Archives: Authors

Mohini Rao is an English-language writer and editor. She has written several excellent books. The inspirational literature she has penned is widely celebrated. She also works as a philanthropist and has received many awards.

Alyque Padamsee Alyque Padamsee (1931-2018) was director of the Theatre Group of Bombay and chief executive of Lintas India. Considered the guru of English theatre in India, he had over seventy-six major productions to his name, including Broken Images, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. Informally known as ‘God’ in advertising circles, he successfully launched and built over a hundred brands. Padamsee was communications adviser to Chandrababu Naidu, the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, where he supervized the presentation to the US President Bill Clinton and to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Theatre by the Sangeet Natak Akademi and was a recipient of the Padma Shri. He is the only Indian to have been voted into the International Clio Hall of Fame, the Oscars of world advertising.
He is the author of A Double Life, his memoirs in theatre and advertising, published by Penguin.

SHAHANA RAZA is Saeeda Bano’s grand-daughter. She has a Master’s in Film and Viedo Production and has worked in television, radio and other print media. A liberal feminist, Shahana is an independent writer and video producer, a wannabe vegan and a dilettante environmentalist. She currently lives in Dubai with her husband and two children.

Taslima Nasrin is an award-winning Bangladeshi writer and human rights activist, and has been living in exile since 1994.

Maharghya Chakraborty is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

V.N. DATTA (1926-2020), a distinguished historian born in Amritsar, was emeritus professor of modern history, Kurukshetra University, former general president of the Indian History Congress, resident fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and visiting professor at a number of universities, including Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin. Among his much acclaimed publications are Amritsar Past and Present (1967); Jallianwala Bagh (1969), which was translated into Hindi and Punjabi; New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919, Vols I and II (1975); Madan Lal
Dhingra and the Revolutionary Movement (1978); Gandhi and Bhagat Singh (2008), which was translated into Tamil; Sati: A Historical, Social and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (1988); Maulana Azad (1990); Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Sarmad (2007); and The Tribune, 130 Years: A Witness to History (2011). He regularly contributed to academic journals and popular press; his column ‘Off the Shelf’ in the Tribune won him great accolades. He was writing a book on Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani in his last days.

NONICA DATTA teaches history at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She received her PhD from Cambridge University, UK. Previously, she taught at Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has been a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi and a visiting professor at the universities of St Gallen, Toronto and Humboldt. Her publications include Forming an Identity: A Social History of the Jats (1999); and Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (2009), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Award.

Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, TJS George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years, in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters), and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and Alexander, among other venues. His most recent novel is Names of the Women. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.

The ‘Dear Me’ series of letters first appeared in Hindustan Times in 2017. These columns, penned by India’s top sporting icons, were published with the intent to inspire a young generation of struggling sportspersons, to serve as the light at the end of the tunnel for them.

Praveen Singh Rajput was a student leader during his Graduation. He is a graduate in Political Science from Allahabad University, where one half of the crowd wanted to see him become an IAS and the rest wanted him to become an MLA. But instead, he paved his own path and topped the entrance exam for Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore to study MBA. Apart from being an author, Praveen has also founded a successful e-commerce and retail chain, Frinza.com

Esha Deol Takhtani is an Indian film actor with hits such as Dhoom, Na Tum Jaano Na Hum, Yuva, No Entry and Dus to her credit. She recently portrayed the role of a chef in the short film Cakewalk, which was released globally on a digital platform and has won a cascade of awards worldwide.

Seeing her illustrious mother, Hema Malini, blazing a trail in classical dance, Esha too succumbed to its lure. She decided to hone her skills in Odissi and in this she was enthusiastically supported by her mother. She has mastered many special renditions in the Odissi repertoire, with over a hundred performances-both solo and in partnership with her younger sister, Ahana. Her depiction of the lovable Sita, the wife of Lord Rama, in the ballet Ramayana has charmed audiences the world over.

Married to a businessman, Bharat Takhtani, Esha is now a doting mother to two daughters-Radhya and Miraya. Esha has recently ventured into production with her first film, which is set to go on floors soon

The author, Bindya S Singh, MD, is a physician, researcher and educator living in San Jose, California. She works at SCVMC with appointed Affiliated Clinical Faculty at Stanford University and is also the founder of the Healthy Center Foundation.