The contributors

AMITABH KUMAR is a designer/artist based between New Delhi and Bangalore. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda and worked as part of the Sarai Media Lab (2006–10) where he researched and made comics, programmed events, designed books and co-curated an experimental art space. He is visiting faculty to the Srishti School of Art and Design and Technology, Bangalore, and is an initiating member of the comics ensemble, the Pao Collective.

ANKUR AHUJA is a cinematographer, photographer, editor and intermittent food blogger. She is based in Delhi and is currently working on her first Bollywood feature.

APPUPEN is a comics creator and artist who tells stories from the original mythical world, Halahala. His first graphic novel, Moonward (Blaft, 2009) was selected for the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France, 2011. His second graphic novel, Legends of Halahala (HarperCollins India, 2013) has been called India's first silent graphic novel. Appupen Is currently working on his next graphic novel, 'Aspyrus'. Appupen's original art has been exhibited in galleries in Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi. His commissioned murals and art can also be seen in many cities across India and at www.georgemathen.com. He currently lives in Bangalore.

ARCHANA SREENIVASAN illustrates for magazines, picture books, comics and lifestyle products. She enjoys exploring new styles and techniques, and has illustrated for periodicals like Forbes Life magazine and The Mint newspaper; publishers such as Karadi Tales and Katha; and publications like Manta Ray Comics, Ruskin Bond's The Blue Umbrella and Angry River. She likes cats, travelling, exploring the great outdoors, bird-watching, and doodling in cafes. She lives in Bengaluru.

ARIF AYAZ PARREY is a Kashmiri writer and independent researcher. He currently lives between Islamabad and Anantnag, Jammu & Kashmir.

ARUNDHATI GHOSH writes poetry in Bangla and works for an arts foundation. She loves journeys and maps. Arundhati lives and works in Bangalore.

BANI ABIDI is an artist who uses video and photography to comment on politics and culture, often through humorous and absurd vignettes. Abidi received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1995 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows internationally. They include Documenta 13, Germany (2012) Bani Abidi-Section Yellow, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2010; The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM I Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Where Three Dreams Cross, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2010); Xth Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2009); 7th Gwangju Biennale 2008, Kwangju, South Korea; Thermocline of Art—New Asian Waves, ZKM, Karlsruhe/Germany (2007); Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2006}; Sub-Contingent—The South Asian Sub Continent in Contemporary Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2006); Contemporary Commonwealth, NatIonal Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2006); 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Fukuoka, Japan (2005). Her work is in the collections of the MoMANY, Guggenheim NY, Tate Modern, The British Museum, The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and the Devi Art Foundation, among others. She is now working in Berlin.

BEENA SARWAR is a journalist, artist and documentary filmmaker focusing on media, gender, peace and human rights issues, working with television and print media in Pakistan and abroad. She is a founding member of the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) formed in 1994. Since January 2010, she has been working as Editor for Aman ki Asha (www.amankiasha.com), a peace initiative between the Jang Group of Newspapers, Pakistan and The Times of India. She blogs at Journeys to Democracy (www.beenasarwar.wordpress.com), and is on Twitter @beenasarwar.

DEEWANA always on the move, Kanhaiya Lal Prem Deewana is a consultant to the Ministry of Love & Harmony in the three neighbouring countries. He somehow manages to live a second life as a visual artist in Amritsar.

DYUTI MlTTAL is an illustrator, graphic designer and comic book artist. She graduated from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, in Visual Communication Design and explored the graphic novel medium first in 2009 with a short graphic novel titled 'Flaw', initiated as her diploma project. She has since been freelancing, and also been a fellow with Sarai CSDS, 2012. She works across mediums and hopes to explore more styles of storytelling in the future and infuse more relevance and beauty into her illustration and writing. She is currently based out of Delhi.

FARIHA REHMAN is an artist and art teacher. She has worked as Curator at Nalrang Gallery, Lahore, and has taught miniature painting and drawing at the Hunerkada College of Visual and PerformIng Arts, Lahore. She was the assistant curator with Nayyar All Dada for 'Representing Pakistan', a group show at Lalit Kala Academy Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2004. She is an independent miniature artist and her works have been shown at several national and international exhibitions. Her work deals with issues of womanhood and the juxtaposition of female form in South Asian culture. She lives and works in Lahore.

HEMANT PURI Academically a painter, he has worked a retail designer/visual merchandiser for some of the best brands, and writes in English, Hindi and Urdu. Currently he works as an artist using different media including performance and sound. He is an avid learner of dhrupad music. He lives in New Delhi.

IKROOP SANDHU is constantly seeking something of an undiscovered nature. She freelances as an animator primarily for Raqs Media Collective. Her illustrated work has appeared in Pao Anthology of Comics and The Mint. She is currently working on 'Bombay Velvet', a graphic novel by Gyan Prakash. She lives in Dharamsala and is preparing the soil for her roots to grow.

IRFAN MASTER is the author of A Beautiful Lie (his debut novel), published by Bloomsbury and shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize, the Branford Boase Award, and translated into seven languages. Irfan is currently working with the charity, First Story as a writer in residence. Recently, he has been working on a commissioned story to be produced as a stage show, and his second novel will be published shortly. Irfan has contributed poetry and short stories to various anthologies. He regularly speaks about the creative writing process to young people and adults. Irfan lives and works in Leicester, UK.

KAISER HAQ is a poet, essayist and translator, and Professor of English at Dhaka University (on leave) and the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has to his credit seven volumes of poetry, the most recent being Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (UPL 2012), five translated books and two edited poetry anthologies. He currently lives in Dhaka.

KHADEMUL ISLAM is concurrently literary editor of the Dhaka Tribune and editor of Bengal Lights, a literary journal. He is a short story writer, translator and critic, and has edited a book of short stories. He is writing a non-fiction book about escaping from Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971. He lives, works and commutes between Dhaka and Bangkok.

M HASAN is a poet and activist. He occasionally writes in Bengali Little Magazines. He has been editing literary magazines like Daw and Kadamati published in Dhaka. His first book of poetry, Dinlipi was published in 2011. He has also co-edited the collected works of Monjatuddin and Tauhid Enam. He lives with his little family in Muelheim an der Ruhr, Germany.

MAHMOOD FAROOQUI effected the revival of Dastangoi, the art of Urdu storytelling, and co-directed the highly acclaimed Hindi feature film Peepli Live with Anusha Rizvi. His first book, Besieged: Voices from Delhi l857 was hailed as a brilliant contribution to 1857 studies and recently won him the Ramnath Goenka Award. His translation of Habib Tanvir: Memoirs was recently released. He lives and works in Delhi.

MAHMUD RAHMAN is a writer and translator. He came of age in Dhaka during the upsurge of the late sixties that led to the creation of Bangladesh. During the 1971 war, he was a refugee in Calcutta. His first book, Killing the Water: Stories, was published in 2010, and his second book, Black Ice, a translation of Mahmudul Haque's novel Kala Borof came out in 2012. He is still tinkering with his first novel The Fiction Factory which is set in contemporary Bangladesh and centred on themes of violence, image-making and propaganda. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

MALINI GUPTA is a development worker by profession and a wanderer by choice. She has been part of many exciting (and once in a while, not so exciting) processes of change in social and economic structures, mainly in rural areas. She has worked with government projects as well as non-governmental initiatives through national and international development agencies. While the bulk of her work is in India, she has also gathered relevant experience in its neighbouring countries as well as East Africa. She lives in her ancestral home in Delhi with her daughters and her dog as a part of a rambling, eccentric and a Very-Bengali-Joint-Family. She is forever planning to return to her place of birth.

MARIA M LITWA is a freelance photographer and multimedia director. At the end of 2011 she graduated in photography from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund, Germany, with the multimedia story 'Inside Geneva Camp', shot in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned art and photography festivals such as The New York Photo Awards, Darmstadter Days of Photography, the International Festival Sarajevo Winter and the Delhi Photo Festival. The multimedia 'Inside Geneva Camp' was broadcast on German TV and is featured in the IM Magazine, the online magazine of The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum Photos. She is based in Cologne, Germany.

MARTAND KHOSLA is an architect and artist. He is a founding partner of RKDS, a design studio established in 200l. His artwork engages with ideas of labour, urbanisation and displacement. He lives in New Delhi.

MEHREEN MURTAZA began crafting a new invention in 1986, accidentally stumbling upon the discovery of the Mentalex—a machine that uses the power of light to bring supra natural powers to the user's mind. It is in fact a strange artefact of unknown origin, discovered during a balneo therapy session. Essentially, a scientific study about the interaction between the angle of the rain, the shapes of the drops and the probability of being happy led to this innovative breakthrough. In the midst of taking out a patent on this discovery (in the hope that this would solve the planet's geopolitical problems), Murtaza began to emanate luminous laser beams from her cerebral cortex. She is currently designing the first quantum space probe that will allow time travel through high-resolution mapping of the human brain epigenome. On this planet, Mehreen Murtaza has been occasionally spotted in Lahore, and is represented by Grey Noise, Dubai and Experimenter, Kolkata. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

MOHIT SUNEJA is trained in Applied Art from the College of Art, Delhi where he is presently teaching as Assistant Professor. He is a versatile artist and is proficient in various illustration styles and genres. As a freelancer he has worked with many leading advertising agencies, publishing houses, design houses, and independent authors. He is also involved with pre-production for animation and ad films. He enjoys travelling and photography, and loves to play his flute under the colourful clouds.

NINA SABNANI is a filmmaker with expertise in animation and illustration. She has been exploring the relationship between word and image and bringing together animation and visual ethnography. She is passionate about storytelling and working in collaboration with traditional artists. Her film Tanka Bole Chhe (The Stitches Speak) has won several national and international awards. She has written and illustrated several books for children for publishers like Tulika, Pratham and Bookworm Goa. Currently, she is Associate Professor at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay.

NITESH MOHANTY is a graphic designer and illustrator. He loves dabbling in various forms of art in pursuit of telling a story. He has been designing book covers for over a decade for various Indian publishers such as Penguin, Picador, HarperCollins and others. He is currently working on his first documentary film and can be found loitering around with his camera. He's also writing a book of poetry, thoughts, observations, scribbles and sketches. He lives and works in Bombay.

ORIJIT SEN is a graphic artist and designer based in New Delhi. He trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. He has helped conceptualise, design and execute several exhibition and museum design projects, including the India Pavilion at the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan and the Virasat-e-Khalsa Museum in Anandpur Sahib, Punjab. Orijit also works with graphic narrative forms. His pioneering graphic novel The River of Stories was published in 1994. He is one of the founders of the Pao Collective—a group of comics artists and graphic novelists in Delhi, and collaborated on the critically acclaimed Pao Anthology of Comics published by Penguin. In 1990, he co-founded People Tree, a centre for design, crafts and sustainable living, which has grown to become a celebrated and unique cultural space in Delhi. He heads the People Tree in-house design studio.

PINAKI DE is a graphic designer and illustrator who has done numerous book covers for publishers like Penguin, Harper Collins, Hachette, Random House, Westland, Rupa, Zubaan and others. He also has a day job as a Professor of English Literature. Presently, he is working on his first graphic novel based on Partition. He lives in Chandannagar, a quiet suburb near Kolkata.

PRABHA MALLYA Is an illustrator, writer and comic book maker. She is at her happiest fussing around with stubby pencils and black inks, and frequently has black fingernails. She has illustrated for Beastly Tales from Here and There, The Wildings and The F-Word, and several book covers. Her graphic short stories have appeared in Mint, Forbes Life and Brainwave magazine. She lives in Stanford, California.

PRASANNA DHANDARPHALE is an illustrator and artist who likes experimenting with different styles. He has won several awards including Best Press illustration two years on the trot. He has also illustrated a graphic novel published by Penguin India. By profession he is a character designer and pre-production artist, working in the animation and art industry since 2001. He was the Character Dept head for two animated feature films and several TV series. His work in the 2007 animated film Dashavatar earned him nominations for Best Character Design. Those who want original Prasanna Dhandarphale art, meet him over coffee. By the end of the meeting, most of the paper napkins on your table will have drawings of the most interesting people in the coffee shop. Prasanna lives and works in Pune.

PRIYA KURIYAN born in Cochin, spent her childhood in numerous small cantonment towns in India. A graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she has directed educational films for the Sesame Street Show-India (Galli Galli Sim Sim) and has also co-directed a short animation film for the Children's Film Society of India. Over the past five years she has illustrated a number of children's books and comics, the last one being When Ali became Bajrangbali (Tulika Books). She currently lives and works in Delhi.

PRIYA SEN works with video and sound narratives as an artist, editor and sound designer, and occasionally teaches experimental film and practices. She is currently based in New Delhi.

RABBI SHERGILL is an Indian musician famous for his debut album Rabbi and the chart-topper song of 2005, 'Bulla Ki Jaana'. His music has been described variously as Rock, Sufiana, and 'semi-Sufi, semi-folksy kind of music with a lot of Western arrangements'. Rabbi has been called 'Punjabi music's true urban balladeer'. His songs are deeply philosophical and blend archaic, almost lost, Punjabi phrases into far more recent Indian rock music with great ease. Rabbi's music has been inspired by Rock, Hard Rock as well as Sufi and Punjabi folk music. His favourite musicians include Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Jimmy Page.

AHMAD RAFAY ALAM is a lawyer, environmental activist and avid cyclist. He lives in Lahore with his wife and daughter. You can follow him on Twitter @rafay_alam.

RAVISH KUMAR is a blogger and a story writer besides being a news anchor and reporter with NDTV, popular for his show 'Ravish ki Report'. A recent winner of the Ramnath Goenka Award, he is also a lover of history.
He lives and works in Delhi.

SALMAN RASHID is a Fellow at the Royal Geographical Society and the author of eight travel books. The only Pakistani to have seen the North Face of K2, he trekked in the shadow of this great mountain on its northern or Chinese side. His writings on explorations, history, and travel have appeared in almost all leading publications. Most of his writings are posted on his blog: http://odysseuslahori.blogspot.in He is based in Lahore.

SANJOY CHAKRABORTY is a painter, performance artist, art writer and illustrator. He completed his graduation from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. In his academic years he participated in many exhibitions all over India. He also attended a student residency in 'Periphery 1.O', Guwahati, in 2008. After returning to Bangladesh, he organised an International Art Exhibition where young artists from India and Bangladesh participated. Many of his articles on art have been published in India and Bangladesh. He works full-time as a Lecturer at the University of Dhaka and teaches part-time at Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka.

SARBAJIT SEN is a cartoonist/ graphic novelist/ filmmaker. He currently lives in Kolkata.

SONYA FATAH is a writer and editor from Karachi, Pakistan. She discovered the complications of an Indo-Pak identity by accident, when she and her husband moved to India in 2006. Apart from writing and raising her children, she runs a trust called No Man's Land, a platform for South Asian engagement on ideas and action.
She lives and works out of New Delhi.

SUKANYA GHOSH is an artist, animator and general dogsbody. She is currently based between Delhi and Calcutta.

SYEDA FARHANA was born in 1972 in Khulna, Bangladesh. After studying social sciences, she went to Hamburg to work on film production. Moved by a western artist's work, she joined a diploma course in photojournalism in Dhaka. Since then she has been exploring visual media both in art and documentary form. She has authored visual and scholarly projects on the Partition, migration and cities in South Asia (documentary photo stories, art exhibitions, films, articles, websites). Her works have been exhibited and awarded in Bangladesh as well as abroad. She lives in Dhaka and Chittagong.

TABISH KHAIR is an Indian writer, born and educated in Gaya, Bihar. Winner of the All India Poetry Prize, his four novels have also been shortlisted for various international and national awards, including the Man Asian Literary Prize. His new novel is titled How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. Khair currently lives in Aarhus, Denmark.

TINA RAJAN is an artist, cartoonist and illustrator. She has been running her own graphic design studio, Tinatoons, for over two decades. Her first book of illustrations for children is called I Saw Delhi (Urban Crayon Press). She has illustrated more than ten books, including the much-acclaimed How Cheeka Became a Star and other Dog Stories. Her most recent work is Triumph of Togetherness (Wisdom Tree). She lives in New Delhi.

VIDROHI is a revolutionary poet known for his oral archive and powerful recitation. Most of his poems have only been recited by him and never been put in the written form. For the past three decades he has been living in the wilderness of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.(Main Tumhara Kavi Hoon (I am your poet, a film by Nitin K Pamnani and Imran Khan, based on Vidrohi, won the Best Documentary Film Award in the International Competition Section of the Mumbai International Film Festival 2012.))

VISHWAJYOTI GHOSH is the author of the graphic novel Delhi Calm (HarperCollins India, 2010). His comics are regularly published in various journals and anthologies, including When Kulbhushan Met Stockli, Ctrl.AIt.Shift Unmasks Corruption and Pao Anthology of Comics. He is also a member of the Pao Comics Collective. In 2009 he published a collection of postcards based on classified ads titled Times New Roman & Countrymen. Vishwajyoti Ghosh is also the author of the cartoon column FULL TOSS. Associated with Inverted Commas, a communication collective, he is currently wrapping up a mapping project in the working clusters of Gurgaon.
He lives and works in New Delhi.

WASIM HELAL is a visual artist whose work revolves around the art of storytelling, designing books, writing and illustrating graphic stories, and collaborating with documentary and other filmmakers. His first project was illustrating and designing a bilingual children's book. Cuentos de Espana, by Spanish writer AR Almodovar. He has designed book covers for leading publishing houses in India. In 2011 three of his short graphic sequentials were exhibited at Bricklane Gallery, London. In 2012, his graphic novella Monochrome was published in the Lalit Kala Akademi art journal. He lives and works in Kolkata.