Archives: Authors

R. Kannan is a child of the Dravidian movement and has long been a commentator on Dravidian politics. Raised and educated at Chennai, Kannan completed his LLM from the University of Georgia and PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has served in various capacities with the United Nations in two continents for nearly a quarter of a century. He presently heads the Basra office of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq. His latest book is MGR: M.G.Ramachandran, A Life.

R. Kannan considers himself as a child of the Dravidian movement and has long been a commentator on Dravidian politics. His book Anna: The Life and Times of C.N. Annadurai received critical acclaim.
Raised and educated in Chennai, Kannan completed his LLM from the University of Georgia and his PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has served in various capacities with the United Nations in two continents for nearly a quarter of a century. He presently heads the Basra office of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq.
Kannan is married and has two children.

American Michael Burns is a university teacher, writing coach, actor, editor and storyteller. He has a BA from Georgetown University, an MS from UMass Amherst, and holds a PhD in documentary film history from the University of Birmingham in the UK. He has directed five films for international television and his work has been seen in over twenty countries. He moved to India in 2011, and founded Tall Tales, the country’s longest-running, live storytelling event series. He also conducts popular writing workshops around India.

Reba Som studied history at Presidency College, Kolkata, standing first class first both at the BA and MA examinations, and obtained a PhD from Calcutta University. She was the recipient of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 2000-02, and served as the regional director of the Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR, Kolkata, from 2008 to 2013. Her publications include Differences within Consensus: The Left-Right Divide in the Congress (1995), Subhas Chandra Bose and the Resolution of the Women’s Question (2002), Gandhi, Bose, Nehru and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind (2004) and Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song (2009).
Reba Som is a trained singer of Rabindrasangeet and Nazrul Geeti; her compact disc albums, Selected Songs of Rabindranath Tagore (Saregama, 2005) and Love Songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam (Times Music, 2016), include her English translations of the lyrics.

Pratibha Karan studied economics at Lady Shri Ram College. She is an IAS officer of 1967 batch and retired as Secretary, Ministry of Food Processing Industries in 2003. She is the author of A Princely Legacy: Hyderabadi Cuisine covering the history, culture and cuisine of Hyderabad and Biryani-India’s most beloved dish.

MONISH GUJRAL is a restaurateur, chef, cookbook author and a popular blogger.

Aruna Chakravarti is a keen academician and a scholar and translator
of repute. She has presented papers at several national and international
seminars and contributed articles and reviews in many collections and
journals. Her translation of Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta,
published by Penguin Books India in 1993, fetched her the prestigious
Sahitya Akademi Award. Those Days, a translation of Sunil
Gangopadhyay’s Sei Samai, published by Penguin Books India in 1997,
received rave reviews and became a best-seller. This was followed in
2001 by First Light, a sequel to Those Days.
Aruna Chakravarti is the principal of Janki Devi Memorial College,
Delhi, and has taught in this college for over forty years.
This is her first novel.

Dr Mickey Mehta is a leading holistic health guru and life coach to billionaires, top Bollywood super stars, top supermodels (Miss World and Miss Universe), top politicians and members of the Maharashtra Police. He has a double honorary doctorate in holistic health and life sciences from International Medicina Alternativa, and has been a pioneer in promoting holistic health in India through radio and TV shows too. Mickey was invited to talk at Harvard University at the Inspire series in February 2017 and at IIT Mumbai Bombay in 2015. He has held holistic health workshops in Oman, Thailand, USA, Hong Kong, Dubai, Turkey and Sri Lanka. Dr Mickey Mehta Mickey is also a leading social media influencer in the health and wellness space.
He has interwoven Zen, Tao, Tantra, Ved, Greek and many more philosophies to develop holistic health systems to self-heal, transform and transcend. His healing focuses on mingling with our five elements and skillfully balancing them. Throughout his 35thirty-five-year-long career, he has striven to promote a disease-free world through his wellness commandants.

Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist, lawyer and journalist. He has a PhD from Princeton University, and degrees from Harvard University and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. His first book, Half Lion, was a best-selling biography of P.V. Narasimha Rao. Sitapati teaches at Ashoka University, near Delhi.