Anand Teltumbde is a leading public intellectual, author and civil rights activist. He’s also regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in India. A polymath, his scholarship ranges from socio-political analysis to big data analytics.
Among his significant books are The Radical in Ambedkar (ed., 2018), The Republic of Caste (2018), Dalits: Past, Present and Future (2016), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2016), The Persistence of Caste (2010), and Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (2008). Teltumbde regularly contributed to Mainstream, Frontier, Seminar and most leading English newspapers and wrote Margin Speak, one of the longest running columns in the Economic & Political Weekly. He held top management positions in his corporate career and taught at IIT, Kharagpur and Goa Institute of Management Business Management and Big Data Analytics respectively.
Happymon Jacob is an associate professor of disarmament studies at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is a columnist with The Hindu, and hosts a weekly show on national security at the Wire. He has been a participant in several India-Pakistan track-two dialogues, and directs the Chaophraya India-Pakistan Dialogue (India Chapter). He was former visiting professor at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris and a senior global challenges fellow at the Central European University in Budapest. Jacob is the author of Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and Indo-Pak Escalation Dynamics (Oxford University Press, December 2018).
Jeanne Perrett has taught English for over twenty-five years, and is the author of a wide range of English language coursebooks for primary and pre-primary classes as well as children’s novels. She lives in Greece with her husband and their four children. Her first novel, Ash & Tara and the Emerald Dagger, was published by Puffin Books in 2010.
Bruno Macaes is a non-resident senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a senior advisor at Flint Global and a senior fellow at Renmin University, China. Formerly Portugal’s Europe minister (2013-15), he has been a regular commentator for CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, and has written for the Financial Times, The Guardian and Foreign Affairs. His last book was The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. He lives in Beijing.
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland. His first book, In Xanadu, written when he was twenty-two, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He then went on to write From the Holy Mountain (1997) and The Age of Kali (1998).
William Dalrymple is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. He wrote and presented the television series Stories of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. He is married to artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi. White Mughals won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award.
HARDEEP SINGH PURI has had a distinguished four-decade career in diplomacy spanning both the bilateral and the multilateral arena. He held ambassadorial posts in London (1999-2002), Brazil (2006-08), and was India’s permanent representative to the UN in both Geneva (2002-05) and New York (2009-13). He presided over the UN Security Council in August 2011 and November 2012, and chaired its Counter-Terrorism Committee. He is the author of Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and The Politics of Chaos. He is presently union minister of state for housing and urban affairs in New Delhi.
Kaifi Azmi (Author)
KAIFI AZMI (1919-2002) was one of the most prominent Urdu poets and lyricists of the twentieth century. An ardent crusader for justice as well as a writer of tender lyrics and rousing anthems, he was the quintessential activist-poet. His three major poetry collections are entitled Jhankar (1943), Akhir-e-Shab (1947) and Awara Sajde (1973).
Rakhshanda Jalil (Translator)
RAKHSHANDA JALIL is a writer, translator and literary historian. Her work on the Progressive Writers’ Movement is considered seminal; she has written A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Dr Rashid Jahan, Shahryar: A Life in Poetry, among others. She runs Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu language and literary culture.
Sudipta Sen is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India.
Kim A. Wagner is senior lecturer in British Imperial History, Queen Mary, University of London. He has written three previous books on Thuggees and on the 1857 Uprising.
Amit Kapoor, PhD, is Honorary Chairman at Institute for Competitiveness, India; Visiting Scholar at Stanford University; President of India Council on Competitiveness and Editor-in-Chief of Thinkers. Amit is the author of bestsellers Riding the Tiger, which he has co-authored with Wilfried Aulber and The Age of Awakening: The Story of the Indian Economy Since Independence published by Penguin Random House.
