Archives: Authors

Nandita Iyer is the author of two immensely popular books, Everyday Superfoods and The Everyday Healthy Vegetarian. A self-taught celebrity chef, she is the popular author of the blog The Saffron Trail. She has been featured in and has written for the Vogue, BBC, Femina, and India Today, among others.

Prashant Kumar is the founder of Entropia, a next-gen marketing services company, now part of Accenture. Entropia has been a pioneer in the area of marketing in the Industry 4.0 era. In 2020, Entropia was recognized as the third-fastest-growing large agency in the world by AdWeek, New York. Earlier, Prashant served as president, Asia world markets, at IPG Mediabrands. He has been on the juries of the prestigious Cannes Lions and Crystal Festival, France, and Lynx Festival, Dubai. He was also a speaker at the Digital Marketing Expo, Germany, and Global Festival of Media, Rome. He has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. In 2019, the International Advertising Association (IAA) recognized him as one of the five digital marketing thought leaders globally. He is an alumnus of St Stephen’s College, Delhi, MICA, Ahmedabad and Harvard Business School.

Ali Rohila is a Pakistani banker who has previously written Read No Evil, a collection of essays published in 2015. A descendant of Nawab Hafiz Rehmat Khan Rohila, the Pukhtoon ruler of Rohilkhand, Khan’s family migrated from Bareilly, India, to Pakistan in 1950. The Whispering Chinar is his first short story collection.

Vidya Krishnan is an award-winning journalist who has been reporting on medical science for the last 20 years. She has written for the Atlantic, the LA Times, The Hindu (as their health and science editor) and for the British Medical Journal.

Jagadish Mohanty (1951-2013) is an influential Odia writer whose most productive years were from the 1970s through to the 1990s, although he was active right until his untimely death at 62. A trend setter in Odia short fiction, he mediated the existentialist experience of angst and alienation, thereby giving Odia literature the much needed international exposure. Two finest short story collections out of his thirteen are Dakshina Duari Ghara (South-Facing House), published in 1979, and Album (1981). The two are also available in English translation. He wrote five novels, including Kanishka Kanishka (1986), which explored the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary individuals in their quest for an authentic existence. Nija Nija Panipatha (1990), translated as Battles of Our Own, is a unique Indian example of the industrial novel

Sejal Mehta is a journalist and editor. She has worked, and written for, the magazine and newspaper industry for the past 20 years, including Lonely Planet Magazine India, National Geographic Traveller India, Nature inFocus, among others. She is also a published author of children’s books. For the last four years, she has walked across shores in India with the team of Marine Life of Mumbai, a citizen-led initiative documenting and creating awareness about the city’s coastal biodiversity. Her forte has become making science palatable and fun to lay audiences. Through her conversations about the intertidal zone with adults and children over the years, she has found an engaged audience, ready to convert to tidepooling on their own.

V. RAGHUNATHAN is an academic, author, corporate executive, columnist and a hobbyist.
He is currently an adjunct professor at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. He was a professor of finance at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad for nearly two decades. He was also the president of a large private bank, first Vysya Bank and then ING Vysya Bank, Bangalore. For the next fourteen years, he headed GMR Varalakshmi Foundation-a large corporate foundation-as their CEO, and also served as the director of the India campus of Schulich School of Business for five years. He has served on many boards of corporates, banks, educational institutions, hospitals, regulators and stock exchanges.
He has written over 500 articles as a columnist and has one of the largest collections of old and ancient Indian padlocks in India.
Raghunathan has a PhD in finance from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.
His previous books include: Games Indians Play (2019, revised edition); Return to Jammu (2018); The Good Indian’s Guide to Queue Jumping (2016); Beyond the Call of Duty (2015); Duryodhana (2014); Locks, Mahabharata and Mathematics (2013); Ganesha on the Dashboard (2012); The Corruption Conundrum (2010); Don’t Sprint the Marathon (2010); Stock Exchanges, Investments and Derivatives-Straight Answers to 250 Nagging Questions (2007).

Dalpat Chauhan is a veteran Gujarati Dalit writer waiting to be discovered by the non-Gujarati readership, academia and world literary cultures. Chauhan’s work unfolds at the intersection of social and literary movements that the Dalits of Gujarat waged in 1970s and 80s. While his activism led him to actively associate with the Gujarat Dalit Panthers (1974) and Dalit Sangharsh Sangh (1982), the radical little magazines like Kalo Suraj (The Black Sun), Akrosh (Outrage) and Sarvanam (Pronoun) that he edited served to pioneer the Dalit Literary Movement in Gujarati. Between 1982 and 1985 when Gujarat burned with anti-reservation riots, Chauhan brought out anthologies of Dalit Poetry, little magazines and investigative booklets that condemned atrocities on Dalits and questioned Government reports on them. Due to his untiring literary activism, Gujarati Dalit literature could chalk out a radical literary manifesto in 1987, sealing the boundaries of its definition and functions for future generations of Dalit writers.

R. NARAYANASWAMI (1919-1992) is better known by his pen name Karichan Kunju. He considered himself a protégé of the Tamil writer K. P. Rajagopalan, who wrote under the pseudonym Karichan-Tamil for the bird drongo. To honour his literary mentor, Narayanaswami wrote under the pen name Karichan Kunju, or the drongo’s chick.

From eight to fifteen years of age Kunju studied Hindi and the Vedas in Bengaluru. He pursued higher studies in Hindi and Tamil at Rameshwara Vedasthana Patashala in Madurai and then worked as a Tamil teacher in Chennai, Mannargudi and Kumbakonam for a few years.

Kunju has an oeuvre of over hundred short stories. He also released ten short-story volumes, two novellas and dramas each, and essays titled Bharati’s Search and Discovery (1982) and Ku Pa Ra (1990). Pasitha Manidam (1978) was his only novel. He translated important works from English, Sanskrit and Hindi into Tamil, besides translating works of Tamil into other languages. He has contributed richly to Tamil literature and culture by exposing the vicious hierarchies of ancient temple towns.

Karichan Kunju was the second son of Ramamrutha Sastri and Janaki Ammal. He is survived by four daughters-Lakshmi Baby, Prabhavati, Vijayal and Santha

Prosanta Chakrabarty is an evolutionary biologist at Louisiana State University where he is a professor and curator. He is a Senior Fellow at TED, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He grew up in New York City; his undergraduate degree is from McGill University in Montreal (the city where he was born) and his PhD is from the University of Michigan.