Archives: Authors

Chirag Gander and Sahil Vaidya started The Minimalist as a creative movement to provoke action with the power of design and minimalism. Over the years, their work has spawned a cult following of over 200,000 people across various social media platforms. They’ve grown The Minimalist to one of India’s leading creative solutions companies that was featured in LinkedIn India’s inaugural Top 25 Startups list in 2018. Chirag and Sahil were featured in the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2019 as changemakers in the field of design, marketing and creativity. They have been invited for numerous TEDx talks, keynote speeches and corporate workshops on minimalism and design thinking across India, Australia, the UK, UAE and the US. They are both engineers from IIT Bombay and still wonder how they managed to graduate.

Chirag Gander and Sahil Vaidya started The Minimalist as a creative movement to provoke action with the power of design and minimalism. Over the years, their work has spawned a cult following of over 2,00,000 people across various social media platforms. They’ve grown The Minimalist to one of India’s leading creative solutions companies that was featured in LinkedIn India’s inaugural Top 25 Startups list in 2018. Chirag and Sahil were featured in the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2019 as changemakers in the field of design, marketing and creativity. They have been invited for numerous TEDx talks, keynote speeches and corporate workshops on minimalism and design thinking across India, Australia, the UK, UAE and the US. They are both engineers from IIT Bombay and still wonder how they managed to graduate.

Rajagopalan Purushothaman (Puru), winner of Gold Award, Brandon Hall, USA, and Asian Human Capital Award, Singapore, for ‘WORKSMART’ learning intervention established by the Human Capital Leadership Institute, is responsible for L&D strategic solutions and digital learning landscape at Reliance Industries Ltd.. As a Senior Vice-president, his responsibilities at Reliance Industries Ltd include setting up a corporate academy, training on effectiveness and business impact measurement, designing a competency framework, assessment development centre design and roll-out, leadership development, job readiness and developing performance enhancement and succession plan learning solutions for Jio-bp, petro-retailing and aviation fuel.

Puru, an IMT Ghaziabad alumni with nearly 35 years of experience in the retail, telecom, manufacturing and information industry in business development and L&D, has also been felicitated with LEAP Vault for the CLO of the year, Best Corporate Academy and Best Business Impacting Learning Intervention by TISS.

In over three decades of his professional career, Puru has multiple accomplishments in areas such as L&D, business development, and sales and marketing functions. The most recent being establishing the Reliance Retail Academy and executing learning solutions for Jio launch to more than 100,000 resources, and interventions in Jio, Reliance Industries, Reliance Retail, Reliance Infocomm and NIS Sparta Ltd have facilitated more than 1,000 workshops on leadership development and EI.

Puru is currently doing a PhD in digital assessment. In his free time, Puru is a fitness enthusiast who loves to travel and explore places as well as people across the globe, most recently being scaling the 5,895 m Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania along with his daughter and son-in-law.

Kirtinath Kurtkoti (1928-2003) was a renowned scholar, critic, playwright and translator who wrote in both English and Kannada. Born in Gadag, Karnataka, he pursued his education in Gadag and Dharwad. Kurtkoti began his career as an English lecturer, initially teaching in Belgaum and Pune before joining Vithalbhai Patel College, Vallabh Vidyanagar in Gujarat, and later Sardar Patel University, Anand, Gujarat. Although he began his writing career with poetry and drama, his shift to critical writing was decisive. He wrote extensively in Kannada and occasionally in English. Kurtkoti served on several prestigious literary organizations, including the Language Advisory Committee of the Jnanapith Award, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, and Karnataka Sahitya Akademi, Bangalore. He was also an adviser to the renowned Kannada-language publishing house Manohar Grantha Male. After retiring in 1988, Kurtkoti lived in Dharwad until his death in 2003.

Kamalakar Bhat is a professor and head of the postgraduate department of English of Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. He is an award-winning bilingual writer, a columnist and a translator between English, Hindi, Marathi and Kannada. He has three collections of poems and three collections of translated verse in Kannada. He has edited three books in English. His essays and translations have appeared in Outlook magazine, Scroll.in, Wire.in, Muse India, Indian Literature, kitaab.org, indianculturalforum.com, The Bombay Literary Magazine and bengalurureview.com.

Lakshmi Subramanian is an Indian historian with a long and distinguished academic and research career. Lakshmi has authored eleven books on the economic and cultural history of India so far. Her latest book, Reading from the South: African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s work, was released in 2023.

Easterine Kire is a Naga writer. She has been awarded the Free Voice Award from Catalan PEN, the Hindu Litforlife Prize, the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award, the Sahitya Sabha and the Bal Sahitya Puraskar. Besides writing historical fiction using the oral history of Nagaland, she is also interested in exploring the spiritual universe of the Nagas. Her poetry has been featured in The European Constitution in Verse.

Navdeep Singh is an assistant professor of English at M. R. Government College, Fazilka.

Shivani Dasmahapatra is a public policy and communications specialist. Her professional experience of three decades is diverse and ranges from consulting members of Parliament, corporate enterprises, and non-profit organizations to journalism, photography, editing and social media management. Born into a family with three generations in the Indian Army, she has a deep interest in Indian military history. Currently, as founder trustee of Lest We Forget India Foundation, she provides crucial support to the families of Indian Armed Forces personnel. Through the foundation’s social media presence, she chronicles India’s military history through stories of service and sacrifice of India’s soldiers and keeps their legacy alive. Shivani is a seasoned writer and editor, having worked with India Today, Encyclopedia Britannica and numerous national publications. She also provides expertise in communications strategy, content development and knowledge product creation to corporates and various organizations. A passionate advocate, Shivani volunteers for social causes, particularly those focused on child education, women empowerment and animal protection, and is a patron of the Foundation for Media Professionals. Photography remains Shivani’s foremost passion. She continuously explores new techniques and delves into innovative methods to transform her photographs into artworks. On the rare occasion that you catch her outside of work, it will be undertaking farming in the Himalayan hills in north India or trekking with her family and pet Basset Hound.

Dhruva Jaishankar is Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America (ORF America), which he helped establish in 2020. He previously held positions or affiliations with the Observer Research Foundation, Brookings India (now the Centre for Social and Economic Progress), the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Brookings Institution, the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, and the the Lowy Institute. Since 2006, he has also been a frequent contributor to the Indian media, including the Hindustan Times and Indian Express. He was educated at Macalester College and Georgetown University.