Described as the ‘Indian art house icon’, by TIME magazine, Rahul Bose won the Best Actor award at the Singapore Film Festival for ‘Split Wide Open’ and the runner-up prize for Best Debut Director for ‘Everybody Says I’m Fine!’ at the Palm Springs Film Festival. Last year he was awarded the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor for his chilling double role in the Netflix film, ‘Bulbul’.

Rahul runs two NGOs, ‘The Foundation’ – dedicated to the equalization of development by educating children from India’s most underserved areas and ‘HEAL’ – dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse.

Some of his awards include: Indian Youth Icon of the Year – Social Justice, the Green Globe Award for Climate Change, NDTV Celebrity Sports Activist of the Year, the Lt. Governor’s Commendation Award for Services to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Hakim Khan Sur award for National Integration, GQ’s Philanthropist of the Year and GQ’s Man Of The Year, Social Change.

In 2017 he produced and directed his second feature film, ‘Poorna’ (available on Amazon Prime) for which he received the Excellence in Direction Award from the Directors Association of India and two international awards in Melbourne and Dublin. His next directorial venture goes on the floors in February next year.

A former international rugby player, Rahul represented India for eleven years, playing 17 internationals from 1998 to 2009. In December 2021 he was elected President of the Indian Rugby Football Union. He is committed to shaping a new high-performance culture in the sport across the country and expanding the player pool at the grassroots level.

A prolific speaker, he has lectured on leadership, gender justice, sport, social activism, and cinema at the World Bank, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge Universities amongst others.

Mimi Choudhury has been a publishing professional for two decades, having worked at senior editorial positions at leading presses Macmillan India, Sage Publications, Oxford University Press, and Orient BlackSwan. She has commissioned academic and semi-academic books across a range of subjects and headed social sciences publishing at Orient Blackswan. She has been especially passionate about books with direct contemporary relevance—on politics, history, society, and culture. In keeping with this interest, she chose to move from publishing books for a largely niche audience to those with potentially wider readerships.

Mimi believes now more than ever in the importance of commissioning domain experts to also write for informed audiences in an accessible, non-specialist style.

Rukmini Sen is Professor, Sociology, School of Liberal Studies Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi, India. Currently she is holding the positions of Dean School of Heritage Research and Management, Director Outreach and Extension Division and Centre for Publishing. With 18 years of teaching and 12 years of research experience with her, her areas of specialisation are sociology of law, feminist pedagogy, qualitative research methods, contemporary urban kinships and intimacies. She has recently been awarded the WISCOMP (Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace) SAAHAS awards 2020 recognising her continuous engagements with curricula using an intersectional lens, and courageous efforts to bring structural shifts in the everyday functioning of higher education spaces through innovative pedagogy and counselling.

She is an Advisory Member of Country Reference Group for the research project ‘Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights in South Asia’ jointly to be conducted between Indian Social Studies Trust with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex. She is a member of International Research Collaborative 2020 on ‘Early Women Lawyers in the Legal Profession’, with Law and Society Association, Amherst, USA. She was a Co-investigator, ‘Feminist Taleem: Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives: Questions of Identity, Pedagogy and Violence in India and the UK’ (2017-2020) funded by UGC-UKIERI and Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi collaborated with University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
She has 2 co-edited books and 2 co-edited journal special issues. She currently has 16 book chapters and 12 journal articles published through various national and international publications.

Shubhranshu has over two decades of global brand and category-building experience with some of the most admired brands in the world. He currently serves as the Vice President – Marketing for Tata Motors’ Commercial Vehicles business. Prior to this, he was the global CMO at Royal Enfield. In earlier stints, he led marketing in South Asia for Visa, Unilever’s home care, Lakme skin and cosmetics & deodorants businesses. He was also CMO for Star Sports between 2014-18 where he conceptualised and launched several sports leagues including Pro Kabaddi, Premier Badminton League and Indian Super League. He created many campaigns for women’s sports and was instrumental in the launch of Khelo Infia program.

Shubhranshu secured a gold medal in the Masters Program in International Business – 1999 from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. He is the Chairman of the Marketing & Sport Development Committee at Bowling Federation of India. He has also served as a pro-bono advisor to the ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports from Jan 2018 to Dec 2018.

He has chaired the jury for APAC Effies 2021 and also served on the jury for the Global Iridium Effies 2021 as well. He has liberally shared his knowledge and expertise with the marketers of tomorrow. He is a regular guest lecturer, adjunct faculty, at premier management institutions like the IIMs.

He is also a prolific writer and writes a column for several publications particularly on brand building, consumer sociology, technology and trends.

Farah Naqvi, an alumnus of Columbia University, is a feminist, writer and activist. For over 25 years she has worked on gender, caste, and minority issues, towards justice, democratic rights and freedom from violence.

Her work has spanned a range of media and locations – from remote villages to public policy spaces – as Member, National Advisory Council or NAC, (2010-2014); Member, Post-Sachar Evaluation Committee (Kundu Committee), Ministry of Minority Affairs (2013-2014); Member, Planning Commission Steering Committee on Empowerment of Minorities, for India’s 12th five-year plan (2011-2012); Member, Planning Commission Steering Committee for Women and Child Development, for the 11th five-year plan (2007-2008); Member, Planning Commission Working Group on Adolescents’ Development & Youth Affairs, 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2008); Member, Planning Commission Working Group on Minority Affairs,
for the 11th five-year plan

(2007-2008).

She has worked on law reform including the 2013 Criminal Law Amendment Act on sexual assault laws; draft law on communal and targeted violence; amendments to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act; amendments to include domestic workers in sexual harassment law – all entailing advocacy with government and parliamentarians; inter-facing with relevant Parliamentary Standing Committees; writing submissions and deposing before Standing Committees.

She has also been part of several fact-finding reports on situations of civil strife and communal violence including in Chhattisgarh (War in the Heart of India), Muzaffarnagar (30 Days and Counting and A Human Tragedy Unfolds), Gujarat (Survivors Speak & Threatened Existence). She has authored two books – Waves in the Hinterland (2007) about a newspaper created by Dalit women journalists and Working with Muslims: Beyond Burqa and Triple Talaq (2017) about how the voluntary sector engages on the ground with India’s largest minority. For nearly two decades, she has worked on hate-based violence and internal displacement in India, and recently co-directed with Srishti films (Bangalore) The Colour of My Home (2017), a film about loss, remembering and rebuilding broken lives, post the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013.

Professionally qualified as a Physiotherapist from Boston University and currently working as a Consultant in the field of disability and development with 25 years of experience. Focus areas of work include working with people with disabilities and their families in community-based programmes; sensitization and training of professionals, community members and other stakeholders; designing tools for rights-based programming; and advocacy and policy related work. Worked for 20 years with Action for Ability Development and Inclusion, an NGO, on creating enabling and inclusive environments for children and adults with disabilities for participation in all spheres of life like home, school, work, sports, recreation, leisure and exercising democratic rights. Presently also on the board of Shroff Charitable Eye Hospital.