Salima Hashmi, the daughter of the Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, is an internationally renowned artist, curator, contemporary art historian and activist. She taught at the National College of Arts, Lahore for thirty years, four of them as Principal. She is also a Founding Dean of the School of Art and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, where she is now Professor Emerita.
Salima has curated and produced catalogues for several exhibitions and written extensively on the arts in numerous publications. Among her publications are Unveiling the Visible – Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan and Memories, Myths, Mutations – Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan (co-authored with Yashodhara Dalmia). Her edited works include Two Loves – Faiz’s Letters from Jail and The Eye Still Seeks – Contemporary Art of Pakistan.
During the 1970s, Salima appeared in a series of highly popular television shows like Akkar Bakkar and Such Gup. She is a council member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta specializes in narrative non-fiction. This is her sixth book. Her previous works include The Stranger in the Mirror: The Biography of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra; Sanjeev Kumar: The Actor We All Loved; Savitribai Phule: Her Life, Her Relationships, Her Legacy; and Win the Battle of Your Mind in the Age of Social Media: Scroll Less, Read More. She is a reading coach to India’s top corporations. For the last three years, she has built a dedicated following for her weekly book review column on Network18 titled #BookStrapping.
Indrajeet Ghorpade is an Indian businessman primarily involved in mining and commodity trading. He is a descendant of the Maratha clan of warriors of the Deccan. His hobbies include wildlife photography and conservation. This is his first literary work.
Robin Singh is an entrepreneur who started his career as a hacker in 1997. He then founded E-junkie in 2003, a service to remove technology barriers for artists and authors wanting to sell their digital content directly to buyers. Later that year, he moved to Tucson, Arizona and continued to build E-junkie.
After successfully exiting in 2011, Robin started working to help animals in February 2013. Realizing that the nature of welfare projects in India being such that they can’t be scaled by scaling the infrastructure, he changed the strategy from just ‘doing’ to involving and inspiring. In December 2014, he started Peepal Farm—a place for animals to heal and be heard—along with two other co-founders. He’s been building it, running it and living there since.
Anshu Dogra is a senior editor and writer with over two decades of national and international communications experience. She has written articles and books that are an eclectic collection on history, gender, and biographies. Her books, Controversially Yours (2010) by Harper Collins and The Power of Hope (2021) by Hachette, were number one bestsellers. She has also founded, managed and developed the research and editing wing in Manana, the activity arm of the Devahuti-Damodar Svaraj Trust (DDST), which supports projects related to the history and philosophy of the Indian subcontinent, education, and scholarships for children, music, arts, and literature.
Sheetal Ranganathan is an alumna of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, from where she obtained her BSc (Hons) degree in Human Biology, and her Master’s in Medical Biotechnology, after which she pivoted into business strategy and consulting with an MBA from Xavier Institute of Management. In her corporate career of over twenty years, she has held several leadership positions in global organisations in the healthcare and biotech sectors. She also works closely with the life sciences start-up community within India as a mentor and an investor. Passionate about improving healthcare access in India, and in India’s potential to contribute to world-class medical research and innovation, Sheetal has been an active contributor to the evolving narrative on digitalization of medicine and healthcare delivery, featuring on think-tank panels and TV debates. Her op-eds have featured in publications such as Mint, Financial Express, India Today.
