Bangalore_Bengaluru@BIC Hub’ba

Meera Iyer is a writer, independent researcher, and the Convenor of the Bengaluru Chapter of INTACH − the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. A former development journalist, she now writes primarily on history, heritage, science and environmental issues. Her writing has appeared in several newspapers and magazines including Deccan Herald, The Hindu, Mint, Indian Express, and HIMAL. She has a PhD in Forest Ecology from Michigan State University. She has recently written and edited a book on Bengaluru’s history and heritage, Discovering Bengaluru: History. Neighbourhoods. Walks.

Janaki Nair was Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Women and Law in Colonial India (1996), Miners and Millhands: Work Culture and Politics in Princely Mysore, (1998); The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (2005) and Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011/2012). She has published widely in Indian and international journals. She has also contributed to popular journals and newspapers.

Anup Naik is an architect, urban designer and the Founder Director of UrbanFrame (SpaceMatrix Architects and Planners). He is currently working on his PhD in Architecture, focussing on creating a sustainable passive design toolkit connecting Indian vernacular architecture and various Green rating systems. He has been actively involved in architecture for more than 25 years. His work experience has spanned across countries like Morocco, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Kenya, Vietnam and across India. Along with his professional pursuit, he is an active academician. Anup is passionate about user-centric design and sustainable design. He is inspired by the seamless incorporation of sustainable elements in ancient buildings and believes the challenge for modern architecture is to understand and utilize these ancient techniques in today’s context. He has been the driving force behind the holistic approach to green architecture, zero energy developments, master planning and urban design.

is an actor, writer, director and teacher for the stage, television and cinema; journalist and occasional activist. President and Founder-Trustee of Centre for Film and Drama, which produces stage plays, he conducts courses in filmmaking and acting, and organises screenings, shows and seminars on aspects of media and issues of current interest. 

He has been a Speaker/ Instructor/ Delegate at conferences and workshops in India and abroad, at Harvard University and San Francisco State University, and in London, Seoul, Gothenburg, Berlin and Istanbul. 

His awards for work on the stage and screen include the Helpmann Award (Australia) for Best Actor Male in Counting & Cracking (2019); the META Award for Best Actor Male in a Supporting Role (2006); Karnataka Nataka Academy Award for contribution to English and Kannada language theatre (2012); and National Award for debut feature (Writer & Director) Stumble, Best Feature in the English language (2003). 

Ankur Bisen is Senior Vice President at Technopak Advisors Pvt. Ltd. He brings over 20 years of cross-functional experience in management consulting, business development and research in the backdrop of working in India, Greater China and Europe. For the past decade and continuing, he has advised leading Indian and international organizations, private equity firms, sovereign funds and institutional investors in the Food, Agriculture, Retail, E-commerce, Space Planning, Affordable Housing and Resource Recovery sectors in India. In the past, Ankur worked with the Tata Group in operations and consulting roles for nine years in India and China and briefly worked for a start-up venture in the affordable housing sector. 

He writes for The Wire on Environment and Sustainability (2019-2020). In the past, he has written columns for The First Post, DNA, The Economic Times and The Mint (2012-2015). In 2019, Ankur’s maiden book WASTED on India’s sanitation challenge was published by Pan Macmillan India. 

Ankur holds an MBA from Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK. He completed his undergraduate and post graduate studies from NCHR&CT, PUSA New Delhi and Devi Ahilya University, Indore.

Siddharth Raja is a seasoned corporate lawyer now in his 23rd year of practice. He focuses on private equity and venture capital transactions, and on cross-border and domestic mergers and acquisitions. He has been highly ranked for several years, including by Chambers & Partners – lauded for his “global business perspective”, “attention to detail” and “excellent technical knowledge”. 

Siddharth is currently one of the founder Partners of the Bangalore-headquartered full-service law firm, Saakshya Law; his fourth law practice. Siddharth previously co-founded Narasappa, Doraswamy & Raja that merged to form Samvad: Partners, where he was one of the co-founders. He has also worked in Hong Kong, with the international law firm, O’Melveny & Myers.

Siddharth graduated from St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School. A Gold Medalist with a Bachelor’s Law degree from National Law School of India University, Siddharth also holds a Master’s in Law from the University of Warwick Law School, where he was a British Council & Foreign and Commonwealth Office Chevening, and J. N. Tata, Scholar. 

Siddharth is or has been a Visiting Professor at NLSIU; Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Science; and IIM, Bangalore. 

Siddharth is currently an elected Governor on the Board of Governors of the Bangalore International Centre – he was previously an elected member of the Executive Committee. He was also a member of the Bangalore Tourism Advisory Committee established by the Karnataka Government. 

His love for history has led him to run a successful historical walking tour company – along with his wife, Priya – called “Nandi Valley Walks”. In his free time, Siddharth pursues historical research on the Princely State of Mysore, through the biographical prism of one of its Dewans, Sir Albion Rajkumar Banerji. 

Sugata Srinivasaraju is an award-winning bilingual journalist and author. He writes a fortnightly column for the Mirror and contributes regularly to The Wire, Mint, Economic Times, Indian Express and The New Indian Express. In the past, he has written for Outlook magazine, The Caravan, Deccan Herald and The Irish Times. Sugata as an editor has had the distinction of having led newsrooms across mediums (print, television and digital), and of working in both the national and regional press. He has published two critically acclaimed books on language and cultural politics in English, and a volume of essays in Kannada. He is currently the co-founder of a start-up that is engaged in building a non-news audio platform. 

Karthik Venkatesh was born in Calcutta in keeping with family tradition that virtually no one in his family who all call Bengaluru home, were actually born in the city. Karthik’s paternal grandfather moved to the city in and around 1915, lived in other cities for many years and eventually came back home as did his father and Karthik himself. Karthik now works with Westland Books as a Senior Editor and occasionally writes for the popular press on language, history and culture.

Swathi Shivanand is an independent researcher interested in questions of urban labour, space, development and communities. Her recently submitted PhD thesis at the Centre for Historical studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, probed the material and discursive histories of Hyderabad Karnataka, and showed how a region comes to be marked as developed (or under developed). She has previously worked as an urban researcher in Delhi and as a journalist with The Hindu in Bangalore. She has studied and lived in the cities of Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. She is a recipient of the 2010-11 Laadli Media Awards for Gender Sensitivity for her article ‘Whose city is it anyway?’

Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India, where she leads the Urban & Mobility Studies Programme. A social anthropologist by training, Prof. Upadhya has researched and published extensively on diverse themes related to India’s post-independence development, including the social impacts of green revolution technology in a rice-farming region of southern India; the formation of Indian software capital and labour; the reconstitution of the Indian middle class; transnational migration and the developmental interventions of regional diasporas in India; and the urbanization of rural landscapes. She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (edited by C. Upadhya, M. Rutten and L. Koskimaki, Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series, Routledge, 2018). Prof. Upadhya is currently co-director of an international collaborative research project, Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital, a comparative study of real estate-led urbanization in Jakarta and Bangalore, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Minnesota and UCLA (USA), funded by the National Science Foundation (2017-2020). She recently completed a study of skill training, rural-urban migration, and employment in Bangalore’s service economy, in collaboration with Supriya Roy Chowdhury of the Institute for Social and Economic Change.

Ekta Mittal co-founded Maraa, a media and arts collective in Bangalore (www.maraa.in) in 2008. She works there as a practitioner, researcher, curator and facilitator around issues of gender, labour & caste in rural and urban contexts. She also works with creative practices in public space, through independent production and collaborations with other artists. She has been making films around labour, migration and cities since 2009. Her recent film ‘Birha’ is about separation and longing in the context of migration.

Zac O’Yeah is a Swedish detective novelist and author of the Majestic Trilogy, which is set in his Indian hometown, Bengaluru. He has published 18 books including several fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. His Gandhi biography Mahatma! was ranked as the best nonfiction book in Sweden in 2008. His travel writings have appeared in magazines such as National Geographic Traveller, and also been included in a huge number of anthologies. All in all, he has written for nearly 100 different publications and he is currently a columnist with the Business Line newspaper. His writings have been translated into German, French, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Hindi and other languages. He is a founder-director of Bangalore’s World-Famous Semi-Deluxe Writing Programme, the first semi-professional writing school in India. His most recent books include the novel Tropical Detective, the travelogue A Walk Through Barygaza and the children’s book The Mystery of the Cyber Friend. He also composes music with the pop group The Ändå whose latest hit “Friend!” was released in 2020. Read more on www.zacoyeah.com.

Vivek Shanbhag writes in Kannada. He has published five short story collections, three novels and two plays. He has edited two anthologies, one of which is in English. Vivek was the founding editor of the literary journal Desha Kaala. His critically-acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar is translated into 18 languages worldwide. Ghachar Ghochar was listed as one of the best ten books of 2017 by The New York Times as well as The Guardian. It is one of Vulture‘s 100 best books of the 21st century. Ghachar Ghochar is the first Indian language book to be a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction 2017 and The American National Translation Award 2017. 

Vivek is the co-translator of U R Ananthamurthy’s book Hindutva or Hind Swaraj into English. 

He was a Fall 2016 Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa and has been a Visiting Professor teaching creative writing at Ashoka University. An engineer by training, he lives in Bangalore.

Usha K R is the author of the novels Boys from Good Families (2019), Monkey-man (2010), A Girl and a River (2007), The Chosen (2003), and Sojourn (1998). Her novels have been listed for several awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Man Asia, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. A Girl and a River won the Vodafone Crossword Award, 2007. Monkey-man was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2012. 

Usha began her journey as a writer with short stories. Her stories were published in various magazines and journals including Femina, Debonair, New Quest, and Deccan Herald. Her short story “Sepia Tones” won the Katha Award for Creative Writing back in 1995. More recently, her story “Elixir” was included in Boo, an anthology of paranormal tales, 2017, Penguin India, and “Boy to Chase the Crows Away” was among the Best Asian Short Stories 2017, Kitaab, Singapore.

Usha K R attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2011. She lives in Bangalore. Read more on http://ushakr.wordpress.com.

Usha Rao is intrigued by cities and what they mean to people. Over the past decade she has attempted to make sense of what is now famously understood as ‘the transformation’ of Bangalore. She is particularly interested in tracing the processes and practices that bring about change in the way a city is imagined and ‘the city’ is fashioned. Her current research and media projects looks at neighbourhoods in Bangalore because she feels that’s where ‘the city’ is lived.

Our Metropolis (2014) which she has co-directed with film maker Gautam Sonti (www.ourmetropolis.in) is her first documentary film. The film has been shown in major festivals including MIFF, Busan International Festival, and Dubai International Film Festival.

Gautam Sonti is an independent documentary filmmaker based in Bangalore. Many of his films follow a group of people or an unfolding situation over a long period of time. Gautam is interested in ‘studying up’ – in making films about the powerful. His earlier series of films Coding Culture (in collaboration with Carol Upadhya), looks at the culture and politics of IT workspaces in Bangalore. Our Metropolis (co-directed with Usha Rao) examines the lack of transparency and public consultation in the making of a ‘global’ Bangalore.