S Subramaniam is a Chartered Accountant and Cost Accountant by qualification and has had a career of close to four decades in Finance and Management. He has worked in companies in the telecom and consumer space both in India and abroad and retired in June 2021 after serving as Chief Financial Officer of Titan Company Limited for over a decade. He is currently Independent Director and Audit Chairman on Boards of diversified companies, both listed and unlisted, in India and abroad.
Sobha Nambisan did her schooling in Delhi, after which she studied science at the undergraduate level and English Literature at the postgraduate level in Kerala. She has taught in Nirmala College, Coimbatore, and Emerald Heights College, Ooty, for three years, before attempting the Reserve Bank Probationary Officers’ exam and the Civil Services Examination in 1975.
She joined first the Reserve Bank as a probationary officer, and then the Indian Administrative Service in 1976. She was allotted to the Karnataka cadre.
Lakshmi Subramanian is an Indian historian with a long and distinguished teaching and research career. She did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in History from Calcutta University and then pursued her doctoral degree in history at the University of Viswa Bharati (Santiniketan) under the mentorship of Dr Ashin Dasgupta. Subsequently, she received several prestigious fellowships in the UK, Singapore, Australia and South Africa to develop her research work. She has taught in a number of universities in India, South Africa, Poland and Germany.
Dr Ajai Kumar Singh was born in Uttar Pradesh, and has Masters degrees in Political Science and Hindi. He holds a PhD and DLitt in Hindi. An IPS (Indian Police Service) Officer of the 1974 batch (Karnataka Cadre), Dr Singh has held various posts over three decades of service – Superintendent of Police in Shivamogga and Mandya districts; DCP Crime, DCP Traffic, Additional Commissioner of Police, Commissioner of Police, Bangalore City; IG, State Intelligence; Additional DGP, Recruitment and Training; DGP, CID.
Navtej Singh Johar is a dancer and choreographer, scholar, yoga exponent, and urban activist. A recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Contemporary Choreography in 2014, his work—within all fields of his varied interests—remains consistently body-centric. It merges practice with critical theory and social action, traverses freely between the traditional and the contemporary, and rigorously engages both the philosophical and the sociological discourses of the body.
Alok Rai attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and University College, London as a Commonwealth Fellow. His PhD George Orwell, Orwell and the Politics of Despair, was published in 1990. He has translated Munshi Premchand’s Nirmala, but he believes that his best work is the monograph Hindi Nationalism, published in 2001.
Arti Kirloskar is a trustee of Kirloskar Foundation, which works in the field of hygiene education and education of underprivileged children.
She is the Convenor of Kirloskar Vasundhara International Film Festival, an environment film festival being run in Pune and 20 other cities for over a decade. Arti was the past Convenor of and current Patron of the INTACH Pune Chapter, which works to conserve and protect India’s heritage.
Arti is an artist and has showed her work along with seven other artists from Pune at the Kochi Biennale 2016.
Vivek Shanbhag is a writer who has published five short story collections, three novels, and two plays in Kannada. From 2005 to 2012, he published and edited the literary journal Desha Kaala.
Vivek’s works are translated into many other Indian languages, and have appeared in Granta, Seminar, Indian Literature and Out of Print. In Fall 2016, he was resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Sajan Poovayya is an advocate with extensive constitutional, corporate and commercial law practice in the Supreme Court of India; and in various High Courts of the country. He was officiated as the Additional Advocate General for the State of Karnataka and was one of the youngest to occupy that position. Prior to this, he was the Managing Partner of Poovayya & Co., a full service law firm with offices at Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi.
Nandita Palchoudhuri is a social entrepreneur curating and consulting internationally, in the field of Indian folk art, craft, and performance practices. She has been a member of the Ford Foundation, an International Initiative for Social Philanthropy, and is a trustee of several other national trusts and foundations in the field of arts and culture. She is a Clore-Chevening Scholar in Cultural Leadership, UK.
Nandita is trained in Indian classical vocal music under Padma Vibhushan Girija Devi.