Archives: Authors

Arvind N. Agrawal, managing partner, Lead Associates, is an executive coach and a consultant with extensive corporate experience, having held senior positions in leading organizations like RPG Group, Escorts Construction Equipment and Escorts JCB. He was awarded the National HRD Award in 1992. He served as the national president of the National HRD Network from 2000 to 2002 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award by Businessworld HR Excellence Summit and Awards in 2021.

Namita Thapar is an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business and a chartered accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. She joined Emcure as CFO, after her six-year stint at Guidant Corporation, USA. Subsequently, her responsibilities grew to manage Emcure’s largest business unit: the India business. Namita is passionate about improving women’s health in India and promoting youth entrepreneurship. During the COVID pandemic, she launched a unique YouTube talk show on women’s health called Uncondition Yourself with Namita, which aims to provide authentic information and break taboos associated with women’s health. She leads Thapar Entrepreneurs Academy Ltd, an education company that teaches entrepreneurship. She is the founding partner of Thapar Vision Fund, which invests in start-ups. Namita is a recipient of various prestigious corporate awards, such as the 40 Under Forty award by Economic Times and Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business by Business Today. She has been a speaker at various prestigious forums, such as the Harvard Business School, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, ET Women’s Forum and FICCI, etc. She lives in Pune with her husband, Vik, and two boys, Vir and Jai. This is her first book.

Himadri Agarwal is a fourth-year student of Ashoka University, with an interdisciplinary major in English and Creative Writing. Her previous translation, Three Stories by Rashid Jahan, was published by Bee Books, Kolkata, in 2020.

Mohammad Hamid Ansari was the vice president of India and chairman of the Rajya Sabha for two consecutive terms from 2007 to 2017. A former diplomat, he served as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, as high commissioner to Australia and as permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. Ansari was a visiting professor in the Centre for West Asian and African Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and in the Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. He was the vice chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, member of the National Security Advisory Board and chairman of the National Commission for Minorities. He chaired one of the five Working Groups established by the Prime Minister’s 2nd Round Table Conference on J&K in April 2006. In 2005, he edited the proceedings of an international conference on Iran, Twenty Five Years after the Islamic Revolution. In 2008, he published a set of his own writing, Travelling through Conflict: Essays on the Politics of West Asia. Selections from his speeches have been published as Teasing Questions (2014), Citizen and Society (2016), Dare I Question? (2018) and Many A Happy Accident: Reflections of a Life (2021).

Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) was one of the greatest Urdu poets who was most well-known for his ghazals. He lived during the reign of the last Mughal king, whose court was the centre of the golden age of Urdu poetry. Chiragh-e Dair is a masnavi he wrote on the city of Banaras en route to Calcutta.

Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (2019) was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018-19) and has also just received the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing (2022).

Virat Chirania is a young and dynamic trainer with over 5000 hours of training experience in India and abroad. Virat is a TEDx speaker and a certified Life Coach. Virat is also a senior Art of Living Teacher and has been teaching meditation workshops for over a decade now.

Virat has taught in some of the top educational institutes and also corporate houses and brings to the table a rich and diverse experience along with lightness and humour.

Abhirami Girija Sriram is an editor and translator. Currently, she is the chief sub-editor of Frontline magazine.

K.S. Bijukumar is the co-translator of this book, and he lives in Chennai.

Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012-17), Ahmedabad, he was responsible for creating a digital archive-the Gandhi Heritage Portal-of all of M.K. Gandhi’s works. Apart from a number of books on Gandhi’s life, Suhrud has co-edited the critical annotated edition of Hind Swaraj, edited the critial annotated edition of An Autobiography, or My Experiments with Truth, translated Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, and translated the four-volume epic Gujarati novel, Sarasvatichandra.

Suhrud is presently translating the diaries of Manu Gandhi, covering the period between 1942 and 1948, compiling a series ‘Letters to Gandhi’-of unpublished correspondence to Gandhi-and working on an eight-volume compendium of testimonies of the indigo cultivators of Champaran. Tridip Suhrud is provost at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology.