Archives: Authors

Amor Towles is the author of New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow. The two novels have collectively sold more than 4 million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. She attended Huntington College and studied law at the University of Alabama. She is the author of the acclaimed novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and numerous other literary awards and honours. She died on 19 February 2016.

Haruki Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize in 1979. He is the author of many novels including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka on the Shore. He has written three short story collections: The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake, and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. He has received numerous international literary honors, including the Jerusalem Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the World Fantasy Award, and the Noma Literary Prize, as well a feature in TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015. Murakami’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages.

Madhav Gadgil was born in 1942 amid the hills of Western Ghats and, fascinated by its rich natural and cultural heritage, decided, while still a high school student, to become a field ecologist-cum-anthropologist. He was educated in Pune, Mumbai and Harvard University, where he did a doctoral thesis in mathematical ecology and won the IBM Computer Center Fellowship.

For thirty-one years he was on the faculty of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, where he established the Centre for Ecological Sciences and engaged in basic as well as applied research in collaboration with tribals, farmers, herders and fisherfolk. He was involved in drafting India’s Biological Diversity Act and has chaired the Science and Technology Advisory Panel of Global Environment Facility and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel.

R. Vaidyanathan is a retired professor of finance from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
A graduate of Loyola College, Chennai, and with a master’s from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, he obtained his doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta where he also taught for four years.
Prof. Vaidyanathan is a two-time Fulbright scholar and also a fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). He was visiting faculty at various universities in the US and UK. In the past, he has been selected by Business Today as one of the ten best professors at all IIMs. He has had the rare privilege of being in the various committees of regulators such as SEBI, RBI, IRDA and PFRDA. He is a consultant to many organizations and is on the board of many corporates. He is a fellow of Salzburg Seminar.
Prof. Vaidyanathan was conferred the Lifetime Contribution Award by the Asia Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA) and Kybo Life in 2019. His 2013 book, India Uninc: Role of Non-corporate sectors in India, which focuses on Indian and Asian value systems, was well received by planners and policymakers. His 2019 book, Caste as Social Capital, has been acclaimed by experts.

VALMIKI FALEIRO, one of Goa’s home-grown prolific writers, was a staff reporter with the West Coast Times. He also covered Goa for national publications like the Current Weekly, the Free Press Journal group of publications and the Indian Express. As a freelancer before that, he contributed articles and features to various journals, including the Navhind Times, Goa Today, Sun Weekly, Newstrek, Detective Digest, Mirror and Newsmag. Faleiro was among the dozen-odd Indians selected for the ‘Workshop for Asian Writers’ held in March 1977 at the India International Centre, New Delhi.

Faleiro was briefly (1985-87), the municipal president of Margao. On picking up the pen once again, after a gap of two decades, he wrote a couple of chapters for a book on Goa’s print media (In Black and White: Insiders’ Stories about the Press in Goa) and, for four years (2005-09), wrote a regular Sunday column, All ‘n’ Sundry, in a local daily newspaper. Patriotism in Action: Goans in India’s Defence Services was his first book, followed by Soaring Spirit: 450 Years of Margao’s Espírito Santo Church 1565-2015.

Deepa Sethi is the dean, programmes and international relations, and professor, business communication, in the area of humanities and liberal arts in management at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, India. With more than fifteen years of teaching and research experience, she specializes in business communication, soft skills, social media communication, advanced corporate communication and cross-cultural communication, among other areas. She has been published in and has guest-edited major academic journals. Experiential and activity-based teaching have been her forte, and she is known for her style of teaching, which has practical implications in addition to theoretical underpinnings. Her training programmes on topics such as managerial effectiveness lab, communication effectiveness lab and soft skills for interpersonal effectiveness for working executives are highly acclaimed. Her faculty development programme, titled ‘Innovative Approaches in Management Teaching’, is much sought after.

William H.J. Hubbard is a lawyer, economist and expert in the empirical study of courts. He is a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, editor of the Journal of Legal Studies, research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and has served as director and president of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies. He is the author of Civil Procedure: An Integrated Approach and a number of other articles.

Aparna Chandra is a constitutional lawyer with an expertise in Indian constitutional law among other areas. She is currently an associate professor of law at the National Law School of India University, and has previously worked at the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal and the National Law University, Delhi where she founded the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance. She has assisted the Law Commission of India in various reports and has been appointed as amicus curiae by the Delhi High Court in matters involving the interface between constitutional and criminal laws.

Sital Kalantry is an international lawyer and expert in comparative law with a focus on human rights and court systems in India and the US. She is a professor of law and associate dean at the Seattle University School of Law, and has previously been at the Cornell Law School and University of Chicago Law School. She is the author of Women’s Human Rights and Migration and dozens of articles. She is also the director of the India Center for Law and Justice and runs a podcast titled A Law in Common: India and the United States.