Amitav Ghosh is the author of highly acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, which include the Booker Prize shortlisted Sea of Poppies (book one of the Ibis Trilogy), River of Smoke, The Glass Palace and The Shadow Lines. He has won numerous prizes, some of which are the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Pushcart Prize and the Grinzane Cavour Prize. He divides his time between New York and India.
KAPUR, ANURADHA recently completed her term as Director at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. She is the author of Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: the Ramlila at Ramnagar. Most of her directorial work has been in collaboration with visual and video artists and filmmakers, including Arpita Singh, Bhupen Khakhar, Ein Lall, Madhusree Dutta, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, Sumant Jayakrishnan, and Vivan Sundaram. She is one of the founder members of Vivadi, a working group of painters, musicians, writers and theatre practitioners, formed in 1989. Her theatre work has traveled among other countries, to Germany, Japan, Brazil, UK, and Korea. In 2003 she was invited to curate the performance window actors at work at body.city, an event siting contemporary Indian culture at the House of World Cultures, Berlin. In 2004 she was awarded the Sangeet Natak Award for Direction in the Theatre.
Arun Kumar is a retired professor of economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Deepan Sivaraman is a theatre director, scenographer, dramaturge and educator based in Delhi. He is the founding Artistic Director of Oxygen Theatre Company in Kerala, and Performance Studies Collective in Delhi. He has directed and designed over 70 theatre productions for various companies and academic institutions in India and Europe. Some of his notable works have been performed in festivals such as Avignon, Alameda, Edinburgh, ULICA-Krakow, Wuzhen-Shanghai, Prithvi, ITFOK, META and Bharat Rang Mahotsav. He was awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship in 2003, The Kerala Sangeet Natak Academy Award for theatre direction in 2012, and Mahindra Excellence National Theatre Awards in 2010 and 2018, for Spinal Cord and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari respectively. Deepan’s works represented Indian scenography at the Prague Quadrennial in 2011, and he served as the artistic director of International Theatre Festival of Kerala in 2013. His notable works are Khasakkinte Ithihasam, Spinal Cord, Peer Gynt, Lord of the Flies, Kamala, Dark Things, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nationalism Project and Ubu Roi. Deepan teaches at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, Delhi.
Dr. Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy is a Behavioural Neurologist and Neuropsychiatrist. The founder of Buddhi Clinic and a pioneer of integrated and holistic care and rehabilitation for the brain and mind, he has taken on multiple international leadership roles in treating epilepsy, dementia and in the field of clinical neuropsychiatry. He is the immediate past president of the International Neuropsychiatric Association (INA) and the editor of the Global Approach series for Cambridge University Press, He has to his credit 70 plus publications, 30 plus book chapters and over 25 articles in the lay press. He is Adjunct Professor at Manipal University and Public Health Foundation India. He is also Senior Clinical Advisor, Neurosciences, Apollo Hospitals Group.
Dr. Pratima Murthy is the director of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS). A well-recognised leader in addiction psychiatry, she has been instrumental in the successful development of state-of-the-art Centre for Addiction Medicine at NIMHANS. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) and as a resource person for various flagship training programmes in substance abuse prevention and tobacco cessation in the country, and across the globe. Dr. Pratima is also recognised for her contribution in improving care for persons with mental illness through her work with the National Human Rights Commission on quality assurance in mental health care both in institutions and in the community. Her awards include the prestigious Dr. Raja Ramanna State Award by the Government of Karnataka and the WHO Regional Director’s Special Recognition Award on ‘World No Tobacco Day 2021’. She has more than 300 research publications in various international indexed journals and scientific books to her credit. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP)-Glasgow.
Dr. Shekhar Seshadri is a child psychiatrist with over 35 years of experience in the field of child mental health. As Senior Professor in the Dept. of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Dean of the Behavioural Sciences Division, NIMHANS, his work extends beyond the clinical population to children and child care institutions/ service providers across the country as well as the South Asia region. Some of his special areas of interest in child mental health are childhood trauma, gender and sexuality issues and life skill education. Also, an artist and musician, he uses a number of creative methodologies in child mental health interventions including theatre and developmental approaches. In the belief that wider psychosocial interventions are rooted in child rights, in addition to his preventive-promotive and curative child mental health interventions, he has undertaken various legal and policy-related initiatives. He was part of national deliberations on the POCSO Act 2012 during its drafting, and more recently an active part of the debates around the December 2015 Juvenile Justice Act on children in conflict with the law. He has also engaged extensively as a member of working groups of the National commission for protection of rights of the child on issues such as substance abuse and elimination of corporal punishment in school. Finally, all his policy and practice work find their way into training and capacity building programs for target audiences ranging from students of mental health disciplines and mental health care professional in clinical settings to child care service providers in non-clinical settings, including community health workers, teachers, government and non-government staff and counsellors and judicial personnel. The NIMHANS Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Project was conceptualised and initiated by Dr. Seshadri as part of his vision for enabling access to mental health for the most vulnerable child populations. This has now extended into SAMVAD (Support, Advocacy & Mental health interventions for children in Vulnerable circumstances And Distress - A National Initiative & Integrated Resource for Child Protection, Mental Health, & Psychosocial Care), supported by the Ministry of Women & Child Development, Government of India.
Dr Soumitra Pathare is a consultant psychiatrist, and the Director of the Centre for Mental Health Law & Policy, Indian Law Society, Pune, India. His primary interests are in the areas of suicide prevention, mental health policy, scaling up mental health services, rights-based care, and legislation. In the past, he has provided technical assistance to the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India, in drafting India’s Mental Healthcare Act 2017, which takes a rights-based approach to mental healthcare and has also served as a WHO consultant in many low- and middle-income countries. He has conceptualised and steered various innovative community-led mental health interventions and strongly believes all persons with mental illness should be able to fully participate in society, as everyone else!
G. Arun Kumar is a Professor at IIT Madras
Gagandeep Kang is Professor, Christian Medical College, Vellore
Indra K. Nooyi served as CEO and chairman of PepsiCo from 2006 to 2019. Her prescient strategic thinking, insight into consumer behaviour, and wisdom on managing a vast, global workforce make her one of the world’s most sought-after advisors to entrepreneurs, executives, and governments. She is also revered as a role model for women and immigrants, and celebrated for her empowering messages on inclusivity. Nooyi has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, and the U.S. State Department’s award for Outstanding American by Choice, and has received 15 honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Yale University in 2019. She is married to Raj Nooyi and has two daughters, Preetha and Tara.
Ira Mukhoty is the author of Akbar: The Great Mughal, Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire and Heroines: Powerful Indian Women in Myth and History. Living in one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, she developed an interest in the evolution of mythology and history, the erasure of women from these histories, and the continuing relevance this has on the status of women in India. She writes rigorously researched narrative histories that are accessible to the lay reader. She lives in Gurgaon with her husband and two daughters. Her first novel Song of Draupadi was published in August 2021.
K. Srinath Reddy is President, Public Health Foundation of India.
Kamini Mahadevan had a long and exciting innings in publishing. She retired as Consultant Editor, Penguin Books. While at Penguin, she looked after the quasi-academic, non-fiction, the Penguin Classics, and translations lists. She has had the privilege of publishing several eminent and award-winning authors, from U.R. Ananthamurthy, David Shulman and V. Narayana Rao, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Vinay Dharwadkar, Martha Ann Selby, Vijay Nambisan to Romila Thapar, Rajmohan Gandhi, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Mukul Kesavan, Shashi Tharoor, Samanth Subramaniam, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Baradwaj Rangan and Sanjaya Baru, among many others. She now lives in Bangalore and freelances.
Dr Mahesh Rangarajan studied history at Hindu College, University of Delhi, and at Balliol College and Nuffield College, Oxford. Presently the Vice Chancellor of Krea University, he teaches History and Environmental Studies. His books include Fencing the Forest (1996), India’s Wildlife History (2000), and Nature and Nation (2015). The co-edited books on conservation include Battles over Nature (2003) and Nature without Borders (2014). In 2010, he was chair of the Elephant Task Force of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.
N. Ravi is the Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the holding company of The Hindu Group, and was earlier the Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu. He was Chairman of the Board of Press Trust of India, and the President of the Editors’ Guild of India. He is the Chairman of the India Chapter of the International Press Institute, and has been a member of the Executive Board of the International Press Institute, Vienna. Mr Ravi is presently Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Chennai Kendra. He was a member of the National Integration Council, Government of India, and from 2006 to 2008 of the National Security Advisory Board. He has a Master’s degree in Economics, and a degree in Law, and has won several academic awards including a gold medal in Constitutional and International Law. He was a Fellow at the Harvard Law School in 2000, and Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University in 2004. In 2013, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.
Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author
Srinivasan, Pankaja has been a journalist for more thsn 25 years. She has been with The Hindu for eight years and is currently Senior assistant editor heading the MetroPlus edition in Coimbatore. She has travelled the length and breadth of the country accompanying her husband who was a helicopter pilot in the Indian Air Force, and lived with him and two infants at Leh for two years. She enjoys travelling and writing about her travels.
Pranay Lal is a biochemist by training and works for a non-profit organisation in the area of public health. He has been a cartoonist for newspapers, an animator for a leading advertising agency, an environmental campaigner, and worked towards the development of HIV vaccine. For the past ten years, he has worked on lung health focussing on tobacco control. His first book, Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent was released in December 2016.
Ramya Kannan has over 25 years in journalism, anachronistically in these times, all of them at The Hindu. She is the newspaper’s Tamil Nadu bureau chief, but does not allow the job to be restrictive — continuing to be passionate about health and development issues, which she has reported on steadily through quarter of a century. If the last couple of years have turned the world on its head, then the endeavour has been to make sense of things within this new paradigm. Besides that, she is trigger happy, shooting pictures; has a green thumb, and is always trying to keep up with her effervescent 11-year-old daughter, and only sometimes succeeding.
Dr. Sanjay Gubbi is a leading wildlife biologist and conservationist in the country who has made notable contributions to the preservation of wildlife. He bridges a strong understanding of the socio-economic and political aspects of conservation with its scientific bases. He relentlessly works with the Government, political leaders, social and religious leaders, local communities, media personnel and others to bring about crucial changes for wildlife conservation. He writes extensively both in English and Kannada and is especially keen on popularising wildlife conservation in local languages. His latest book Leopard Diaries: The Rosette in India is based on his extensive work on leopards. His other books include Second Nature: Saving Tiger Landscapes in the Twenty-First Century, Shaalege Banda Chirate Matthu Ithara Kathegalu, Vanyajeevigala Jaadu Hididu, and Vanyajeevigala Ramyaloka.
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.
SHASHI THAROOR (Dr.), a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of 25 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, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in the category of ‘English Non-Fiction’ for his book An Era of Darkness. He chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.
journalist and author
Subodh Kerkar was born in Keri, a picturesque village on the northern border of Goa. A qualified medical professional, he gave up medicine to pursue arts 30 years ago. He is an artist and an activist and uses art to comment on social, political, religious and other issues. His art practice includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, performances and land art. He has carved a niche for himself, especially in the field of conceptual art and land art. Subodh Kerkar’s installations are heavily washed by the ocean, both literally and metaphorically. He creates his ephemeral installations using thousands of mussel shells, pebbles, palm leaves, boats, fishermen and sand. The ocean is both inside and outside his works, his master and his muse. He has exhibited widely in galleries, museums and biennales around the world and is the Founding Director of Museum of Goa (MOG). Presently, he also holds the Mario Miranda Chair as a Visiting Research Professor at Goa University. He lives and works in Goa.
Sudha Kongara was born in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, and grew up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, where she obtained a degree in History and Mass Communication from the Women’s Christian College. She started her career in 1999 as a screenwriter for the English film, Mitr My Friend, directed by Revathi. The film won the Best English Film of the year at the 49th National Film Awards. In 2000, she joined Madras Talkies as an Associate Director to Mani Ratnam and, for seven years, assisted him in films such as Aayutha Ezhuthu, Yuva (Hindi and Telugu), and Guru (Trilingual). In 2010, she made her directorial debut with Drohi. Among her many successful films is the 2016 box-office hit, Irudhi Suttru starring Madhavan (Salaa Khadoos in Hindi and Guru in Telugu starring Venkatesh Daggubatti). The film won many awards including Filmfare South’s Best Director Tamil, Best Film Tamil, Best Actor Tamil, Best Actress Tamil, a special mention at the 2016 National Film Awards, Best Film Director at the Government of Puducherry’s Best Film Awards. In 2020, her projects included Soorari Pottru, Illamai Idho Idho (a segment of the Tamil anthology series, Putham Pudhu Kalai for Amazon Prime) and Thangam (a segment of the Tamil anthology series, Paava Kadhaigal for Netflix).
The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi is an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator and a polymath monk. He is President & CEO of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Venerable Tenzin’s unusual background encompasses entering a Buddhist monastery at the age of ten and receiving graduate education at Harvard University with degrees ranging from Philosophy to Physics to International Relations. He is a Tribeca Disruptive Fellow and a 2018 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Venerable Tenzin serves on the boards of number of academic, humanitarian, and religious organisations. He is the recipient of several recognitions and awards, and received Harvard’s Distinguished Alumni Honors for his visionary contributions to humanity.
Vinay Kamath is Senior Associate Editor with The Hindu BusinessLine based in Chennai. Prior to joining BusinessLine in 1998, he did a short stint in television with TV 18, where he was chief of news bureau, Chennai. He has earlier worked with Financial Express, Business World, Times of India and Economic Times. A graduate in Economics from Vivekananda College, University of Madras, Kamath earned a diploma in journalism from the Times School of Journalism, New Delhi, in 1986. He was also a member of the first batch of the Chevening Young Journalists’ Programme at the University of London in 1995.