Archives: Authors

A.A. Jafri was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. He is an economist by day and a writer by night. Of Smokeless Fire is his first novel.

Sam Pitroda is an internationally recognized telecom inventor, entrepreneur, development thinker and policymaker who has spent fifty years in information and communications technology and related global and national developments.

Credited with having laid the foundation for India’s telecommunications and technology revolution of the 1980s, he has been a leading campaigner to help bridge the global digital divide. As a way to induce the second phase of India’s technology revolution, in 2005 he headed India’s National Knowledge Commission (2005–09), to provide a blueprint of reform for the knowledge-related institutions and infrastructure for the twenty-first century in the country.

In addition, Sam is a serial entrepreneur having started several companies in the United States. He holds around twenty honorary PhDs, close to 100 worldwide patents and has published five books and numerous papers and lectured widely all over the world.

Sandeep K. Krishnan is the CEO of People Business, a leading global consulting firm. Sandeep seeks his purpose in helping professionals achieve their potential and transforming of organizations for good. He is a fellow (doctorate) of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and is now a visiting faculty. Over the past two decades, Sandeep has worked and researched in the areas of employee engagement, leadership and talent. He has partnered with over 100 clients on organizational and leadership transformation, and employee engagement. He is a certified coach from the University of Cambridge and completed the certification in Stanford Psychology for High Performance from Stanford Center for Health Education. At People Business, he has partnered with various organizations, such as IIM Bangalore, IIM Indore, SDA Bocconi and Hofstede Insights. He is the author of two books, The Making of a CEO and The Mind of a Consultant: Leveraging a Consulting Mindset for Professional Success, published by Penguin Random House India. He can be reached at sandeephrm@gmail.com.

Gauranga Das Prabhu is a IIT engineer turned monk, leadership consultant, corporate coach, inspirational speaker, environment leader, social reformer, spiritual leader, teacher, academician.
He’s an IIT graduate and worked for the Kirloskars before joining ISKON, Mumbai.

Born in Trinidad, West Indies, Peggy Mohan studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies and pursued a PhD in the same from the University of Michigan. She has taught linguistics at Howard University, Washington D.C., Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ashoka University, and mass communications at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is the author of Wanderers, Kings, Merchants (2021), which won the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award. Peggy has dabbled in cartoon animation, produced a television series in Hindi for children and taught music. She lives in New Delhi.

SUDARSHAN RAMABADRAN is a writer and columnist. He is an alumnus of Vivekananda College, University of Madras, and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. He has worked in various capacities, such as deputy director and senior research fellow, at the India Foundation and headed its Center for Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in Chennai, besides founding the Tamil Nadu Young Thinkers Forum. He has previously worked with the New Indian Express in Chennai and the Department of Information, Government of Gujarat. He has completed the Legislative Fellows Program in Washington DC, a professional exchange programme organized and run by the U.S. Department of State.

GURU PRAKASH PASWAN is one of the national spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He is an alumnus of the National Law Institute University, Bhopal, and the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi. He is an assistant professor of law at Patna University and has submitted his doctoral thesis. He is an adviser of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He was previously a part of the steering committee of the Australia India Youth Dialogue, which is a pre-eminent track-two young leaders’ dialogue between the two nations. He has completed the International Visitor Leadership Program organized and run by the U.S. Department of State.

Anastasia Damani is an illustrator-turned-author, musician and theatre lover. When she’s not donning one of these hats, she likes curling up with a warm cup of tea. After completing her graduation from Symbiosis Institute of Design, Pune with a degree in communication design, she began her journey in her hometown, Kolkata, and now lives in København (Copenhagen). Anastasia enjoys writing and illustrating across mediums with children’s books as her first love. Through her work, she strives to promote love, confidence, respect and responsibility in children.

Lindsay Pereira was born and raised in Bombay. He studied at St Xavier’s College and the University of Mumbai and holds a PhD in literature for his work on gender attitudes implicit in nineteenth-century Indian fiction. He was co-editor with the late Eunice de Souza of Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford University Press). His first novel, Gods and Ends (Penguin Random House India), was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Penguin Random House India), was published in 2023 and won the Godrej Literature Live! Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2024.

Danish Khan is a journalist and historian living in London. He has been covering the UK and Europe for Times Now, ET Now and Mumbai Mirror for a decade. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist in Mumbai. Danish
was awarded the Martin Senior scholarship and the Amersi Foundation scholarship at the University of Oxford, where he is also involved in the Global History of Capitalism Project. He has taught history at the University
of Oxford and Stanford University.

Ruhi Khan is a London-based independent journalist. She has written on extradition cases for the Wire. She has worked with NDTV and Mumbai Mirror in India and been a curator at Twitter UK. Ruhi was a Jefferson
Fellow at the East West Center, US, and a recipient of the Mary Morgan Hewitt Award for Women in Journalism. She is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scholar at the London School of Economics and
Political Science and she also edits the Media@LSE Blog.