Archives: Authors

Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator. She is Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), nominated Book of the Year 2011 by Martha Nussbaum for The New Statesman. She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (2008) and Novelist Tagore (Routledge, 2013). She has also translated several of Tagore’s works, including Gora, Boyhood Days, Chokher Bali, Farewell Song: Shesher Kabita and The Land of Cards: Stories, Poems and Plays for Children. Other works in translation include Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala, In the Name of the Mother by Mahasweta Devi, and Crossings: Stories from Bangladesh and India. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Tagore the Eternal Seeker: Footprints of a World Traveller, Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore is an edited volume forthcoming from the Social Science Press. Her essays and review articles have appeared in books and periodicals worldwide.

Vinayak Garg is the founder of Lazy Gardener, a company and community that has inspired thousands of Indians and people around the world to take up home gardening. He was named the ‘Sustainability Hero of 2020’ by The Better India.

Translator

Veejay Sai is an award-winning author, editor, biographer, translator and culture critic. He has written extensively on the Indian performing arts traditions and practitioners for over two decades. He has been documenting the cultural history of India. He lives in New Delhi.

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).