Archives: Authors

Dr Ashok Shekar Ganguly is a noted industry expert, former chairman of Hindustan Lever and was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. Much of Dr Ganguly’s working life has been with Unilever PLC, where he spent over thirty-five years. He was the chairman of Hindustan Lever Ltd from 1980 to 1990 and a member of the Unilever Board from 1990 to 1997. Dr Ganguly has held board-level positions with various other multinationals, including Hindustan Lever, ICI India, British Airways, Wipro, Tata AIG Life Insurance Co, Hemogenomics and Firstsource Solutions. He was a member of the board of British Airways PLC from 1996 to 2005.

Preetha Leela Chockalingam is a writer, assessor and mum, who enjoys mentoring, training and developing.

Preetha loves writing historical fiction set in Kerala for both children and adults. She spends hours researching and collecting evidence of matrilineal, multifaith Kerala, which up until the mid-twentieth century favoured women more than men. She hopes that one day, the whole of India will follow the open-minded Chera’s rule of Kerala, where religious harmony meant that several different faiths lived peacefully in one kingdom. Until then, you can find her living in those times through books, stories and research!

Daaji, also known as Kamlesh D. Patel, is the fourth and current spiritual guide of the global Heartfulness movement. He has spent the past four decades training people across the world in Heartfulness meditation.
Daaji is the author of the bestsellers The Heartfulness Way (with Joshua Pollock) and Designing Destiny. His work has appeared in the Times of India, Economic Times, Hindustan Times and on leading television networks. Daaji gives keynote addresses at conferences and conducts workshops around the world. His passion lies in grassroots efforts, especially in taking meditation to the villages of India. Daaji enjoys going on nature walks with his grandchildren in Kanha Shanti Vanam, India, where he lives with his family.

Sangeeth Varghese is a globally acknowledged leadership thinker from Harvard and the London School of Economics. He is a personal advisor to heads of states and has consulted for nations from Asia and Africa. He is the President of one of the largest European international institutions and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He was honoured as the first Asian Youth Ambassador by the government of Libya and was a board member of the Global Business Oath of Harvard University. Varghese is the author of Decide to Lead (BusinessWorld 2008), Open-Source Leadership (Penguin 2010) and Future Intelligence (Springer Germany 2023).

Reema Ahmad is a neurolinguistic programming-based life coach. She is also a mental space psychologist and she works in the area of healing from trauma, abuse, violence and relationship issues.

Reema co-edited an anthology of women’s work called Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts with Semeen Ali. It was published by Red River Press in 2022. She is a poet and has also written articles for online publications like Scroll, Vice, Daily O and Live Mint. She is also a two-time TEDx and Josh Talks speaker.

Reema began her career as a child sexual abuse awareness educator and went on to specialize as a sexuality educator. She then co-founded Candidly, a forum to explore issues of gender, sexuality and media with her longtime friend Amita Malhotra in 2017.
Reema graduated from Lady Sri Ram College, Delhi University. Her schooling and early years were spent in Agra where she now lives with her parents, her son, two dogs and three cats.

Malati Mukherjee is a writer, translator and editor. She is a storyteller who has published Nature Songs of Tagore, a book of songs of Rabindranath Tagore translated from Bengali to English. She has edited (and part-written) a 200-page coffee table book, The Legendary Fr. E.H. McGrath SJ-Revered Teacher, Inspiring Forever. She has translated Bitan Chakraborty’s novellas Redundant and Collapsed, which are awaiting publication. Malati runs Words and Space, a writing and editing service. Born in Dakshineswar, Malati now lives in Coonoor, in the Nilgiri hills of South India.

Bhaskar Chattopadhyay is an author and screenwriter. He started his career translating Bengali and Hindi writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. He now writes mystery fiction and thrillers. He has also written several books on filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Bhaskar’s first feature screenplay releases in October 2024. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons, and teaches screenwriting at York University.

Simona Sawhney teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT-Delhi and has been a senior co-editor of the journal Cultural Critique (University of Minnesota Press) for about a decade. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and has previously taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Modernity of Sanskrit. She has published articles on Bhagat Singh and the Hindi writer Abdul Bismillah. She is currently co-editing, with Kama Maclean, a collection of essays on Yashpal as well as writing a monograph on Bhagat Singh.