Archives: Authors

Pran Nevile was born in Lahore and took his postgraduate degree there. After a distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service and the United Nations, he decided to become a freelance writer and specialized in the study of social and cultural history of India. His particular fascination with the visual and performing arts inspired him to spend many years researching in libraries and museums in the UK and USA.

Bob Christo played Bollywood baddies in scores of films including Qurbani, Namak Halal, Mard, Mr India and Agneepath. If there was a fight to be picked with the hero, a village to be terrorized or an immoral foreigner to be portrayed, it invariably fell on Bob’s beefy shoulders. He acted in over 200 films and fifteen television serials in a career that spanned over two decades. This memorable autobiography traces the journey of a civil engineer from Australia who travelled the world and wrestled with his own demons before becoming one of Bollywood’s most prolific villains——and then went on to reinvent himself yet again. Bob Christo’s life story is like a rollicking superhit and includes bar brawls and shootouts, secret missions and spirituality, wars and passionate liaisons, even music and dance. Above all, Flashback is an insider’s perspective on one of the most fascinating film industries in the world.

K.S. Maniam, born 1942, has been writing from his early teens. His stories have appeared in numerous journals around the world. His first novel, The Return, was published in 1981 and the second, In a Far Country, in 1993. He won the first prize for The Loved Flaw: Stories from Malaysia in The New Straits Times-McDonald short-story contest (1987) and for Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia in The New Straits Times-Shell contest (1990). He is the inaugural recipient of the Raja Rao Award (New Delhi, September 2000), for his outstanding contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora. He has been lecturer (1980-85) and associate professor (1986-97) in the English Department, University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur. He lives with his wife, son and daughter in Subang Jaya, Malaysia, and devotes his time fully to writing.

Yoginder Sikand studied economics at St. Stephen’s College, sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and then did a PhD in history at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion at the National Law School, Bangalore. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jama’at (1920-2000): A Cross-Country Comparative Study; Sacred Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India; Muslims in India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations; Bastions of the Believers: Madrasas and Islamic Education in India; Religion, Peace and Dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir; Voices Against Terror: Indian Ulema on Islam, Jihad and Communal Harmony and Jihad, Peace and Inter-Community Relations in Islam. He freelances for several newspapers and magazines, having written mainly on religious conflict and communalism, but now, being tired of the subject, is searching for something more meaningful to explore. He thinks the Buddha makes sense, and wants to work in that direction.

A Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling in Scotland, in 2010, K. Srilata teaches creative writing and literature at II T Madras. Table for Four is her debut novel. Srilata is an award-winning poet and has two collections of poems-Seablue Child and Arriving Shortly (forthcoming). She co-edited Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry. Her other books include The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History and Short Fiction from South India. Her reviews appear regularly in The Hindu’s Literary Review.