Editor’s Cut: Road to 2019
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Saba Naqvi, Mukund Padmanabhan, Narayan Ramachandran with Ashutosh Varshney
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
Bio
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based writer and journalist with almost obsessive interest in religious conflicts. He tracked the emergence of communalism and Hindu nationalist politics as it grew in strength mid-1980s onwards. His reporting on the Ram temple agitation for newspapers led to his first book — The Demolition: India At The Crossroads (HarperCollins, 1994) which established his credentials as a serious voice on Hindu rightwing politics. After a two-decade long break, in 2013 he published his second book — the biography of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His last book, Sikhs: Untold Agony of 1984 drew extensively from personal experiences while engaged in relief and rehabilitation programmes in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh pogrom. An unabashed college dropout, he anchored India’s only discussion programme on watershed historical events, A Page From History, on Lok Sabha Television for six years. He writes columns for several papers and websites besides making odd TV appearances. Also a playwright, he is giving final touches to two books on different aspects of Hindu nationalist politics.
Saba Naqvi
Bio
Author, Journalist and Commentator, Saba Naqvi has written three books. In Good Faith, published in 2012, chronicles a two year long journey across India in search of syncretistic traditions and pluralist communities. It is the book closest to her heart. Capital Conquest, 2015, is about the emergence of AAP, the so called citizen’s party that now rules Delhi. Her third book, Shades of Saffron: from Vajpayee to Modi, released in June 2018, chronicles the journey of the BJP that Saba covered for two decades. It’s a first hand account with the author as the primary source of news and information and has profiles of all the leading figures in the BJP’s ascent to power.
Saba is a known election analyst, political commentator and columnist in leading newspapers and TV platforms.
Mukund Padmanabhan
Bio
Mukund Padmanabhan took over as Editor of The Hindu in March 2016. He was Editor of The Hindu BusinessLine from August 2013, before which he worked for The Hindu since 1997. An M-Phil in Philosophy, he studied in Chennai, Delhi and The London School of Economics. He worked briefly as a lecturer in University of Delhi before switching to journalism. In his career as a journalist, he has reported from various countries including Sri Lanka, Britain, Australia, Malaysia, and other countries in Europe. He worked for the magazine Sunday in Kolkata and the Indian Express before joining The Hindu in 1997 where he wrote editorials and oversaw many of the newspaper’s supplements including the Sunday Magazine, Literary Review and MetroPlus. He is interested in and has written about politics, legal affairs, and literature. He is an adjunct faculty of the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where he teaches law and advanced writing to post-graduate students. He also curates two festivals of theatre and music on behalf of The Hindu Group of Publications – The Hindu Theatre Fest and The Hindu November Fest.
Narayan Ramachandran
Bio
Narayan Ramchandran is father of two girls, husband of writer, social entrepreneur, columnist and emerging market investor in that order. He worked on Wall Street (mostly at Morgan Stanley) for over 20 years, most recently as head of global emerging market investing and then country head of Morgan Stanley in India.
Ashutosh Varshney
Bio
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India, and India in the Era of Economic Reforms. His honors include the Guggenheim and Carnegie fellowships and the Gregory Luebbert Prize. He is a contributing editor for The Indian Express, and his guest columns have appeared in many other newspapers, including the Financial Times. He is editor of the Modern South Asia Series, published by Oxford University Press, New York.