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.

Fat. So? Ameya Nagarajan

Cook, cat lady and always reading, Ameya has four degrees (because she likes to study yaar, and, no, she’s not telling what where when how), but still can’t make her mind up about her career. She wrote a briefly popular blog about dating in Delhi; she set up the Indian Express podcast network; she used to commission books for Penguin India. She co-hosts a podcast called “Fat. So?” about the experiences of fat women in India. A fluent Spanish speaker, she’s fascinated by language and communication. She currently runs programs for a media development startup called PROTO.

Lost in language: Pooja Priyamvada

Pooja is an author, columnist, translator, online content and Social Media consultant. She is also an awarded bi-lingual blogger who also offers psychological first aid in India, and has been associated with reputed national and global portals. Her translation A Night in the Hills, a collection of short stories by Manav Kaul, has been published by Westland Books in 2019. Her two ebooks, Mental Health: A Primer and Papa & I, are available on Amazon Kindle.

Creole Indias, an archipelago of fragments: Ari Gautier and Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Ari is a French novelist from Pondicherry of Indo-Malagasy origin, based in Oslo. He writes historical fiction about Pondicherry’s place in the world, and works at Melahuset, Norway, an institution promoting art and culture from the Global South.

Ananya is an academic at the Department of English, King’s College London, and winner of the Infosys Prize for the Humanities in 2018. She currently works on creolisation as a historical process and cultural theory. In May 2020, Ari and Ananya co-founded the online cultural platform, le thinnai Kreyol, that promotes their shared vision for a plural, multicultural, and creolised India.

How to photograph a city: Chirodeep Chaudhari

Chirodeep is the author of the critically feted book A Village In Bengal: Photographs and an Essay, a result of his 13-year long engagement with his ancestral village in West Bengal and his family’s nearly two century old tradition of the Durga Puja. Chirodeep’s work documents the urban landscape and he has often been referred to as the ‘chronicler of Bombay.’ During his career he has produced diverse documents of his home city in a range of projects like “Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay,” “The One-Rupee Entrepreneur,” “The Commuters,” “In the city, a library,” among others.

Drawing a line: Aarthi Parthasarathy and Arun Prasad

Arun is a pannapictagraphist (comic book archivist), history researcher, artist and freelance writer based in Bangalore. He began his career as a journalist and then decided to dedicate his time exclusively towards nurturing his lifelong passion: collecting and researching comics. Over two decades, he travelled extensively around the country, collecting and piecing together old and out-of-print comic books, comic strips and other comic-related materials to create an extensive repository of Indian sequential art and illustration.

Aarthi is a filmmaker and writer, and has written a number of comics and short graphic stories. She founded Falana Films, a Bangalore-based creative film and animation studio along with Chaitanya Krishnan. She created the webcomic Royal Existentials and is also part of Kadak Collective, a group of South Asian women graphic artists and writers.

You are cooking meat wrong: Krish Ashok

Ashok is not a chef but cooks daily. He is not a scientist, but he can explain science with easy to understand clarity. His parents wanted him to be a full-time violinist, but he chose to study to be an electronic engineer, and is a software engineer in real life. When he is not cooking, he’s usually playing subversive music on the violin or cello. He lives in Chennai with a wife who sagely prevents him from buying more gadgets for the kitchen or musical instruments, and a son who terrorises all flora and fauna in the neighbourhood. He is the author of an upcoming book on food science that will be out from Penguin India later this year.

Ctrl + Alt + Del: Mumbai Playbackers

Mumbai Playbackers is an applied theatre company which works with expressive art forms as a medium to create dialogue and reflective spaces. They hold open and customised workshops, and interactive performances for varied group – ranging from schools, colleges, NGOs, corporates. They offer both the workshops and performances online and have been extremely encouraged by the outcome and the possibilities of this online space.