Archives: Authors

THOMAS BELL was born in the north of England. After university, he moved to Nepal to cover the civil war there for the Daily Telegraph, The Economist and other publications. He was the Southeast Asia correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, before returning to Kathmandu where he was a political officer for the United Nations during the peace process. His earlier book, Kathmandu, is a history of Nepal’s capital.

Vinod Mehta has founded and edited numerous publications, among them India’s first Sunday paper, the Sunday Observer, the Indian Post, the Independent and the Pioneer (Delhi edition). currently, he is editorial chairman of the outlook Group which brings out several magazines, including the weekly newsmagazine Outlook. Vinod Mehta has authored biographies of Sanjay Gandhi and Meena kumari, and in 2001 published a collection of his articles under the title, Mr Editor, How Close Are You to the PM?

Krishna Kumar Birla (1918-2008) was the chairman of several companies in areas as diverse as textiles, sugar, engineering, shipping, fertilizers and information technology. He was also the chairperson of HT Media, which publishes the Hindustan Times, an English daily with the largest circulation in north India, besides newspapers and magazines in Hindi. He was a member of the Rajya Sabha for three successive terms from 1984 to 2002, served on several committees of Parliament and was on the central board of the State Bank of India and ICICI. He was appointed twice, in 1980 and 2004, as a member of the National Integration Council chaired by the prime minister.

Born in Pilani, a village in Rajasthan, in 1918, K.K. Birla got a bachelor’s degree (honours) from Lahore University in 1939, and in 1997 was conferred the degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) by Pondicherry University. He was chairman/chancellor of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. He set up the K.K. Birla Foundation, which confers annual awards for excellence in literature, scientific research, Indian philosophy, art and culture and sports. He also established the K.K. Birla Academy, which undertakes research on scientific, historical and cultural subjects.

Dr Birla’s previous books include Indira Gandhi: Reminiscences and Partner in Progress.

Tarika Ahuja is an international wellness coach with over twelve years of experience in natural medicine and macrobiotics. She has worked in New York, Austin, Santa Monica, Becket, Mangalore, Bengaluru, Ludhiana, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram and Rishikesh, and also Belgium and Spain.
Tarika is dedicated to making available an integrated and efficient system of wellness for all, especially for children. Her work with women and children is particularly notable. Her own healing journey inspired her to come up with Sacred Swan, an organization which supports women and children to be happy and creatively fulfilled.
The Asthma Cure is her second book after Beautiful Children.

Medha Kudaisya did her PhD in South Asian history at the University of Cambridge. She is a professor in Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at National University of Singapore. She has previously published The Life and Times of G.D. Birla.

Sagarika Ghose is one of India’s most noted journalists as well as an author and broadcaster. She has worked at the Times Of India, Outlook and the Indian Express. She was a prime-time television news anchor for BBC World on Question Time India as well as on the news network CNN-IBN. She is the author of two novels, The Gin Drinkers and Blind Faith, as well as the recently published acclaimed biography of Indira Gandhi, Indira: India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister, now slated for a screen adaptation. She has won numerous awards for journalism, including the C.H. Mohammed Koya National Journalism Award as well as the Best Anchor Award from the Indian Television Academy. She has also been listed as one of the world’s most famous women Rhodes Scholars. Ghose is a popular and widely read columnist and she is currently consulting editor with the Times of India.

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He is a freelance feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’s Front Matter. He contributes regularly to the New Scientist, and has also written for Nature, National Geographic News, Discover, Nautilus, Matter, the Wall Street Journal and the UK’s Literary Review. His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, won a Nautilus Book Award in 2015 and was long-listed for the Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award (2016).

Nandini Krishnan is a writer, dancer, and stage actress. Her first book, Hitched: The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage, was published by Random House in 2013. Her journalism has appeared in long-form publications in India and abroad. She is the author of several plays and screenplays. An extract from her novel-in-progress was one of the five winners of theCaravan and Festival des Écrivains du Monde contest, 2014. Nandini lives in Madras with the eight dogs and three cats who own her.

Neel Patel is a first-generation Indian American who grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His debut story collection, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was long-listed for the Story Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He currently lives in Los Angeles. Tell Me How to Be is his debut novel.

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University. He was a member of the influential Subaltern Studies Collective until its dissolution in 2006, and has been a recipient of the Guggenheim and the National Endowment of Humanities fellowships. He is the author of several books, including Another Reason (1999) and the widely acclaimed Mumbai Fables (2010), which was adapted for the film Bombay Velvet (2015), and for which he wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.