An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Anirudha Bhattacharjee is an SAP consultant by profession, a musician by passion and a chronicler of music and cinema by avocation. R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music, his first book (co-written with Balaji Vittal), won the National Award for best book on cinema in 2012. Gaata Rahe Mera Dil (also co-written with Balaji Vittal) won the MAMI Award in its inaugural year, 2015. His other books include the critically acclaimed S.D. Burman: The Prince-Musician (2018, co-written with Balaji Vittal) and the bestseller Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography (2022, co-written with Parthiv Dhar).
Anirudha lives with his family in Calcutta, India, where he spends time watching films with his wife when not pretending to work or watching football matches. Basu Chatterji: And Middle-of-the-Road Cinema is his first book on a film-maker.
Amandeep Sandhu was born in Rourkela, Odisha. He completed his Master’s in English Literature from the University of Hyderabad. He worked as a journalist and later as a technical writer. His first two books were autobiographical fiction: Sepia Leaves (2008) and Roll of Honour (2012).
For the past few years, he has written for the media and contributed to anthologies. He now lives in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Panjab: Journeys through Fault Lines, his first non-fiction book, was originally published in 2019 to great critical acclaim and reception.
Aniruddhan Vasudevan writes and translates between Tamil and English. He is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2023) at the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer in the Humanities Council and Anthropology at Princeton University.
After being in academics for nearly three decades, C. RANGARAJAN joined RBI as deputy governor in 1982 and then proceeded to become member, Planning Commission, governor, Reserve Bank of India, governor, Andhra Pradesh, chairman, Twelfth Finance Commission, member, Rajya Sabha and, finally,
chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (Dr Manmohan Singh). A Padma Vibhushan awardee, he was part of the team that initiated far-reaching reforms in India’s economy in the early 1990s.
Subhadra Sen Gupta has written over forty books for children because she thinks they are the best readers in the world. She writes about history, loves cooking up mystery, ghost and adventure stories and dreams up comic books. She was awarded the Bal Sahitya Puraskar by the Sahitya Akademi in 2014.
Anand Teltumbde is a leading public intellectual and civil rights activist. He writes a monthly column, ‘Margin Speak’, for Economic and Political Weekly and regularly contributes to Mainstream, Frontier, Seminar and many leading English and Marathi newspapers. Among his significant books are The Republic of Caste (2018), Dalits: Past, Present and Future (2016) Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2016) and The Persistence of Caste (2010). An engineer with a management qualification, Teltumbde has been the CEO of a holding company. He currently teaches in a business school of IIT, Kharagpur.
Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health system innovation, and Chairman of Lifebox, a charity making surgery safer globally. He lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.
Muzaffar Ali is an Indian film-maker, fashion designer, poet, artist, music lover, revivalist and social worker. He belongs to the royal family of Kotwara.
Beginning his career in advertising, he played a role in the incipient days of Air India before moving on to a successful career as a film-maker in Bollywood. His works include movies such as Umrao Jaan and Gaman, and several documentaries and short films. He has launched his own couture line, ‘Kotwara’, and is involved in several initiatives that celebrate art, foster the traditional handicrafts of Awadh and promote Sufism.
He received the Padma Shri in 2005 and the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award in 2014.
