Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande
Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande is a uniquely creative Hindustani classical vocalist who is widely respected for his contributions as a performer, composer, musicologist, scholar, researcher, author and guru. He is the son of the renowned musicologist Pt. Vamanrao Deshpande and senior disciple of Padmavibhushan Pt. Kumar Gandharva.
In 1983, Satyasheelji established the Samvaad Foundation at his residence in Mumbai. Here he created one of the largest and most valuable collections of Hindustani classical vocal music in India, a collection that continues to serve as an unrivalled source for the comparative study of this tradition. It was through this process that Satyasheelji’s unique, wide-ranging, eclectic and complex musical personality was forged. Satyasheelji is thus known today to be a performing musician with a rare understanding of diverse approaches to music making within the Hindustani tradition.
Satyasheelji has also sung for films, most famously in ‘Lekin’ with Smt. Asha Bhosle, for which he won the Best Playback Singer of the Year award. ‘Kahen’, one of his most popular albums, was published by the Master Deenanath Mangeshkar Foundation and launched by Bharat Ratna Lata Mangeshkar.
Satyasheelji has received many awards including the Homi Bhabha Fellowship 1996, the Kumar Gandharva Fellowship 1999, Sursingar Samsad’s Tansen award, the Raza award for creativity in 2006, the Vatsalabai Bhimsen Joshi award 2013 and, Kusumagraj Pratishthan’s Godavari Gaurav Puraskar, 2018. His Marathi book on his musical journey, Gaan Gunagaan, (Rajhans Prakashan, 2022) is already in its second edition, has become a bestseller, and has won the Lokmat Sahitya Puraskar 2023.
Anmol Vellani is the founder and former executive director of the India Foundation for the Arts, a nationwide grant-making organisation. He also helped to envision and set up Toto Funds the Arts, which supports emerging artists in India.
Earlier he was the Program Officer in the New Delhi Office of The Ford Foundation with responsibility for grant making in the performing arts, folklore and classical learning. He has served in an advisory capacity for government departments, civil society networks, international foundations and cultural organisations.
Anmol has been associated with nearly 50 theatre productions in English, Tamil and Hindi, as a director, actor and designer. In the last decade, he has turned his attention to adapting fiction for the stage and reworking existing plays for new contexts and concerns. He trains performing artists in such areas as voice, character building, the triggers for action and speech and script analysis.
His writing and talks—on arts entrepreneurship, the creative economy, cultural policy, the role of grant-making foundations, culture and development, arts collaboration and the performing arts, for example—have reflected on the insights he has gleaned from his long engagement with the arts and philanthropy.
Anmol Vellani
Shoba Narayan
Shoba Narayan is the author of six books. She has been a journalist and columnist for over 30 years, writing about health, relationships, travel, food and culture for global publications, winning a James Beard award and Pulitzer Fellowship. She has taught and lectured at universities in India (IIM-B and IISc) and abroad.
She founded and co-created two websites: Project LooM, about textiles traditions of India, and Jewels of India: about Indian jewellery. She is the host and anchor of Bird Podcast: about birds and nature. She has been a commentator on NPR and Radio New Zealand. She serves on the board of Industree Foundation, Neev Academy and Natya Institute of Kathak and Choreography. She enjoys wine, studies Jung and is a gadget geek.
Her lifelong mission is to get fit without exercising and lose weight without dieting.
Paula Mariwala is a well-known venture capitalist, who has been part of building the startup ecosystem in India since 2006. One of the first women VC in India, she is the founding partner at Aureolis Ventures, which invests in innovative companies focused on social or environmental impact.
She is the Founder/ President of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India, Managing Director of Seedfund Advisors and Director of the Hinditron Group. As an engaged philanthropist, she is deeply committed to the causes of education, environment, gender equality, human rights and the arts. Paula is a founding member of the Board of Management of Krea University and sits on management and advisory boards of companies and foundations.
Paula holds an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford University and BSc (Hons) in Physics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She lives in Mumbai with her family and enjoys painting, writing poetry, trekking, birding, supporting the arts and engaging with community and social issues.
Paula Mariwala
Swati Apte
Swati Apte has 25 years of experience across strategy consulting, leadership development, the social sector and the arts. Currently the Founder Director of The Arts Quotient, a leadership development firm, she started her career at McKinsey & Co in New York and has since worked in microfinance and education, etc.
Swati is Director of Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, a senior advisor to Educate Girls and the World Monuments Fund. Her areas of interest are education, urban revitalization, the arts and livelihoods and she works actively on organizational capacity-building with many social sector organisations in these domains.
She was part of the founding team of Junoon, which aimed to infuse the arts in public spaces, education, etc. She was also part of the founding team of SMART (Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre), a capacity building programme for theatrewallahs across India.
Anna Morcom is the Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. She studies music and dance in India and Tibet from diverse perspectives that seek to understand the contemporary world and processes of change.
Her research encompasses ethnographic and oral historical methods and traditional as well as popular musics. She is the author of Unity and discord: Music and politics in contemporary Tibet (2004, Tibet Information Network); Hindi film songs and the cinema (2007, Ashgate); and Illicit worlds of Indian dance: Cultures of exclusion (2013, Hurst and OUP, awarded the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Allan Merriam prize and the Marcia Herndon prize of SEM’s Gender and Sexualities section in 2014).
She has published articles and chapters in a range of peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. She made a VCD album of Tibetan songs with the singer Tanzin Gyatso in Tibet in 2006, entitled sPrin Gyi Metok (‘Cloud flowers’). She is currently working on a monograph on Hindustani music and two edited volumes: Creative economies of culture in South Asia: Craftspeople performers (Routledge, co-edited with Neelam Raina), and the Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology (OUP, co-edited with Timothy D. Taylor).
Anna Morcom
