Radha Vallabha is an acclaimed chef, author, former monk, yoga teacher, speaker and life coach. He has over two decades of experience in sattvic& Ayurvedic vegetarian cooking, developed by reading Ayurvedic texts. He is the founder of Yogi Plate, an organisation dedicated to educating people about Sattvic cooking.
After completing his M Tech from IIT, he decided to become a monk at ISKCON, Mumbai, to dedicate his life to the service of society. There he cooked for 250 residents of the ashram daily for more than a decade. As head chef, he led a team of highly acclaimed chefs who were featured in National Geographic’s series on India’s mega kitchen series, serving about 10,000 plates of sattvic food every day.He was also the cook of his Gurudev, HH Radhanath Swami for 17 years
But the love for Ayurveda grew from discussions with Dr Sanjay Pisharodi, a fellow ashram resident with an MBBS degree and also great knowledge of Ayurveda. Radhavallabha Das has conducted more than 200 cooking workshops across the world and held seminars on the importance of an Ayurvedic Diet, including at the headquarters of Microsoft, Amazon and Intel in the USA.
Currently he lives with his wife Hansapriya in Silicon Valley in California. He is working with a team to bring healthy food to people through live cooking workshops, seminars and one-on-one consulting.
Ted Seides, CFA has spent 25 years as an institutional investor, allocating money to managers. He started in 1992 at the Yale University Investments Office, seven years after David Swensen arrived at Yale. Ted spent five years learning under David’s tutelage and departed to attend Harvard Business School shortly before David wrote the bible in the industry, Pioneering Portfolio Management. In 2017, Ted launched the Capital Allocators podcast, a series of interviews with leading Chief Investment Officers. The show reached four million downloads in August 2020. Barron’s, Business Insider, and Value Walk each named it among the top investing podcasts. He also advises asset managers and allocators across business strategy, audio content, and investing. Ted writes opinion pieces for Institutional Investor, wrote a blog for the CFA Institute’s Enterprising Investor and guest publications for the late Peter L. Bernstein’s Economics and Portfolio Strategy.
Marco Moneta holds a PhD in philosophy from Florence University. Before devoting himself to academic teaching and historical research, he worked in the fields of industry and business consultancy. In 2006, he authored a volume on the great Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. From early 2000, he has been travelling in the Indian subcontinent for both research and pleasure. Over the last decade, his interests and research have been aimed at the interactions between Europeans and Indians in the early modern age. A Venetian at the Mughal Court is the first result of a work in progress on European travellers to South-East Asia in the seventeenth century.
Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist and a migrant rights defender. He was Chief Reporter for the Times of Oman until he was deported back to India in 2017, for exposing human trafficking and modern slavery in the Arab Gulf through a front-page news story.
Rejimon now writes for the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), Equal Times, Migrant Rights, Middle East Eye, The Hindu, Times of India, The Caravan, Wire, The Leaflet, and various other Indian news portals.
He has done two media fellowships with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on labour migration and human trafficking, and one each with TRF and National Foundation of India (NFI) on forced labour and Gulf migration, respectively.
Rejimon is also a researcher for the Migrant Forum in Asia and has worked as a consultant for the ILO and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
In 2019, he authored an anthology, Rowing Between Rooftops: The Heroic Fishermen of Kerala Floods, telling the stories of heroic fishermen who rescued thousands from the 2018 Kerala floods.
Rejimon belongs to the Panan Dalit community of Kerala. Historically, Panans were ballad singers who narrated the acts of the then great warriors and kings. He wishes to continue this storytelling legacy through his books and writing.
Rejimon lives in Kerala and can be followed on @rejitweets. He can be contacted at reji.news@gmail.com
Swapnil Pandey is the bestselling author of Soldier’s Girl and Love Story of a Commando. Both her works of fiction emphasise the emotions of a soldier and have been a rage among youngsters. She is also a star blogger with an audience-base reaching up to lakhs of people.
Apart from blogging professionally for various brands, she also loves compiling stories about life in the Indian military. Since lockdown 2020, she has also started producing motivational and informational videos to add value to the lives of her audiences. These videos have created a huge impact among the masses and have been pivotal in raising various social issues surrounding military families.
The effortless portrayal of military life comes from her fauji background. She married into the tribe thirteen years ago and her nomadic life in army cantonments all across the country amongst extraordinary men and women has pushed her to come up with the most extraordinary stories. She believes a nation must not only look after the well-being of its soldiers and their families, but also honour their memories. The Force Behind the Forces is her humble attempt to provide the most authentic glimpse of the coveted army life and of the struggles military families face to common people.
Swapnil is also an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, and has worked with organisations like Wipro, HDFC, taught at Lovely Professional University and even the Army Public School to name a few of her ever-changing job profiles as the wife of an army officer.
Rajni Sekhri Sibal is a writer and an IAS officer. She topped the civil services examination in 1986 and was Secretary, Government of India. Rajni has worked in various capacities handling programme implementation and policymaking at the state as well as the national level. She is the recipient of the Indian of the Year Award in the category ‘Unsung Hero’.
She has authored Cloud’s End and Beyond, Kamadhenu, Are You Prepared for a Disaster?, Fragrant Words, The Haunting Himalayas and Asariri. Women of Influence is her seventh book.
Col V. N. Thapar is the father of Capt Vijyant Thapar, VrC, who was a fourthgeneration army officer. At the early age of fifteen, he was selected for the National Defence Academy and commissioned on 12 December 1962 in the
Maratha Light Infantry. He commanded a battalion of the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles. He was part of the 1965 War and Bangladesh War, and has operated in counter-insurgency operations. He is an alumnus of the prestigious Defense
Services, Staff College, Wellington. He has written for media publications and is a motivational speaker at various forums, universities, colleges and schools.
Neha Dwivedi, a Kargil War martyr’s daughter and an Armoured Corps Officer’s wife, is a doctor by profession. She is an alumnus of DPS RK Puram and Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi. She sought solace in writing and found her
strength post her father’s martyrdom. She now lives in Mumbai, where she works as a childbirth educator and an infant and young child feeding specialist. She deeply believes in the healing and inspirational power of stories. This is her first book.
SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers, run television channels and digital news platforms. Over the years, he has been a Chevening Scholar in the UK, a fellow of the Aspen Institute in the US, and a Homi Bhabha fellow in India.
Sugata’s books, among others, include Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi; Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of HD Deve Gowda; Pickles from Home: The Worlds of a Bilingual and Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue: The Anxieties of a Local Culture.
Evi is the CEO of Worldwide Buddies, an educational startup that creates picture books and toys that celebrate diversity. She is the author of children’s books A Marvelous Mexican Misunderstanding and China’s Child. Evi holds a BA in Geography from the LSE, an MA in Anthropology & Cultural Politics from
Goldsmiths and an MA in Individualized Study from NYU, with a concentration in creative writing and education. Evi is fascinated by discovering new
places and learning new things. An advocate of education, she loves books, adventures and ice creams, and has a mild obsession with polar bears.
Dr Joseph Murphy was a world-renowned authority on mysticism and mind dynamics. He wrote, taught, counselled, and lectured to thousands of people all over the world as the minister-director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. His sermons and lectures were attended by numerous people every Sunday. During his lifetime, he authored over thirty outstanding self-help books selling more that fifteen million copies.
