Siddharth Kak is a documentary maker, television producer and presenter, who is best known as the producer and presenter of Surabhi (1993–2001). His television company, Cinema Vision India, has won several major television awards and three national awards, and has produced more than 100 documentaries and several long running television series for leading TV channels in India.
A well-known foodie, he has written food columns for many national newspapers and has also produced and directed two very successful food shows, The Good Food Guide and the Star Sunday Lunch. Both these programmes were telecast on Star Television. He has also published a book of poetry, Looking in Looking out, and compiled a quiz book on India’s heritage, Surabhi ke Sau Sawaal.
SUVIR SARAN made history with Devi, the first Indian restaurant in North America to earn a Michelin star. One of the world’s first openly gay chefs—out since age twenty—he has shaped iconic restaurants such as One8 Commune, Neuma, Bastian, Qora, Murphies and The House of Celeste. A lifelong student of Indian classical music, Saran also paints, stitches, knits, prints, embroiders and gardens. His memoir, Tell My Mother I Like Boys, spans pinnacles of success and depths of illness, exile and homecoming, offering readers an unflinching gift: the courage to break, heal and begin again.
Akhilesh Upadhyay is the policy lead for the Center for Geostrategic Affairs at the Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS), a Kathmandu-based think tank.
A Fulbright scholar, he received his MA from New York University, where he spent more of his time in South Asian and Hispanic working-class neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Queens in his attempt to find pan-South Asian voices. Akhilesh developed deep empathy for people unlike his own and documented stories, big and small, of ordinary immigrants for New York newspapers. In Nepal, he led the Kathmandu Post as editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2018. His multicultural New York experiences echo in his stories of borderlands.
Born in Bhadrapur, a town bordering the Indian Chicken’s Neck, Akhilesh’s childhood and adolescence traversed Kathmandu and Darjeeling. He is almost always subconsciously in a borderland state of mind. Akhilesh’s research, part reflected in his column View from the Himalaya for Hindustan Times, focuses on how China and India’s near-concurrent rise, the great Sino-US power rivalry, and Asian powers impact this region.
Akhilesh has written for New York Times, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Wire (India), ThePrint, Flipboard, MSN India, Kantipur and Kathmandu Post.
