Shashi Tharoor & Samir Saran
DR SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of nineteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and most recently, The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India and The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism. He was a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs Parliament’s Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT). He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians. He was given the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
DR SAMIR SARAN is the President of Observer Research Foundation, one of Asia’s most influential think tanks. He writes frequently on India’s foreign policy, and issues of global governance, climate change, energy policy, global development architecture, artificial intelligence, cyber security and internet governance. He is the author of four books, numerous academic papers, and is featured regularly in Indian and international print and broadcast media. He curates the Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship platform on geopolitics and geo-economics, and chairs CyFy, India’s annual conference on technology, security and society. He is also a Commissioner of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, member of the World Economic Forum’s South Asia advisory board and Global Future Council on Cybersecurity. He is the Director of the Centre for Peace and Security at the Sardar Patel Police University, Jodhpur, India.
Dr Saran completed his doctoral studies at the Global Sustainability Institute, UK. He holds a Master’s in Media Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India.
