How to pack for a 1,200-km walk: Priyanka Borpujari

Priyanka is an award-winning journalist, a former Fulbright scholar, and currently a Rotary Peace Fellow at the International Christian University in Tokyo. She has reported extensively on human rights and justice from across India, El Salvador, Indonesia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina and Argentina for various international publications. She has conducted such writing workshops among Muslim girls in Mumbra, women in a Cape Town township, and male inmates at a local prison in Rochester, USA. Between 2018 and 2019, she joined two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist Paul Salopek on his 33,000-km Out of Eden Walk project that traces the path of human migration, walking 1,200 kms across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, and Assam.

The women who forgot to invent Facebook: Nisha Susan

Nisha is a writer and editor. She grew up in India, Nigeria and Oman and lives in Bangalore. She is the co-founder of award-winning media companies The Ladies Finger and Grist Media and was formerly Features Editor, Tehelka, and commissioning editor, Yahoo! Originals, a longform destination for Yahoo! India. She currently writes Cheap Thrills, a column on millennials, time and obsessions for Mint Lounge. Her non-fiction is focused on culture, gender and politics; her fiction often explores the intimacy and strangeness the internet has brought to our lives. The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook & Other Stories is her first collection of short fiction. (Context, August 2020).

Sc-fi films as a precursor to space exploration: Ajay Sarpeshkar

A technologist by day and a creative by night, Ajay grew tired of changing outfits in phone booths as they are hard to find. After 15 years of living this dual life, he finally called it quits on his day job and took up film making full time. Exploring realistic sci-fi films in an Indian context, his film Mysore Masala: The UFO Incident; a first in a trilogy, is undergoing final assembly for a late 2020 release. He hopes to kick-start this fascinating genre in India, remaining true to the science and exploratory aspect of it.

Squares and circles in (Indian) classical dance: Manasi Raghunandan

Manasi practices the Indian classical dance forms Odissi and Bharatanatyam and has performed, provided lecture demonstrations and paper presentations and represented India at Spain, France, Mauritius, Brazil, Serbia, Qatar, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and thrice at Lahore, Pakistan. She is a research scholar in performing arts, creative director of Abhivyakti national festival, contributed articles and reviews to the print media, written two books (and is working on translating one from Gujarati to English) and also curated an online performance series, Rendez-vous, She has won awards in performing arts and the Ministry of Culture national scholarship for Bharatanatyam.

Welcome to Queeristan: Parmesh Shahani

Parmesh is Vice President at Godrej Industries Ltd. and the founder of the award-winning Godrej India Culture Lab. A passionate advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in corporate India, he has guided many of the country’s leading companies on their inclusion journeys. He wrote Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India in 2008, and his second book Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace is just out. He has been a TED Senior Fellow, a Yale World Fellow, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and is a member of the FICCI taskforce on diversity and inclusion and a board member of KHOJ International Artists’ Association.

Woof! Sindhoor Pangal

Sindhoor is a canine behaviour consultant, a canine myotherapist and an engineer by qualification. She is also passionate about ethological studies of free ranging dogs in India. Her studies have been published by IAABC and PPG blog in the US, were presented at the PDTE summit in the UK and were mentioned in the book Canine Confidential by Dr. Marc Bekoff. She currently is the principal and director of BHARCS, which offers a one of its kind, UK-accredited level four diploma on canine behaviour and ethology, and boasts of students from 15 cities in India and 6 countries.

Publishing beyond the industry: Tara Khandelwal

Tara is an editor and writer. She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University and the Columbia Publishing Course. She currently works with Asia’s largest literary agency, Writers’ Side. She is the founder of Bound which provides skill building for creatives through writers’ retreats, workshops, writing coaching and editorial services.

Sharing space with the wild: Sejal Mehta

Sejal is a writer/ editor and has been part of the publishing landscape for 17 years. She writes about science, wildlife, travel, communities for publications like Scroll, Mongabay, The Indian Express, Livemint, BBC Knowledge to name a few. She has been part of the senior editorial teams at Lonely Planet Magazine India, National Geographic Traveller India, Nature inFocus and is currently consultant editor at Marine Life of Mumbai. She is a published author (fiction and children’s books) and sketches about wildlife at Snaggletooth, a line of nature-inspired merchandise.

Long-distance musicianship: Advaith Mohan

Advaith is the rhythm guitarist of The Down Troddence, a Bangalore-based heavy metal band. Through their music, they tell stories of the downtrodden and powerless, while blending Indian folk music elements with straight up thrash and groove metal. Their debut album How Are You? We Are Fine. Thank You. won 8 awards at the Rolling Stone India Metal Awards 2014, and has seen the band hailed as one of the best metal bands to ever come out of India. After an extended hiatus, they are currently working on their second album, scheduled to be released in 2021.

Maneuvering through the Covid-19 era: Romel Dias

Romel has 19 years of experience across media and platforms, starting with conceptual work and animation before moving to supervision and production. He has an affinity for projects that mix media seamlessly to meet challenges, where his instinctive approach is finding a work-around. He has worked on ad films, short films and VFX for mainstream Bollywood, including Raju & I (30 min) which has won 15 international awards and Maa-aa (28 min) which has won five, a multi-award-winning music video, and a TVC which won a Cannes Silver Lion.