Sankar Sridhar developed a head for heights early in life while climbing stairs, first to peddle pagers and then trousers, as a teenager in Calcutta. The regular exercise—skipping lunch, mounting steps and dashing down to outrun irate housewives—stood him in good stead when he finally swapped concrete staircases for the icy Himalayas.

After a few years of trekking and guiding tourists on trails in Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Kashmir, Sridhar, by then twenty, enrolled in a mountaineering course, and proceeded to earn his keep as an outdoor survival instructor in a Delhi-based adventure company.

Whether it was the effect of breathing rarified air for extended periods or a stroke of genius, he will never know, but one fine day, Sridhar tapped his fingers on the keyboard instead of feeling rock faces for holds and, in the process, found himself a toehold in journalism. His articles have appeared in The Telegraph, The Statesman, The Times of India, DNA, India Today Travel Plus, Outlook Traveller, Swagat and DiscoverIndia. His travels continue and photos from his escapades have been exhibited, published and won honours in national and international salons and contests.

Sridhar currently works for a media organization in Delhi, spending his spare time thinking of the role life will next throw at him.

Shankar Sharma was born of Assamese descent inside Bellshill Maternity Hospital (now sadly defunct), Lanarkshire, Scotland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at 11:11 a.m. on Wednesday, 18 June, 1980. Since then it has all gone drastically downhill—and he has grown to despise Wednesday mornings. In the human race, Sharma came last and was twice nearly disqualified for false starts. He has however somehow managed to ‘cut and paste’ his way through the international media, working as a writer and journalist for various newspapers, magazines and websites in India, the Republic of Ireland, the U.A.E. (very briefly), and the U.K. (not briefly enough). He has subsequently abandoned that line in order to pursue a career in teaching history. He hopes to proselytize future generations towards his cause for global domination. One can only have deep sympathy with the kids.

Nirupama Dutt is a journalist of many seasons, having worked with The Indian Express at Chandigarh and Delhi for most of her career. She has written extensively on Punjab as a journalist and as an author. Her published books include a collection of poems—Ik Nadi Sanwali Jahi (A Stream Somewhat Dark)—and several anthologies, in English translation, of Hindi and Punjabi poetry and short fiction. At present she is working as Punjabi Editor for The Sunday Indian at Chandigarh.

Ashok Malik is senior editor with The Pioneer. A political journalist for the past 16 years, he has previously worked with a host of leading publications, including India Today and Indian Express. He lives in New Delhi with his wife and son.

Palden Gyalsten Tenzing left the Indian Administrative Service because he had better things to do. One of them was a motorbike run around the country, prompted by his wife throwing him out after he set up a hotel chain in Sikkim. He is currently licking his wounds somewhere in India. He is founder-member of the Vipassana Trust of Sikkim, runs a school for Buddhist monks and practises tai chi haltingly. He has been lead singer in a rock band and is friend to all. This chapter is from a work in progress with Penguin India.

Kriti Sharma moved from Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh to Paris at the age of thirteen. She is currently doing her B.A. in International Affairs at the American University of Paris. She spent the last two summers working for NGOs in Senegal and India.

Shubhra Gupta has been reviewing movies for the Indian Express for over sixteen years; for her writing about cinema is not drudgery, but a passion.

Gupta grew up watching Bombay masala in dusty UP cinema halls, bunked many Eng. Lit. undergrad classes to take in world cinema at Delhi University’s Celluloid Society, and went on to study film formally at Sophia College, Bombay.

After some years in straight-up journalism as sub-editor and reporter at the Hindustan Times and Sunday Mail, she began a weekly TV review column which started in 1988 at the Indian Post, and then travelled to Sunday, till the end of the ’90s.

The weekly movie column at the Indian Express began in 1992. Single-channel India was poised to turn into a 200-channel satellite dish. A few years after that, Bombay became Mumbai. And a media boom began, which has shown no signs of slowing down. Like everywhere else, TV and film have fed off each other: when it began, programming on TV was all film-based, then films began imitating TV, and now everybody happily copies everybody.

And Bollywood is cool, cool, cool.

Aman Sethi is a reporter for Frontline Magazine where he covers environment, infrastructure and urban ecologies. The ‘Khullam Khulla Inversion’ was first presented as a full length paper at the Sensor: Census: Censor conference at CSDS: Sarai in December 2006, and was based on his research as an Independent Fellow 2005-06 at Sarai.

Avijit Ghosh grew up in the small town of Arrah in Bihar’s fertile Bhojpur district. As a teenage film addict, he was initiated into the world of Bhojpuri films back in 1978 when he watched the noon show of Balam Pardesiya in the Moti Mahal cinema hall. He hasn’t stopped watching them since. Now a journalist with The Times of India, he is working on a book on Bhojpuri cinema.

Temsula Ao has contributed a number of articles on oral tradition, folk songs, myths and cultural traditions of the Ao Nagas and linguistic diversities of the Naga tribes for journals like Indian Literature published by the Sahitya Akademi, Indian Horizons: Journal of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations etc. She is Professor in the department of English, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong and also Dean, School of Humanities and Education at NEHU. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2007.

Nooreen Sarna is a sixteen-year-old student, a keen environmentalist and the winner of the Asian Age Poetry competition (August 2006).

Jahnavi Barua trained as a doctor but is now a writer, a reader, a mother of a six-year-old and a wife, not necessarily in that order. She writes mainly short fiction. She writes because she cannot help it; she writes because she reads; she writes because she is otherwise largely speechless.

Jahnavi is from Assam in the North-East of India and is passionate about the land she comes from; it has a way of creeping into almost all her works.

In 2005 she had won the Short Fiction contest hosted by Unisun Publishers and the British Council. The following year she won second prize in the Children’s Fiction category of the same prize. In 2006, Jahnavi was also awarded a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to study Creative Writing in the UK. She lives in Bangalore.

Mridula Koshy makes her home in New Delhi. In the past she was a Union and Community Organizer in the United States but threw this over for the lucre and glamour of a career mothering her three. She has been published in the Canadian journal Existere and in the Zubaan Books anthology of new writing, titled 21 under 40. Her work is also forthcoming in the English literary journal, Wasafiri, in an anthology of Indian stories published by Saqi press in London and in an anthology of urban Indian writing to be published by the Italian imprint, ISBN.

Kishore Valicha has written poetry and short stories that have been published in New Quest and earlier in the Writers’ Workshop Miscellany. His doctoral dissertation on Indian cinema, which later was published in book form, received a National Award from the Government of India. He has written two biographies for Penguin India on Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar.

Vijay Parthasarathy, 27, grew up in Bombay. Currently based in Madras, he writes for The Hindu.

Neel Kamal Puri was born in Ludhiana, Punjab, in 1956. She grew up in the erstwhile princely state of Patiala. Since 1979, she has worked as a lecturer in English Literature at different colleges in Patiala and Chandigarh. She is currently teaching Literature and Media Studies at the Government College for Girls, Chandigarh.

Uma Girish is an internationally published writer whose articles and features have been published in 7 countries. Uma’s short fiction has won her several awards, the most recent being e-Author 7.0, India’s Largest Online Talent Search. ‘Voices Across Boundaries’, ‘Lunch Hour Stories’, ‘India Currents’ and ‘Espresso Fiction’ are some of her fiction credits. She is also a Business English trainer and lives in Chennai with her husband and 14-year-old daughter.

Joan Pinto grew up in Bombay. She’s been an engineer, copywriter and interior designer. Joan has written for a host of publications including The Times of India, Femina, Design Today, India Today Travel, The CS Monitor, Boston, and Gulf News. Her short fiction ‘The Wretched and the Loved’ appeared on Long Story Short, the e-zine, and a flash memoir ‘The Scent of Sawdust’ on flashquake. Her short story ‘How Rifka Made Things Right’ was published in Favourite Stories for Girls (Puffin).

When Joan is not writing she blows bubbles with her niece, studies the colours in people, runs an NGO, sips chai, hums off-key, wanders through graveyards, and travels. She can be contacted at huanita@yahoo.com or on www.joanpinto.wordpress.com.

Tulsi Badrinath, born in 1967, lives in Chennai. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and an MBA. Her poems and articles have appeared in various newspapers and journals. Her unpublished novel ‘The Living God’ has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2007. Tulsi learnt Bharatanatyam from a very young age and has performed widely in India and abroad. She quit her job as a manager in a bank to devote herself to dance and writing. Currently, she is working on a novel and a collection of short stories.

Parismita Singh is currently working on a graphic novel.