writer and editor in the print media in Delhi and Mumbai. She left journalism in 2007 to study yoga and travelled to Mysore before continuing her studies -- and later teaching -- in Goa, where she currently lives. A Bad Character is her first novel.
Dr K Parthibaraja is an assistant professor, Department of Tamil, Sacred Heart College, Tirupattur. He has been researching Therukoothu from 1997 and has published articles about that art form in leading Tamil journals. He has published a book about Oyilattam in 2005. His awards include the Sadhbhavana National Award (1995), Best Short Story Writer from TASNA, Tamil Nadu (1996), Prof Na Vaanamaaalai Research Award (2012) and Naataka Panichelvan (2012).
Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand. She won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Canadian Governor General’s Award for fiction for her novel The Luminaries. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
DOCTOR, GEETA is a journalist and writer. She is also a noted reviewer of literature. She has written extensively on art and architecture; on food and travel; as well as children’s stories. She describes herself as a journalist whose commentaries on life, literature and society have always sought to be incisive and insightful. She received the Angarag lifetime achievement award 2008 for her contribution to journalism. She published a volume of poems in 2013 entitled “What We Leave Behind.” Geeta lives in Chennai.
Githa Hariharan has written novels, short fiction and essays over the last three decades. Her highly- acclaimed work includes The Thousand Faces of Night, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1993; the short story collection The Art of Dying; and the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master; When Dreams Travel; In Times of Siege; and Fugitive Histories. Hariharan also edited A Southern Harvest and From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity. Her own collection of essays called Almost Home: Cities and Other Places has just been published by HarperCollins India. Hariharan’s fiction has been translated into a number of languages. She has been Visiting Professor or Writer-in-Residence in several universities. She is currently Writer-in-Residence in Singapore.
Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse: A Novel and Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories. She was awarded the Yuva Puraskar (Young Writer Award) from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for fiction in 2013.
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is a medical officer with the government of Jharkhand. His stories and articles have been published in Indian Literature, The Statesman, The Asian Age, Good Housekeeping, Northeast Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Alchemy: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories II and The Times of India. The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey is his first novel.
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of The Trotter-nama, a comic epic that won a Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989. He has written in a variety of genres; from The Brainfever Bird (a thriller set in St Petersburg and Delhi) to Yukon to Yucatan (a travelogue of a journey from the Eskimos to the Mayas). His Everest Hotel is a novel in the form of a calendar. In 2014 he published The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, which chronicles his apprenticeship to three unlettered men -- a mali, a mistri, and a mazdoor -- with whom he builds a tower. He is now writing Zelaldinus, a cycle of Akbar poems set in Fatehpur Sikri. Sealy has been awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize and the Padma Shri.
Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse: A Novel and Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories. She was awarded the Yuva Puraskar (Young Writer Award) from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for fiction in 2013.
Jonathan Gil Harris has been visiting India for 15 years, and has been a permanent resident since June last year. He was Professor of English at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, the world’s leading journal of Shakespeare studies. He is the author of six books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Shakespeare and Literary Theory and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. In recent years, his scholarship has turned to Indian themes. He is the editor of a collection of essays, Indography: Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern Culture, and has written two series for the Hindustan Times on ‘India Bana Pardes’ and ‘Tales of the First Firangis’. His most recent book is The First Firangis: How to Be Authentically Indian. Harris is now Professor of English and Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University in Rai, Haryana.
Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a ‘barefoot’ doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York. She is the author of the best-selling books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (which the Asian Wall Street Journal called the ‘most read book about China’), and Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies, in addition to millions in pirated editions and computer downloads in mainland China where both books are banned. Among the many awards she has won are the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993). Jung Chang’s latest book Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, was published in 2013.
Justice K Chandru is a retired judge of the Madras High Court. He appeared in a number of cases relating to human rights and freedom of the press and has consistently championed the cause of the underprivileged, be it a worker, woman, child, Dalit or political prisoner. During his tenure at the Madras High Court, he strongly defended freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. He now writes regular columns about law, courts and legal systems. He is a visiting faculty at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal. He has published two books in Tamil containing his articles on law and judiciary as well as a review of his judgments on social justice.
K Muralidharan is an artist who lives and works in Chennai. A Diploma and a post-Diploma in Painting from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras was followed by grants to Stockholm College of Art, Sweden in 1989 and to Glasgow School, Scotland in 1993. He has exhibited his work in countries like Mauritius, Bangladesh, Yugoslavia, the U.K., Singapore, Germany, the U.S. and Sweden.
SATCHIDANANDAN K. is perhaps the most translated of contemporary Indian poets , having 23 collections of translation in 19 languages. He writes poetry in Malayalam and prose in Malayalam and English. His book While I Write: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins) came out in 2011. He has lectured and read his poetry across the world. He was a professor of English, and later the chief executive of the Indian National Academy of Literature (Sahitya Akademi) and the Director of the School of Translation Studies, IGNOU, Delhi. He has won 27 literary awards including the Sahitya Akademi, Kerala Sahitya Akademi award (five times), Kusumagraj National Award, NTR National award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy and India-Poland Friendship Medal from the Government of Poland.
Karthik Kumar is a performing arts entrepreneur, actor, stand-up comedian and life-skills trainer. He took a degree in chemical engineering and a post graduate degree in brand management from MICA before finally venturing into the world of cinema, theatre and business. He started ‘evam’ a performing arts entrepreneurship and co-founded ‘Training Sideways’. He is a well-known speaker at national and international forums on arts, entertainment and management.
Karthika VK is Publisher and Chief Editor, HarperCollins Publishers India.
Latha Menon is a 30-second storyteller whose soul comprises vignettes that merge visuals with words. This is evident as the leitmotif embedded across her body of work is the microcosmic examination of character. From a busy actor endorsing an efficient telecom brand to the real life stories of dairy farmers to a weaver staying true to his art in times of change, understanding character is the crux of art. From a painter to a protagonist, a minion to a model, we look closer and watch the story for longer only because we empathise with the character. Latha Menon has been deconstructing this texture of empathy and intrigue in over 150 ad films, several documentaries & short films from 1996 onwards when she set up Iris Films.
Leila Seth was the first woman to top the Bar examinations in London, the first woman judge of the Delhi High Court, and the first woman to become chief justice of a state High Court. She was appointed as a judge in 1978 and retired as Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh in 1992. In 1995 she was appointed as a one-member commission to examine the death in custody of Rajan Pillai, and to suggest improvements in medical facilities for prisoners. She was a member of the 15th Law Commission of India (1997-2000) and one of the three members of the 2012 committee (known as the Justice Verma Committee), constituted in the aftermath of the rape in Delhi of the young woman known as Nirbhaya. She is the author of three books, her autobiography, On Balance; We, the Children of India; and Talking of Justice: People’s Rights in Modern India.
Living Smile Vidya known as Smiley, is the founder-director of Panmai Theatre. Smiley is the first transgender person in India to receive British Council’s Charles Wallace Award 2013 for her excellence in theatre. She has been involved with theatre since 2004. She is the author of I am Vidya, India’s first transgender autobiography. Originally written in Tamil, it has been translated into English, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Assamese. Her essays and poems are published in magazines and online magazines. Smiley is also a self-taught artist. Her drawings based on transgender issues in feministic perspective. She has held five exhibitions in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi. Smiley has also worked in Tamil cinema as assistant director to Mysskin in Nandhalala and also acted in a few short films like Kandal Pookkal and 500 & 5 and in documentary films like Aghrinaigal and Butterfly.
M D Muthukumaraswamy is a Tamil writer and a folklorist who heads the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai. Trained as a semiotician, he traverses several disciplines as a teacher and a researcher. His latest publications in English include Seraikellaa Chaau and edited volumes of Folklore, Public Sphere and Civil Society, Many Cultures: One Nation and Folklore as Discourse.
M Trotsky Marudu is a painter and illustrator who works extensively with animation and special effects. He holds a Diploma and a post-Diploma in Painting from the Government College of Arts and Crafts and has participated in many exhibitions across India. His collections have been shown in countries like Finland, the UK, the US, France and Australia. Apart from his work for magazines and advertising agencies, he has also worked as Special Effects Director for over 35 films in Tamil, Telugu and other languages. He has been on the jury of many art competitions and film festivals. His interests include the history of Tamil art, textiles and cinema and the history of Indian comics.
Madhan Karky completed his Bachelors in Computer Science in College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University in 2001 and his Masters and Ph.D. in Information Technology in University of Queensland, Australia. He worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Anna University between 2009 and 2013. He has published numerous papers and research articles on Tamil Computing. Lyric Engineering is his area of research. Karky began his lyric writing career with director Shankar’s Endhiran. His first song, ‘Irumbile Oar Irudhayam’, won numerous awards including Vijay TV’s Best Find of the Year 2010. Karky has penned 300 songs in 130 movies and has also penned dialogues for popular movies such as Endhiran: The Robot, Nanban & Idharkuthane Aasaipattai Balakumara.
Malashri Lal is currently the Dean of Colleges at the University of Delhi. She was also the Head of the English department. With a specialisation in women’s studies, she has published 10 books including the highly-acclaimed Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English. Recently she co-edited In Search of Sita and Chamba-Achamba: Women’s Oral Narratives. Malashri has served on international book award committees including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Manjula Padmanabhan is an author, playwright and cartoonist. Her books include Getting There, a travel memoir and Harvest, winner of the 1997 Onassis Award for theatre. Escape, a science-fiction novel set in a woman-less future, was published in 2008 and its sequel, The Island of Lost Girls, is due in 2015.
CHEF MANU CHANDRA, a Delhi native, is considered one of India’s leading culinary authorities and one of the most revered chefs in Bengaluru. From Cannes Film Festival to World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Chandra’s skillful culinary artistry has been appreciated worldwide. With numerous honors under his belt — including Travel + Leisure’s “Restaurateur of the Year” and being on the list of top 10 chefs in India by Culinary Culture, a venture by Vir Sanghvi recognising India’s 30 top chefs — his ever-evolving cooking style lays fundamental emphasis on freshness of ingredients and constant evolution. One of India’s most well-respected chefs, he brought many firsts to India’s F&B culture. He is credited for opening the first Indian gastropub, bringing the open-faced bao and trendy Asian dining and its many interpretations to the forefront, the revival of India’s romance with Gin, and celebrating India’s biodiversity by championing Indian produce in progressive ways.
MEENA KANDASAMY is a poet, writer, activist and translator. Her work maintains a focus on caste annihilation, linguistic identity, and feminism. Meena is the youngest person ever to represent India as a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2009. In 2011, she was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (Peacock Books) and Ms Militancy (Navayana). Her work has also been featured in Outlook, The New Indian Express and Tehelka. She is currently working on her first non-fiction book, Caste and the City of Nine Gates.
Mini Krishnan is the co-ordinating editor of the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation’s plan to support English translations of Tamil works through 14 publishers. She has edited literary translations for Oxford University Press (2001-19) and for Macmillan India Ltd (1992-2000). She was the Founding Editor of the South Asia Website for Women Writers hosted by the British Council; Member, Translation Mission; and Member, Indian Literature Abroad. She writes for The Hindu, the English portal of the Mathrubhoomi, and selects translated fiction for Frontline. Over her four-decade-long career, she has edited 135 full-length translations — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and short stories — from 15 Indian languages, been and worked on educational texts prescribed at school and university levels.
N Muthuswamy is a leading playwright, director and pioneer in experimental Tamil theatre. Born in 1936, Natesan Muthuswamy started his literary career as a short-story writer. Later he started writing plays and his first play, Kaalam Kaalamaga, was produced in 1969. Since then he has written a number of plays in Tamil including Unthichuzhi, Kattiakkaran and Nattrunaypan. Among the various awards he has received are the Sangeet Natak Akademic Award in 1999-200; the Kalaimamani Award of the Tamil Nadu Government in 2010 and the Padma Shri in 2012.
N Manu Chakravarthy is Professor and Head of the Department of English at NMKRV College, Bangalore. During the last three decades, he has taught Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory and Theories of Communication to graduate and post-graduate students. He was awarded the Swarna Kamal, the President’s Gold Medal, for Best National Critic at the 58th National Film Awards in 2010. He also won the V M Inamdar award for his book Madhyama Marga on literature and culture. He writes extensively on cinema, music, literature and culture and has several books in English and Kannada to his credit.
Nayantara Sahgal is the author of nine novels, eight non-fiction works, a collection of short stories, and wide-ranging political and literary commentary. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held Fellowships in the US at the Bunting Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Humanities Center. In the 1980s she served as Vice-President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and, in 1990-91, as Chair (Eurasia) on the jury of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Leeds and a Diploma of Honour from the International Order of Volunteers for Peace, Salsomaggiore. She has received the Distinguished Alumna Award from Wellesley College, Massachusetts and from Woodstock School, Mussoorie. She lives in Dehra Dun and has received the city’s Doon Ratna. In 2009 she was a recipient of Zee TV’s Awadh Samman.
Nellai Manikandan is a Chennai-based folk dance teacher. He completed his diploma in folk art from the Tamil Nadu Government Music College and has conducted workshops in Oyillatam, Karagam, Thappatam, Devarattam for institutes like Theosophical Society, Loyola College and Stella Maris College. He has worked with theatre groups like Chennai Kala Kuzhu and Koothu-p-pattarai. He has taken classes in folk art for specially challenged children as dance therapy and was a regular participant of the Chennai Sangamam.
Nimrat Kaur is a film and stage actor. She started her career as a print model and moved to theatre in 2009 with theatre veteran Sunil Shanbag in a musical at the Prithvi Theatre Festival. She has been part of plays like Baghdad Wedding (2012), All About Women and Red Sparrow. Her debut in Hindi films was with Anurag Kashyap’s production Peddlers in 2012, which was followed by The Lunchbox with Irrfan Khan. Both were screened at the Cannes Film Festival. She now appears in the fourth season of the American TV series Homeland, and also in Saurabh Shukla’s untitled psychological drama with Rajkummar Rao.
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Memorious, Slice Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio. Her collection of short stories collection Cowboys and East Indianswon the 2014 PEN Open Book Award. She is at work on a novel and teaches at the University of Wyoming.
Niran V Benjhamin has been a full-time actor with Tamil theatre group Koothu-P-Pattarai from 2010. He has worked in Prasanna Ramaswamy’s Valarkalai and Kattiyakaran. He has a degree in Mass Communications (triple major in Film & Television, Journalism & Public Relations) from Curtin University, Perth (2009). He has also dabbled in various art forms like Capoeira, Ballet, Devarattam, Silambam, Kalari and has worked with South Korea’s Theatre Tuida.
Nirupama Subramanian is Senior Associate Editor at The Hindu. She spent several years in Sri Lanka and Pakistan as a foreign correspondent of The Hindu and thinks of Islamabad and Colombo as homes away from home. She continues to follow both countries closely as well as the rest of South Asia. Her book, Voices from a War Zone, based on her reportage of the Sri Lankan conflict from 1995-2002, was published by Penguin in 2005.
Palagummi Sainath is founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online site wholly dedicated to rural India. A journalist and reporter for over four decades, he has covered rural India for over 30 years and worked with UNI, The Daily, Blitz and The Hindu. His new book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom (2021, Penguin), is about the last fighters in India’s struggle for Independence. His previous book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought (1996, Penguin) is now in its 60th reprint. He has won over 60 national and international awards including the Fukuoka Grand Prize 2021, the World Media Summit award 2014, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007, UNFAO’s Boerma Prize, Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Reporting Prize, the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Media Prize, and the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. He teaches journalism at Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai and Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
RAMAKRISHNA, P.C is a Theatre Actor and Communications Professional. He has been associated with The Madras Players, the oldest English Theatre Group in India, as an actor and administrator. He served as its president for two decades, and has acted in more than 100 of its theatrical productions since 1969. He has been instrumental in shifting the focus of English theatre in the South to Indian writing in original English or in translation/adaptation. He recently directed the much acclaimed production, Water, in translation from Komal Swaminathan’s Thanneer Thanneer. Ramakrishna is a professional voice-over artiste, who has lent his voice to documentaries, corporate films, children’s talking books, heritage films etc. He is one of the most recorded English Language voices in India today.
Nayar, Parvathi is a contemporary visual artist based in Chennai – who works with hand-drawn graphite on wood, paint, video and sculpture. Parvathi received her Masters in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, on a Chevening scholarship. She has exhibited widely in India and abroad, and her works collected by institutions such as the Singapore Art Museum. Parvathi is also a writer, poet and commentator on aspects of creative disciplines that include film, literature and modern dance. Her upcoming solo in Chennai (Feb2014) is titled The Ambiguity of Landscapes.
Prabha Sridevan is a former Judge of the Madras High Court, and former Chairman of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. Her judgments include cases dealing with freedom of speech and the worth of the homemaker’s work, the Novartis case, and the compulsory licence case. Her translations include two volumes of short stories of Chudamani — Seeing in the Dark (OUP) and The Echoes of the Veena (Ratna). The latter won a translation award at the Valley of Words Literature Festival 2019 and was adapted to a theatrical presentation by the Madras Players. She has also translated short stories of Ravikumar, Sornavalli, Vaasanthi, Seetha Ravi, Thoppil Mohammed Meeran, Imayam and K. Chandrasekaran, and the essays of U.Ve.Sa (along with Pradeep Chakravarthi).
Pralayan Shanmugasundaram Chandrasekaran, better known as Pralayan, is one of the pioneering theatre personalities who are spearheading the modern theatre movement with the major emphasis towards the open-air theatre performances in Tamil Nadu. As the founder and convener of Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, he has been active in the Tamil Nadu theatre scene from 1984. He has written, facilitated and directed more than 50 open-air plays and 23 proscenium plays including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, Habib Tanvir’s Moteram ka Satyagragh, Charandas Chor, Chandrashekhara Kambara’s Mahamayi, Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Pralayan’s works and presentations are known for their dynamic engagement with the space and its design and vibrant music. He has also conducted workshops and directed the plays across India and in countries like Norway, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
Prince Rama Varma is a direct descendant of Maharaja Swathi Thirunal and Raja Ravi Varma of Travancore and a singer, veena player, writer, voracious reader, orator and eternal student. He takes care to learn the word-by-word meaning of every song that he sings, be it in Sanskrit, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi or even Bengali. He also generously shares his insights with his listeners.
Rohini R. started her career as a child artist at the age five. Since then, she has acted in over 230 South Indian films. She has worked with eminent directors like Kamal Haasan, K.Bhagya Raj, Balu Mahendra, Bharathan and Singeetham Srinivasa Rao. For her performance in the Telugu film Stree, she received the National Award ‘special mention’ for best actress and the Andhra Pradesh Nandi Award. She received the “Kalimamani” from Tamil Nadu Government in 2010. Rohini has directed seven short films, three commercials and a documentary on child actors, Silent Hues, under her production house, Raadhaswamy Enterprises. She has also hosted live talk shows for Star Vijay and has been writing scripts for TV series since 1996. She adapted the award-winning book Verukku Neer for a telefilm. She is active in Tamil theatre as performer. Currently, she is directing her first feature film in Tamil, Appaavin Meesai, produced by Cheran.
Rajdeep Sardesai was till recently the editor of chief of IBN 18 network and the author of 2014: The Elections that Changed India. He has 26 years of journalistic experience in print and television. Before setting up the IBN network channels, he was the Managing Editor of both NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India. He also worked with The Times of India for six years and was city editor of its Mumbai edition at the age of 26. During the last 26 years, he has covered major national and international stories, specialising in national politics. He has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence, including the prestigious Padma Shri for Journalism in 2008, the International Broadcasters award for coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots and the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award for 2007. He has won the Asian Television award for talk show presentation and has been News Anchor of the year at the Indian Television Academy for eight of the last nine years. He has been the President of the Editors Guild of India and was also chosen as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the world economic forum. Sardesai writes a fortnightly column across several newspapers, including The Hindustan Times.
Rajmohan Gandhi is a historian and biographer who served as Research Professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois, US until end 2012. His latest book is Prince of Gujarat: The Extraordinary Story of Prince Gopaldas Desai, 1887-1951. His Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten was published in 2013. An earlier book, Gandhi: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, received the prestigious Biennial Award from the Indian History Congress in 2007. In 2002 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Rajaji: A Life. His other books include Patel: A Life; Revenge & Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History; Eight Lives: A Study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter; and Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns. In the early 1990s, Rajmohan Gandhi served as a Member of the Rajya Sabha. Before that he was Resident Editor, Indian Express, in Chennai, and Chief Editor, Himmat, Mumbai.
Ramesh Gopalakrishnan hails from the older-than-Chennai Mylapore whose lanes bifurcate at temples, churches and masjids. When he’s not riding his bike in this city, he lives on the banks of the Meenachil in Kerala or in London. He’s a lapsed nuclear technologist, a student of philosophy, a structuralist interpreter equally at home in ancient and modern Tamil, a print and radio journalist and a researcher-activist. His last avatar was an eight-year-long stint as the India researcher at Amnesty International’s International Secretariat at London. Here he savoured a rare moment of glory when his focused research findings helped the Dongria Kondh adivasis’ Avatar-like struggle stall Vedanta’s corporate plans to mine bauxite in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills. His latest foray is into teaching a course on disasters for students of media.
RANVIR SHAH is a businessman, philanthropist, and cultural activist. He is the founder of The Prakriti Foundation. For over a decade, the Foundation has provided a sturdy platform for scholars, researchers, artists, critics, poets and filmmakers to exchange ideas and to promote a serious discussion of their work and of our cultural heritage. Ranvir’s interest in the arts also led him to direct several plays, with his debut being a dramatisation of classical Tamil poems. He has been part of the Chennai Citizens’ Run since its inception, and assists in promoting awareness about small non-governmental organisations that deserve recognition.
Renuka Narayanan is a commentator and columnist on religion and culture. She was Arts Editor, The Indian Express with a column on religion on the Editorial Page; Editor, Religion & Culture, Hindustan Times; and the start-up Director of the Indian Cultural Centre in Bangkok for ICCR-Embassy of India. Her published books include The Book of Prayer, Faith: Filling the God-sized Hole and The Little Book of Indian Wisdom. She lives in New Delhi.
KUMAR, REVATHY is a Company Secretary by profession, working for Cognizant technology solutions as Senior Legal counsel. Revathy is a trained carnatic vocalist (student of late Sangeetha Kala Acharya Smt. Sulochana Pattabhiraman and presently Sri P. Vasanth Kumar) and a bharathanatyam dancer (student of Padmasri Guru Kum. Shobana), and started performing concerts at the age of 11. Recipient of the “Yuva Kala Bharathi” from the Bharat Kala Char in 2011 for all rounder in Vocal, Bharathanatyam and Nattuvangam, winner of the Spirit of youth “best female vocalist” award from the music academy in 2008, best dancer award from the VDS arts academy in 2003 etc., Revathy was featured in the Score magazine as the “Artiste of the month” during February 2012. She has performed across India and the globe accompanying her guru in dance, music and nattuvangam. She is a B-High artiste with All India Radio.
Ritu Menon began working in publishing in 1970, and has been doing so ever since. After about 15 years in mainstream publishing, she co-founded India’s first feminist press Kali for Women in 1984, and in 2003 set up Women Unlimited, a subsidiary of Kali. A passionate involvement with publishing, feminism and the women’s movement led her to writing. She writes on varied -- but interconnected -- issues such as violence, the media, communalism and fundamentalism, censorship, history and biography. Always with a feminist’s double gaze. Among her many books is the path-breaking Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Her most recent publication, Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal. A whimsical travel diary, Loitering With Intent, is forthcoming.
Rm Palaniappan is a well-known Chennai-based artist and an alumnus of the Government College of Arts Crafts, Chennai. He was the Artist in Residence at the Oxford University in 1996 and the recipient of several awards, honours and residencies including the Fulbright Grant, Charles Wallace India Trust Grant, International Visitorship programme of USIS, and Senior Fellowship, Government of India. He has held 19 one-man shows across the country and also in Holland, in the U.S., the U.K. and Korea. He has curated several exhibitions including a special one organised by the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi to commemorate the golden Jubilee of India’s independence in 1997. He has served on the jury of several exhibitions and art competitions around the country. He is a Life Trustee at Dakshina Chitra (Heritage Museum)/ Madras Craft Foundation, Chennai; and art advisor at Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai. Since 1997 he has been the Regional Secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi.
Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and urban designer from Mumbai and the Deputy Director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. He is interested in exploring cross-disciplinary ways of reading and representation of cities and has been involved in projects that attempt to broaden the ways in which we look at architecture and the city. He has published essays on architecture and urbanism in international and national journals. He is the co-editor of Project Cinema City, a book that documents the multi-disciplinary research and art project exploring the relationship between cinema and the city of Mumbai.
MENON, SADANAND is a nationally reputed arts editor, popular teacher of cultural journalism, photographer, stage lights designer and prolific speaker at seminars on politics, ecology and the arts. He is currently Adjunct Faculty, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and at IIT, Madras. He is member, Apex Advisory Committee, National Museum, Delhi; Advisory Committee, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru; Advisory Council, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi; Governing Council, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; and Managing Trustee, SPACES, An Arts Foundation, Chennai. A close associate of legendary choreographer Chandralekha, he is deeply involved with issues concerning contemporary Indian dance. He also curated a major Retrospective Exhibition of Fifty Years of Dashrath Patel’s work in painting, ceramics, photography and design for NGMA, Delhi and Mumbai.
Salil Tripathi is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan, and lives in London. He was born in Bombay and studied at New Era School and later Sydenham College, and did his MBA at Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College in the U.S. He has been a correspondent at India Today, and in 1991 he moved to Singapore, where he was regional economics correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review. He moved to London in 1999 and has written for publications including Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New Republic, Guardian, The New Yorker, and others. His journalism has won a Bastiat Prize and the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Award. He is the author of Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Aleph Book Company, 2014). A collection of travel essays (Tranquebar, 2015) will be published later this year.
Samanth Subramanian is the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War. A New Delhi-based journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Guardian, Mint and Caravan, among other publications. His first book, Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2010.
Sanjaya Baru is Director for Geo-economics and Strategy, International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), London, and Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He was Media Advisor and Principal Speechwriter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2004-08. He has been Chief Editor, Business Standard and The Financial Express; Editorial Page Editor, The Times of India and Associate Editor, The Economic Times. His publications include Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance (Routledge, 2006), The Political Economy of Indian Sugar (Oxford University Press, 1990) and The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (Penguin/Viking, 2014).
Sashi Kumar is the founder and Chairman of the Media Development and Asian College of Journalism. He is a print and broadcast journalist. He was among the earliest newscasters in English on national television, Doordarshan, Middle East Correspondent of The Hindu and news anchor on Radio Bahrain in the mid-1980s. He has produced many docu-features for television. In 1992 he founded and launched Asianet, India’s first satellite and cable TV in a regional language. He received the Vijayaraghavan Memorial Award in 2007 and the Swadeshabhimani-Kesari Puraskaram from the government of Kerala in 2011 for his contribution to media. In 2004 he scripted and directed Kaya Taran, an award-winning Hindi feature film based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots. He has acted in a few Malayalam feature films. Sashi writes a regular fortnightly column titled ‘Unmediated’ in Frontline; it is also the title of the book comprising his essays and articles published by Tulika Books in 2013.
SHARAN APPARAO is one of the most well-known curators and promoters of art in India. Since her first presentation of art in 1983, she has made Chennai an established destination for the discerning collector, through Apparao Galleries and its sister concern Art Route (an export firm). In 2007, she was honoured by FICCI as one of the top women achievers in the country for her contribution towards promoting contemporary Indian art. In 2012 she was awarded the Ritz-Audi award for her contribution to art. With a background education in fine arts, Sharan has previously worked at the Smithsonian and Christie’s contemporary art. She now conducts shows in cities across India. It is her curatorial eye that has discovered and been associated with emerging talents in the field of art in India.
Shashi Deshpande has to her credit 10 novels, two novellas, a number of short story collections, a book of non-fiction (Writing from the Margin) and four children’s books. Her novel That Long Silence won the Sahitya Akademi award. Her latest novels are Small Remedies, Moving On, In The Country of Deceit, Ships that Pass and Shadow Play. A number of her short stories and novels have been translated into many Indian and European languages. She has translated two plays by eminent Kannada writer, Adya Rangacharya, as well as his memoirs, from Kannada into English. She has also translated Gauri Deshpande’s Marathi novel into English. She has been invited to participate in various literary conferences and festivals, as well as to lecture in Universities, both in India and abroad. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2008.
Shiv Visvanathan is Professor, Jindal Global Law School and Director, Centre for the Study of Knowledge Systems, O.P. Jindal Global University.
Shonali Muthalaly is an Associate Editor at The Hindu, running the MetroPlus and Weekend supplements. A Chevening scholar, she writes and reports on the intersection between food and culture, and oversees The Hindu’s food vertical, building a product that engages with both diners and professionals in the culinary space. She also writes on theatre, art and travel.
CHOWDHURY, SHOVON is an amateur humourist. His blog, India Update (shovonc.wordpress.com) has horrified over 100,000 people. He is also the creator of The Trilokpuri Incident, a research project which investigates something no one can remember. He has completed one novel, The Competent Authority. Shovon’s work as co-author of the Very Rich Whitebook for the National Council of Applied Economic Research has left him deeply prejudiced against the very rich. His grandfather ran away from Dhaka to escape Japanese bombing in 1945, not realizing that the war was about to end, and arrived in Calcutta just in time for the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946. These shared family experiences have left him deeply averse to sudden movement, which is why he has lived in Delhi for the last twenty years. He is too old to immigrate, but too young to give up.
Singeetam Srinivasa Rao made his directorial debut with the Telugu Film Neethi Nijayathi in 1972. He has directed about 60 films in various languages including Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi and English. He has directed several movies, including Pushpak, Mayuri, Taram Marindhi, Vichitra Sodarulu, Michael Madhana Kamarajan, and Aditya 369. He also directed an English animation film called Son of Aladdin. He has also scripted many plays. Currently he is working on a film about the life of Jesus Christ. He has received the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil for Dikketra Paravathi and Golden Lotus Award for Best Director for Pushpak. He has also received the Nandi Award and Filmfare Best Director Award (Telugu) for Bhairava Dweepam.
Sriram V has an engineering degree and an MBA under his belt but is better known for his passionate interest in Chennai’s history and Carnatic Music. He writes frequently on these subjects for The Hindu (where he has two columns – Encore, a monthly and Hidden Histories, a weekly) and Madras Musings. He is the author of over 10 books, among them Carnatic Summer; The Devadasi and The Saint: the Life and Times of Bangalore Nagarathnamma; and Fifty Historic Residences of Chennai. He pioneered the concept of heritage walks in the city in 1999 and his thematic tours of the city, on the third Sunday of each month, have become very popular. In 2014 Sriram launched Chennai Past Forward, a mobile application that makes people aware of the heritage in their surroundings.
SUSHILA RAVINDRANATH joined Business India in Mumbai as a staff writer when business was still a bad word and and Business Week famously called the country an elephant on an oil spill. She moved to Chennai in the mid 1980s and has done stories on many South Indian groups, which were publicity-shy and had never been written about. She set up Business India bureaus in all the Southern cities. She helped launch Hansazone website, an entertainment portal for R K Swamy BBDO, before she moved to the New Sunday Express as its editor. She is now a consulting editor for Financial Express and is completing a book on post-liberalisation Tamil Nadu.
T.M. KRISHNA or Thodur Madabusi Krishna is a pre-eminent Karnatik vocalist and public intellectual who speaks and writes about issues affecting the human condition and matters of culture. Krishna has started and is involved with many organisations that work across the spectrum of music and culture. He has co-authored Voices Within: Carnatic Music – Passing on an Inheritance, a book dedicated to the greats of Karnatik music. A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story won the 2014 Tata Literature Award for Best First Book in the non-fiction category. His latest book Sebastian and Sons received the Tata Lit Live Award for the Best Non-Fiction book for 2020. In 2016, Krishna received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of ‘his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions’. He has collaborated with contemporary Tamil writer Perumal Murugan to bring his poetry onto the ‘classical’ stage and also brought the poetry of social reformer and philosopher, Sree Narayana Guru, into the Karnatik fold. In collaboration with Ashoka University, T.M. Krishna is now involved in The Edict Project, an attempt to reimagine Ashoka’s edicts in musical form.
Dr Trippunithura Viswanathan Gopalakrishnan (TVG) learnt Carnatic music first from his father, Viswanatha Bhagavathar, and later from Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar. He learnt mridangam from his uncle, Narayanaswamy Iyer. He gave his maiden concert at the age of six. Later, TVG turned to Hindustani music and evolved a unique style. He has also been hailed as an innovator of Indian Jazz and has collaborated with musicians like George Harrison and Pt. Ravi Shankar. Among his various awards are the Padma Bhushan, the Sangeet Natak Academy Award, the Kalaimamani from the Tamil Nadu Government and the Sangita Kalanidhi from the Music Academy, Chennai. His publications include Mridangam: The King of percussion, Your Voice: Study of Voice Culture in Indian Music and Gamaka: The New Vision.
Tabish Khair was born and educated in Bihar, India. He has published a number of critically-acclaimed collections of poetry -- including Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000) and Man of Glass (2010) -- and novels. His novels have been translated into various languages and shortlisted for a dozen major awards, including the Man Asian Prize, the Encore Award and The Hindu Prize. He has also written or edited several ground-breaking studies and anthologies, including Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (2001) and Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (2005). His latest novel is How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. Khair now lives in Denmark.
TIMERI N. MURARI was for many years a journalist writing for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and Observer in London before he moved to New York, where he made documentary films for British television. He has written 18 books of fiction and non-fiction. His bestselling Taj: A Story of Mughal India (Aleph Book Co.) has been translated into 25 languages. The Taliban Cricket Club (HarperCollins) was published in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia and translated into French, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian. He is also the writer and producer of the award-winning film, “The Square Circle”, which was voted as one of the “ten best films of the year” by TIME Magazine in 1997. He adapted it for the stage and directed it as the Leicester Harmarket theatre with Parminder Nagra in the lead role. In 2002, he was presented with the R.K. Narayan Award for his contributions to writing, cinema and theatre.
Tisca Chopra has acted in over 40 feature films in different languages. Taare Zameen Par, her best known feature film, was India’s official entry to the Academy Awards. It also won her the Filmfare Award. Another feature film, Qissa, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013, and has travelled to over 20 festivals. She was nominated for Best Actress at the New York Indian Film Festival for her work in 10Ml Love, a film based on A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. She’s been on the Jury of the prestigious MAMI film festival. She has acted in the Pulitzer Award-winning play, Dinner With Friends. A practising Buddhist, she works on issues especially those of women, the girl child and the environment. She has worked with Sam Pitroda on the National Knowledge Commission, to help with revamping the education system and rote learning. Her book Acting Smart is being translated into Hindi. She has started work on a film script and plans on producing it.
Vaishna Roy is a Sr Deputy Editor with The Hindu, and writes on books, society and culture. She authors a fortnightly column called ‘Woman, Uninterrupted’ in Melange, besides editing the newspaper’s cinema and property supplements
His second film Veyil (2006) not only won the National Award for the Best Tamil feature film that year but was also the first-ever Tamil film to be screened in the Tous les Cinema du Monde section at the Cannes Film Festival. He followed this up with Angadi Theru about two lovers who struggle to unite amid the travails of their workplace – a textile showroom in T.Nagar’s Ranganathan Street – and their personal responsibilities arising from being lone breadwinners of the family. His two latest films – both period dramas – touched upon topics as varied as capital punishment (Aravaan) and rivalry within a drama troupe in pre-independence India (Kaaviya Thalaivan).
Vasuki U is the National Vice-President of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and a Central Committee Member of the CPI(M). She works actively on many social and political issues such as violence against women and children, food security, caste oppression, honour killings among others. She successfully led a struggle against Coca Cola setting up a factory at Padamathur, Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu. She has served as a resource person on gender equality to the police force, district judges and various NGOs and is a member of the Police Advisory Committee in Chennai. She was the anchor person for Magalir Panchayathu in Pothigai TV, a programme on issues related to women’s right.
Vetrimaran, an assistant to the legendary filmmaker Balu Mahendra, debuted with the commercially successful Polladhavan (2007) starring Dhanush. He returned four years later with Aadukalam, (again with Dhanush), which spoke about love, respect and revenge surrounding the brutal sport of cock fighting in Madurai. The film won six awards in the 58th National Film Awards – the most for any Tamil film. Apart from this, he has also produced films such as Udhayam NH4, Kaaka Muttai and Poriyaalan. He is currently directing Visaranai starring Attakathi Dinesh.
Vinod Rai joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1972 and was from the Kerala cadre. His assignments in the State Government included stints as Secretary (Agriculture), Principal Secretary (Finance) and Managing Director, Kerala State Cooperative Marketing Federation. At the federal level also, he has held senior positions, including Deputy Secretary in Ministry of Commerce, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, and Secretary Ministry of Finance. He took over as the Comptroller & Auditor General of India in January 2008. His responsibilities in the international arena included Chairmanship of the U.N. Panel of External Auditors and membership of the Governing Board of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). He was also the Chairman of the Governing Board of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions(ASOSAI). He is a keen tennis player and his interests include gardening and mountaineering.
Ziya Us Salam is a veteran journalist and widely published author. His latest book Being Muslim in Hindu India is a bestseller. His upcoming book is The Lion of Naushera. Based in New Delhi, he works with The Hindu as an Associate Editor.
