INK2011: Power of the Journey

Anusha Ravi

Anusha Ravi is the CEO of Park Group of Institutions, Coimbatore and Chennai. Prior to this she worked with Onair communications (an Airbus subsidiary), and Annheuser Busch, USA. Anusha is an active Rotarian, and is also the president elect for 2010-11 for the all-women Rotary Club AAKRUTHI of Coimbatore. She is the trustee of ‘Aravanaippu’ which helps motherless or fatherless children with school and college fees. Till date 1000 children have benefited. The goal is to have 25,000 children benefit over next five to 10 years. She is also a member of the TED community, actively spreading new ideas to the world. She is also an organizing committee member of ASTIA.org which is a US-based organization entering India for facilitating venture capitalists for women entrepreneurs.

Abhay Deol

Indian film actor Abhay Deol, often hailed as a “thinking actor” in the Hindi movie circles, has appeared in popular films such as Dev D, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

Abhay is a self-described fan of “cinema that has the ‘real’ element”. He feels movies can be entertaining as well as socially conscious. He recently turned producer and hopes to make films that are relevant.

WEBSITE
www.facebook.com/AbhayDeol

Aisha Chaudhary

Seventeen year-old Aisha Chaudhary was born with an immune deficiency disorder and overcame a predicted life expectancy of only one year to have become an accomplished artist today. Despite a serious lung disease called Pulmonary Fibrosis, her persistent optimism, extraordinary maturity in the face of impossible odds, and calm perspective on life’s challenges have been an inspiration to many.

UPDATE: Aisha Chaudhary sadly passed away on the morning of January 24th, 2015 after battling an immune deficiency disorder and Pulmonary Fiborosis throughout her life.

Get Aisha’s book “My Little Epiphanies”

Alexander Tsiaras

Alexander is a renowned technologist, artist, journalist and author. As an artist and technologist, he has participated in developing scientific visualization software to enable him to “paint” the anatomy using volume data.

Alexander taught himself mathematics and physics and developed his own lenses, including one for a microscope that was used to photograph the first images of human eggs in an in vitro fertilization program. The images resulting from this became cover stories for Life Magazine.

UNTOLD STORY
At the age of 19, Alexander returned to his parents’ village and spent a year herding 2,000 goats from the Macedonia Albanian boarders down to his mother’s village near the base of Mount Olympus, where he remained to produce his first book, Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Later, he also trained for the Olympics in the 400 meter intending to run until the boycotts of the Moscow Olympics.

NEWEST ENDEAVORS
Alexander has started a new website called TheVisualMD.com where he is using real scanned data and his skills as an artist, story teller and technologist to tell visual stories of the marvels of how the human body is designed, when things go wrong and compellingly explain pathways back to health.

WORKS
Death Rituals of Rural Greece; From Conception to Birth; Architecture and Design of Man and Woman; Guide to Lifeblood; Guide to Sexual Health; Guide to a Healthy Heart; Body Voyage

Anousheh Ansari

On September 18, 2006, Anousheh Ansari captured headlines as the first female private space explorer travelling to and staying onboard of International Space Station. Back on Earth, as a successful serial entrepreneur, Anousheh returned to her job as co-founder and chairman of her latest technology company, Prodea Systems.

In her previous endeavor, she had served as co-founder, CEO and chairman of the board for Telecom Technologies, Inc. An active proponent of world-changing technologies and social entrepreneurship, in 2004 Anousheh and her family provided the title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Currently Anousheh works to enable social entrepreneurs to bring about radical change globally, with organizations such as ASHOKA and X-PRIZE

Anupam Mishra

A Gandhian and an environmental activist, the late Anupam Mishra is among the most knowledgeable persons in India on traditional water harvesting systems. He has travelled to various part of the country, especially Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, visiting various water harvesting systems managed by people.

He has also interacted with grassroot-level water harvesters, inspired and supported them and helped them in their traditional water harvesting systems campaign. He has written two books on traditional tank management in India and various traditional water harvesting systems in Rajasthan titled Aaj bhi khare hai talab and Rajasthan ki rajat boonde. Mishra continued to travel to different parts of the country, while keeping in touch with grassroot-level water harvesters and NGOs and inspiring them. The mission of the Gandhi Peace Foundation is to promote the environmental activities of rural development agencies; to prepare survey reports on distressed areas and place them before concerned authorities; to disseminate environmental information through the publication of up-to-date reports on environmental issues; to organise workshops and seminars for environmental experts, policy makers, individuals and organisations engaged in environmental issues.

WORKS
Rajasthan ki rajat boonden (The Radiant Raindrops of Rajasthan); Aaj bhi khare hai talab (Ponds are still relevant)

Babar Ali

Named the ‘youngest headmaster in the world’ by BBC in October 2009, at the age of 16. Babar Ali is an Indian student and teacher from Murshidabad, West Bengal. He started a school, Ananada Siksha Niketan – Home of joyful learning, in his backyard when he was just 9-years-old, now with 300 regular students. It is an outdoor school and counts a total of 10 teaching and non-teaching staff who are providing their voluntary service. There are no tuition fees, thus making it affordable for the poor in this economically deprived area and thereby helping increase literacy rate there.

In 2009, Babar Ali won a prize from the program Real Heroes of the Indian English news channel CNN IBN for his work and was awarded the NDTV ‘Indian of the Year’ award. His story became a part of the syllabus for the CBSE 10th standard English textbook, PUC English textbook for Govt. of Karnataka, and also in a curriculum in Luxembourg, Europe. He was featured on Aamir Khan’s TV show Satyamev Jayate in July 2012

Gokul Chandra Das

Gokul Chandra Das is a dhak (a traditional percussion instrument from Bengal played during religious festivals) player whose music is an amalgamation of classical and folk. Gokul Das was the first dhaki to play at the Hollywood Bowl. Gokul Chandra Das is one of the few dhakis, if not the only one, to take the dhak mainstream and introduce this regional instrument and art to the world. Das comes from a traditional ‘Dhaki’ family.

Raghava KK

Raghava KK is a renowned Indian artist and a tech entrepreneur, named by CNN as one of 10 most remarkable people in 2010.

He was inducted into the National Geographic Society as an Emerging Explorer for bringing together science, art, and technology in the field of exploration in 2013 and he recently wrote the foreword for Mass General Hospital’s textbook on psychiatry, in which he discusses the importance of cultural sensitivity, perspectives, and empathy in psychiatry

A four time TED speaker, his iPad art book Pop-it, launched at TED, shakes up the concept of the ideal family and presents children with multiple perspectives at the earliest stage. The book won several awards, including a Best of 2011 award from Kirkus.

Currently, he is the CEO and co-founder of Flipsicle, a tech startup out of New York and Sweden, which brings together creativity, technology, and empathy.

UNTOLD STORY: As a school kid, Raghava used to perform magic shows at children’s birthday parties to earn pocket money.

Shantanu Moitra

Folk music is rapidly disappearing from mainstream music, but never fear! Shantanu Moitra is a man on a mission to save folk musical traditions. Shantanu is a renowned Indian music composer and restorationist. With a father as an accomplished sarod player and his mother as a talented artist, creativity naturally runs through his veins. He has worked on many landmark Bollywood films, including “Parineeta”, “3 Idiots”, and “Madras Cafe”.

In 2014, he received the National Film Award for Best Music Direction (Background Score) for Na Bangaaru Talli. With his compositions and exploration of lost musical traditions, Shantanu constantly contributes to what he strongly believes is the best way to “see” a country — by experiencing its music

Alexander Asseily

Alexander Asseily is founder and Executive Chairman of London startup State, a global opinion network. Alexander was founder CEO of Jawbone (Aliph) and continues to serve as Chairman.

Alexander was born to an Anglo-Russian mother and a Lebanese father. His parents relocated permanently from Beirut to London in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and Alexander completed his schooling in England before attending Stanford University in California. At Stanford, he received a BSc. in Product Design and a MSc. in Mechanical Engineering, where he focused on user-centered design & engineering.

In 1998 Alexander founded San Francisco consumer technology company Jawbone (aka Aliph) with Hosain Rahman and continues to serve as its Chairman. As Jawbone’s founding CEO, Alexander directed the development of Jawbone’s core products and built the defense business with DARPA. In 2004 he launched the first Jawbone headset to critical acclaim, followed by the industry-changing Jawbone Bluetooth headset in 2006. Today, Jawbone is the world leader in mobile lifestyle products including Jawbone Icon & Era headsets, the Jambox speaker and UP personal health solutions. Jawbone is one of the most highly valued private consumer electronics companies in the world, with approximately 100,000 points of sale globally.

In 2010 Alexander returned to London to create State with his brother Mark Asseily. State is a global opinion network founded on equitable principles; a platform for people anywhere to get counted for their opinions and connect to the world instantly through them.

Alexander advises a number of startup technology companies and charitable organizations in the US and Europe and has produced two short documentaries on forgiveness & conflict resolution in the Mideast.

He owns a bicycle and some mediocre artwork.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: I’ve spent a decade at Jawbone creating products that radically improve the experience of communications. But while the web has liberated data access, the nature of these communications has not radically changed: our cultural and political programming is still in tact because media and governments can’t accurately render the reality of our views. The discovery of shared values, of like-minded people and of humanity in our ‘enemies’ is limited by the richness of the information that is shared. A nomadic lifestyle taught me there is far more that unites communities in the world than divides them – all we need is a safe, neutral space to share and explore ideas. So I took the leap from Jawbone to create State: a way to voice your opinion on anything, large or small, and to see what the world is thinking at any moment.

WORKS: Alex has produced two short documentaries on forgiveness & conflict resolution in the Middle East. He is also executive producer of ALUNA, a feature length documentary on the respected indigenous Kogi of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, due for release in 2012.

WEBSITE: jawbone.com; http://state.it

Amar Sen

Amar Sen’s devotion to the arts has brought him fame for various specializations at different stages in his life; now the world knows him for a number of things including but not limited to singing, acting, magic, graphic arts, poetry and obviously his pet art, handShadowGraphy. The field of performance knows him better for his hardcore professionalism at whatever he does.

WEBSITE: AmarSen.com; www.handshadowgraphy.com/amazing_duo.html

Amish Tripathi

Described as the ‘Paulo Coelho of the East’ by Business World and a ‘People’s author like Jeffrey Archer’ by The Telegraph, Amish’s unique combination of crackling story-telling, religious symbolism and profound philosophies have made him an overnight publishing phenomenon.

Released in March 2010, Amish’s Shiva Trilogy (of which two books, The Immortals of Meluha and The Secret of the Nagas have been published) has over 350,000 copies in print. Amish is a graduate of IIM-Calcutta and worked for 14 years in the financial services industry before turning to full time writing.

WORKS
The Immortals of Meluha; The Secret of the Nagas

WEBSITE
www.shivatrilogy.com ; www.twitter.com/amisht

Anand Agarawala

Anand Agarawala is an entrepreneur and product designer.

He created BumpTop, an innovative 3D desktop user interface powered by physics and multi-touch gestures inspired by real desks and driven by a more expressive, human vision for computing. BumpTop was Anand’s Masters thesis in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto. It became a viral hit on YouTube and as Founder/CEO built a venture-backed startup company around it. Google recently acquired BumpTop and Anand is now Product Manager of Android System UI, trying to dream up the next big user interface ideas. Anand loves to help early-stage entrepreneurs and has become an advisor and investor to startups such as Qwiki, Glooko and Tagstand. He speaks on entrepreneurship and user interfaces around the world from Tokyo to TED. He was named to BusinessWeek’s Top Tech Entrepreneurs list and has been featured in various press (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Le Monde, Forbes).

Anu Aga

Anu Aga is on the Board of Thermax Limited, the leading Indian player in energy and environment management. She retired as Chairperson of the company in October, 2004. The Government of India conferred her with the Padma Shri Award for her distinguished service in the field of social work in 2010.

Aga has been very active in various national and local associations like Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and had served as the Chairperson of CII’s Western Region. She has written extensively and given talks on the subjects of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, role of women and education.

Aga is the Chairperson of the Thermax Social Initiative Foundation (TSIF) which runs the CSR activities of Thermax. Along with Akanksha, TSIF has signed a MOU to support three municipal schools in Pune. She is also closely associated with the Teach for India Initiative which attempts bridging the inequity gap in education. She is keenly involved in the causes of communal harmony and human rights, especially women and children.

Arunachalam Muruganantham

Arunachalam Muruganantham of Jayaashree Industries designed, created, tested and implemented a sanitary napkin-making machine that operates on a small scale.

Contrary to a large-scale production model which requires Rs.3.5 Crores as initial investment, Jayaashree Industries sanitary napkin-making machine can be made available to a buyer for approximately Rs.65,000. This allows smaller players to adopt the business model propagated by him, and thus generates more employment and wealth in the most neglected sections of society. More specifically, an empowerment forum – such as a Self Help Group or a women’s group – can invest in a sanitary napkin-making unit to create a business that employs up to ten women. The new invention is capable of making 120 napkins per hour.

Overall, the Jayaashree Industries model helps offer livelihood, hygiene, dignity and empowerment to underprivileged women all over the world. And it does so using a sustainable business framework.

WEBSITE: newinventions.in

Ayesha Khanna

Ayesha Khanna is Founder and Director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a research and advisory think tank focused on the intersection of technology trends, data intelligence and geopolitics.

A technology and innovation strategy expert, Ayesha has over ten years of experience advising clients on scenario analysis, new product development, market entry, digital branding and customer experience. Her clients have included Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, American International Group, and Deutsche Bank. Ayesha is frequently interviewed in the media and was recently featured by the New York Times. She is a regular speaker at industry, marketing, and academic conferences related to emerging technology trends and intelligent cities.

Ayesha is the author of Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and was series editor of The Complete Technology Guides published by Reed Elsevier. She has also written for diverse publications such as BusinessWeek, TIME, Newsweek, Forbes, Strategy+Business, and Foreign Policy. She also blogs on human technology co-evolution at Big Think.

Ayesha is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and one of the organizers of TEDxGotham. In 2010, she co-chaired the Innovation Advisory Board for the New York City congressional campaign of Reshma Saujani.

Ayesha has a BA (honors) in Economics from Harvard University, an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University and is writing her PhD in Information Systems and Innovation at the London School of Economics.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
My journey started in villages in Lahore doing micro-finance and jails in Rawalpindi advocating for women’s rights. But after college, I took a sharp turn and became deeply immersed in technology and innovation strategy on Wall Street for many years. A life-long city dweller, I expanded my work from finance to entire cities, seeing the potential of how city-wide technology platforms could give citizens better government services and access to education, healthcare and information. But the path is riddled with the challenges familiar to me from my days in development economics: the need to protect civil rights, privacy, justice and equitable access. As cities become the center of all human activity in the early 21st century and countries rush to add urban intelligence to their crumbling infrastructures, one must tread surely but carefully towards technology-enabled �smart cities�.

WORKS
Straight Through Processing (Reed Elsevier, 2007), and was series editor of The Complete Technology Guides published by Reed Elsevier.

WEBSITE
ayeshakhanna.com

Bedri Baykam

One of the most internationally well-known Turkish artists, Bedri Baykam was born in 1957, in Ankara. His father Dr. Suphi Baykam was a famous deputy in the Turkish parliament and his mother Mutahhar Baykam an architect-engineer. He started to paint when he was only two years old, and has had several exhibitions since the age of six in Bern, Geneva, New York, Washington, London, Rome, Munich, Stockholm, etc. during his childhood years, when he was known as a child prodigy, (wunderkind) throughout the world. Baykam also won prestigious titles as a tennis player throughout the 70s at Turkish Championships.

He studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1975 to 1980 and got an MBA degree. During this time, he also studied drama in L’Actorat, Paris. He lived in California during the years 1980-1987, studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, in Oakland between (1980-1983). He had several shows in New York, California and Europe in the 80’s. He returned to Turkey in 1987 and has been living in Istanbul since.

He has had 117 one-man-shows in various countries in addition to participating in numerous group shows. One of his most well-known books, Monkey’s Right to Paint, brings to light the rights of non-western artists and severely criticizes the one sided prejudiced attitude of the western art establishment that keeps building a one sided, all western art-history. Baykam is also the writer of a controversial bestseller The Bone, published in December 2000. A turn of the Century novel around sex, death, philosophy, technology and spying, The Bone predicted the events of September 11, ten months before it happened in full details!

Baykam is one of the pioneers of the New-Expressionism movement and of multi-media and photo-painting oriented political art as well as “4-D lenticular works that he has been exhibiting worldwide in the last five years. Since the beginning of the 80’s, he directed several 16 mm. films and has acted in several parts in feature films in Turkey as an actor. He is the author of 23 books.

Baykam has been working actively for several institutions as a political activist, taking the defense of Turkey as a secular democratic country respecting fully human rights. He has been one of the main spokesmen of the Kemalist movement in the last decades, and has been writing in the leftist-democratic daily Cumhuriyet. He is one of the central characters of the tormented Turkish intellectual and political milieu since the 80’s. Besides being a political activist struggling for democracy, human rights and peace, Baykam was a candidate for the Presidency of the Turkish social-democrat Party CHP in 2003 after being a Party Assembly Member in the 90’s.

Baykam is the founder of the production and publishing company Piramid and Piramid Art Center. Located in the heart of Istanbul, Piramid hosts several shows and daring panel discussions year round.

He married journalist Sibel (Yagci) Baykam in 1997, and they had Suphi, their son, in January 1999.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: This year at the General Assembly of world art associations in Guadalajara, as the Turkish Committee we suggested that Leonardo’s birthday became “world art day”. It was accepted unanimously. Coming back from Mexico, we celebrated that enthusiastically. A week later, I was attacked and stabbed on April 18… I almost died and the killer missed my main blood artery by two milimetera. My surgeon had miraculously befriended me a month ago at the LA Airport and he happened to save my life! He said, “This is your second birthday”. It did change the way I look at daily life and even the hours in a day.

WEBSITES: www.piramidsanat.com

WORKS: The Brain of Paint, 1990; Monkey’s Right to Paint, 1994; May 27 Was Our First Love, 1994; Mustafa Kemals on Duty Now, 1994; Turkey Without Concession, 1995; His Eyes Rest Always on Us, 1997; The Years of 68, The Revolutionaries, 1998; The Years of 68, The witnesses, 1999; Che the Condottiere of the Millenium, 2000; The Bone, 2000; When the army Plays Chess, 2001; Oh Wish They Made Ilhan Play, 2002; End to the Empire of Fear, 2003; The Bridge of Kemalism to the New Century, 2004; On the roud to Teheran with a European Ticket, 2007; Democratic Revolution at the CHP, 2010; No to Civil Dictatorship, 2010.

Bhavik Gandhi

In 2007, Bhavik rowed single handed across the Atlantic, from Spain to the Caribbean island of Antigua, spending an106 days alone at sea in a 23 ft rowing boat. It was an epic 5000 km voyage which began with the battle to leave land resulting in 3 failed attempts and 2 years of preparation. It was a journey that sometimes became a living hell, stretching his mind to the breaking point as he deals with with gale force conditions, water leaks, a broken rudder, an Atlantic hurricane season, sharks, extreme isolation, sleep deprivation, muscle fatigue, a near collision with tankers, and finally a capsize.

Pushed physically, psychologically and emotionally to the limit, Bhavik survived without food rations for 2 weeks, lost the few clothes he had, hallucinated, wept, fought fear, grew a beard and nursed blisters while discovering to focus more on the beauty of the ocean and less on the hardship. Bhavik demonstrates that sometimes although a record may have been the objective, the experience gained through seeking that record becomes the reward.

Bhavik’s overwhelming positivity and ‘go for it’ attitude are contagious. Often very emotive, he shares his highs and lows, personal battles and victories, to help illustrate in a very human way that we are all capable of the extraordinary. His philosophy of ongoing personal growth will inspire his audiences to aspire, achieve and advance towards their goals both individually and collectively.

Bhavik is one of the rising sporting personalities in Endurance Sports. His other achievements in endurance include:
Cycling solo 3000 km across Europe, from Stockholm to Istanbul and a 9000 km treck across Eurasia from Helsinki to Hongkong, thru Siberia and Mongolia in the winter. He is one of the elite few athletes in the world who have ever crossed an ocean and a continent under human power and was voted amongst the ‘Top 5’ sports personalities of the Year 2007 by Outside Magazine.

�Although a record may have been the objective, the experience gained through seeking that record becomes the reward.�

WEBSITE: www.bhavik.com

Chris Meyer

Chris Meyer’s mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as an entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and the leader of a think tank.

Chris has created new capabilities for each of the organizations he has served. He founded Monitor Networks, a Monitor Group company, and was Chief Executive from 2004 to 2009, when he became Founder of Monitor Talent. Prior to joining Monitor Group, he was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business. Earlier, he was a Vice President and Group Head at Mercer Management Consulting (Now Oliver Wyman), where from 1984 to 1995 he founded and built the firm�s practice in the information industries, comprising telecommunications, hardware, software, and information services and media. And at Data Resources, an econometrics-based consulting firm, Chris developed the product offering for financial institutions.

Chris has published three books about adaptive enterprise and network-based innovation, including the BusinessWeek Best Seller Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, Future Wealth – the book on which Monitor Talent is based, and It�s Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business. He blogs on the Harvard Business Review site, and has contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. Chris’s fourth book, Standing on the Sun, will be published by Harvard Business School Press in January, 2012.

Chris holds BAs in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School. In addition, he held a University Predoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He attended Dalton, in New York City, and The Hotchkiss School.

He serves on the Boards of Icosystem, the Bankinter Foundation for Innovation, the Business Innovation Factory, and the New Rep Theater, and the Advisory Boards of Innocentive and LaunchCyte.

Chris lives in Boston with his wife, Mary, and has one Spanish- and Arabic-speaking musical daughter, at an undisclosed location.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: Every second year for the past 25, my father, my sister’s family, and my family have taken literal journeys, traveling together somewhere in the world for two to four weeks. This has created a kind of flip book, snapshots of the family as my niece grew up enough to bring a friend, then a boy friend, then my father died, then my daughter began bringing friends, my brother in law began aging.

The real journey has been in watching relationships change and seeing them in the context of individual growth and family evolution.

WEBSITE: www.christophermeyer.com

INTERESTING FACTS: I played baseball for my high school and college teams. I have a mad crush on linear algebra.

And I think the following story contains important wisdom: On my first trip to Beijing I was shown around by the son of a business colleague, a bi-cultural Chinese who had grown up in California. On our way to the Great Wall, we passed a gated community of enormous Tudor-style houses–they’d have cost $2 million. I asked him how this could be in a Communist country, and he replied: “In China, we’re very pragmatic. If it works, we call it Communism and move on.”

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, is one of my favorite plays. Stoppard manages to make an engrossing, entertaining drama out of an explanation of complexity theory, and includes a statement that I often affirm: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

I try to look for weak signals that things we believe are no longer valid and imagine what might have caused them and what could result.

I live in Boston with my wife, a consultant to NGOs. My daughter, a recent University of Chicago graduate, is looking for work with a social justice NGO in Cairo.

Claire Kremen

Claire Kremen is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley, and an Associate Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. She is an ecologist and conservation biologist whose work focuses on understanding and characterizing the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services, and utilizing this information to develop conservation and sustainable management plans, considering both protected areas and the working lands matrix around them.

Claire’s current research focuses on exploring the ecological, social and economic benefits, costs and barriers to adoption of diversified farming systems, and on restoring pollination and pest control services in intensively farmed landscapes, using both predictive modeling and field studies. Her work reaches from theory to practice and includes hands-on conservation action such as, for example, the design and establishment of one of Madagascar’s largest national parks within an integrated conservation-development framework. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2007 for her contributions to ecology, agriculture and biodiversity. She is a scientific advisor for several conservation organizations and sits on the Editorial Boards of Conservation Letters and the Quarterly Review of Biology.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
In high school I wanted to solve the world hunger problem. A counselor urged me to train in basic sciences.. so I studied biology, but ended up far from my original goal, studying developmental evolution. But then an epiphany! It’s futile to unravel the miracles of evolution through science, when the fabric of life itself is unraveling. I abruptly changed course, to conserving biodiversity by establishing parks in Madagascar. However – we also need to live sustainably around those parks. 20 years later I am doing what I first set out to do – looking for a sustainable solution to world hunger.

WEBSITE
http://nature.berkeley.edu/kremenlab/index.html

Dibakar Banerjee

Dibakar Banerjee is a National Film Award winning filmmaker, best known for films like Khosla ka Ghosla and Love, Sex aur Dhokha. The films went on to receive not just accolades for him but brought him in the list of new filmmakers who were bringing about a marked shift in Bollywood themes, which typically focuses on stories and characters from in and around Bombay.

WEBSITE
twitter.com/DibakarBanerjee

Drumjam: Roberto Narain & Vasundhara Das

Drumjam, the pioneer of interactive rhythm-based activities in India, and the record holder for the largest drum circles in the country, has introduced over 450,000 people to the joys of group drumming.

The benefits of group drumming are varied. Drumjams are a highly effective form of stress release, and bring people closer together. Barriers to communication are broken down, and interpersonal relationships improve. Participants discover their creative and musical potential. Drumjams are energizing, inspiring and fun.

DRUMJAM activities can be geared to a variety of purposes to suit specific needs, from corporate to community and children to adults.

The Drumjam team is headed by Roberto Narain, whose talent and experience as a drummer is complemented by his advanced training in drum circle facilitation and strong people skills. Trained by the founder of the World Drum Circle Movement, Arthur Hull, Roberto has facilitated programmes for many of the country’s best-known corporate houses and is one of India’s leading trained corporate drum circle facilitators.

Roberto’s musical credentials are impressive. He has been playing the drums for close to thirty years now and has performed in a variety of styles on stages across India and the world. Roberto has worked with musicians such as L. Subramaniam and his Carnatic music studies with T.A.S. Mani of the Karnataka College of Percussion have added depth and richness to his drumming. From Heavy Metal, Jazz, Fusion to Electronica, his performances on the Acoustic and Virtual Drums have given audiences a chance to experience the delights of textual drumming enhanced by eye-catching visuals.

Drumjam’s co-founder, Vasundhara Das is a singer, songwriter, composer and actress. She has starred in several films in various languages, and has worked extensively as a playback singer in Bollywood, as well as in South Indian regional language films. Vasundhara is also a qualified drum circle facilitator, having trained with Arthur Hull. She spearheads Drumjam’s community and children’s programmes.

Vasundhara Das is a dynamic stage performer, with her band. She is one of the most popular performing stars in India, and has entertained delighted audiences at a variety of events on a global scale. Vasundhara’s current focus is on music composition, and she creates original sound tracks for films as well as working on collaborative music projects.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
What you see or hear is not what you get. With Drumjam, the medium is music, toned down to just drumming and the life force of all things living, your heart beat as well as your voice. The two most primitive of instruments know to mankind. To make music go beyond the traditional format and perception of musicians and non-musicians.

This is about the essence of true human expression and celebration. To believe, to do, to express, communicate, and connect with each other as well as celebrate life and living as long as the heart beats.

WEBSITE
www.drumjam.in

Elliot Goldenthal

Composer Elliot Goldenthal creates works for orchestra, theater, opera, ballet and film. Most recently he scored Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren. In 2003, he was honored with the Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the score to Taymor’s film Frida. Goldenthal was nominated for his third Grammy Award for co-producing the platinum soundtrack album for Across the Universewhich featured 35 Beatles songs, he also composed the original score for the film.

In 2006, Elliot’s original two-act opera Grendel, directed by Julie Taymor, premiered at the Los Angeles Opera. The opera had its east coast debut as the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York, and was added to the Los Angeles Opera’s permanent repertoire. Elliot was named one of the two finalists for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in music for his work on Grendel.

Elliot’s large-scale symphonic piece, Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio, was commissioned by the Pacific Symphony to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. It was released in 1996 on Sony Classical Records and featured soloist Yo-Yo Ma. Fire Water Paper debuted at the Pacific Symphony and was later performed at Carnegie Hall and at The Kennedy Center, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Goldenthal was commissioned by the American Ballet Theatre to compose a three-act ballet of Othello, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in May 1997. Othello was co-produced by the ABT in partnership with the San Francisco Ballet and was choreographed by Lar Lubovitch. In June 2003, PBS’s series Great Performances broadcast a two-hour special of Othello, filmed with the San Francisco Ballet and Goldenthal’s original score was nominated for an Emmy Award. To date, Othello has been performed at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Kennedy Center, Den Norske Opera & Ballett in Oslo and the Opéra National de Paris in Paris. In October 2009, the Joffrey Ballet showcased Othello in nine performances in Chicago.

Elora Hardy

Having spent the first fourteen years of her life in Bali and the following fourteen in the United States, Elora left her position as the sole print designer at Donna Karan International in New York, returning to Bali to found Ibuku, an international design/build team providing fully functional homes and furniture made from natural substances allowing the occupants to live in an authentic relationship with nature. Her key realization was that with the right nurturing, Asia’s creative minds, skilled hands,growing global perspective and unique natural materials will provide the force for positive change in our global future.

GBS Bindra

GBS Bindra, Global Director of Innovation at Logica, is responsible for driving Logica�s innovation and new business models. He has been working as an innovator for more than 20 years, leading design teams to create new products and services that leverage technology to improve business outcomes. He is also a committed community leader and a vocal advocate of children and women�s education in underprivileged societies.

WEBSITE
twitter.com/gbsbindra; www.logica.com

Harpal Singh

The Mentor and Chairman Emeritus of one of India�s leading hospital chains, Fortis Healthcare, Harpal Singh is also the Founder Chairman of the Nanhi Chhaan Foundation, an initiative in support of the girl child and the environment. Harpal is also currently the Chairman of the Save the Children, India. He has chaired the second and third India Health Summit and delivered the prestigious �Friday Lecture� at the Royal Institute of Great Britain on Integrating Global Healthcare.

WEBSITE
www.nanhichhaan.com

Itay Talgam

Itay Talgam worked as a conductor with some of the world’s best musical ensembles and orchestras and assisted great Maestri such as Leonard Bernstein and Claudio Abbado.

As a native Israeli, he studied at the music academy of Jerusalem and Philosophy at the Hebrew University. Later he continued his studies in Italy and the United States.

Talgam’s unique approach to the understanding of music-making and conducting as a metaphor for leadership, communication and relationships, made him a desired keynote speaker in many of the most significant global conferences, including Google’s Zeitgeist, TED Global and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Besides his keynote speeches Talgam works with many organizations, universities and governmental institutes all around the world, incorporating workshop elements and live chamber music, and, in some events, conducting symphony orchestras.

MAESTRO PROGRAM The “Maestro programs” were founded on the belief that, in the orchestra as in the work place, music has the power to create community and reinforce shared values. Music embodies knowledge and innovation, individual effort and collective achievement, and offers a work-environment that is full of opportunities for excellence and self-actualization – same as in any successful business. These programs, based on continuous dialogue and active participation, offer a unique learning experience that explores relations between conductors, players and audiences to achieve inspiring new insights into leadership, management, and teamwork.

Internationally renowned conductor Itay Talgam turned to developing these programs when he observed how the elements essential in achieving excellent orchestral performances could be transformed into powerful metaphors for the corporate world.

Since 1996, the “Maestro programs” have been successfully employed across a wide spectrum of local, International and multi-national companies, including Intel, Apple, Google, Motorola, Philips, HSBC, ING, Credit Suisse, Accenture, McKinsey, KPMG, PwC, WPP, Orange, Stanford University, Cambridge University, and many Governmental organizations and NGOs all over the world.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: As a young person, I often experienced the transformational power of music, listening to my beloved Brahms or Beethoven. That made me want to conduct, to have direct access to ‘the force’. But as a conductor I often sensed a strange discrepancy between the nature my own experience and that of my players: even when we joyfully shared the interpretation, their engagement in the music was different then mine. Having to physically create the sound while infusing it with spirit, they knew the secret lies in balancing control and ‘letting go’. I am still learning today how these two faces of creative work are best combined, working with different groups of professionals, in music and in other fields, in search for ways leading to magical infusion.

WEBSITE: www.talgam.com

John Mathew

Having completed doctorates in Ecology at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia (2003), and in the History of Science at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2011), John Mathew is currently lecturing a freshman seminar on Science, History and Theatre at the latter. He hails from Kerala and remains an Indian national although he has spent significant periods in Iraq, Jordan, Libya, the United States of America, France and England. He obtained his Bachelors, Masters, and M.Phil. degrees in Zoology at the Madras Christian College, Tambaram, Madras (now Chennai). He also holds a Masters in Medical Anthropology from Harvard and has benefited from many scholarships in his educational journey, including the French Governmental Bourse Chateaubriand, the Harvard Sheldon and Krupp, and the Harvard Academy fellowships.

Blurring lines between the curricular and co-curricular, John co-founded the Scrub Society, the Madras Christian College�s environmental organisation in 1990 (still extant 21 years later) and served as the Secretary (1990-1992) of the Students� Sea Turtle Conservation Network in Madras that ran an active hatchery for olive Ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) sea turtles.

John is also an avid theatre enthusiast. His association with drama began at eight in Libya playing an angel in a Christmas pageant. He proceeded to perform regularly on stage at school and college, winning the prize for best actor, and with his co-cast and crew, best performed play at one of the largest collegiate cultural competitions in India in 1992, Oasis at BITS, Pilani, Rajasthan. In 1994, his musical on sea-turtles, Olive was performed for over 3, 500 people at the prestigious Music Academy, Madras (Chennai). In 1995, his effort, Grave Affairs won best play in the category ‘English as a second language’, for a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) international radio-drama contest and was broadcast worldwide the following year. Grave Affairs was adapted to stage and premiered at Harvard in 2001. That same year, John co-founded SAATh (South Asian American Theatre) with Tara Deshpande (a Bollywood actress) and Sudipto Chatterjee (a drama professor then at Tufts University), the first South Asian theatre company in Boston, and served as its Artistic Director from August 2002 to August 2007. Apart from Olive and another musical, B Minor Blue, John has written five full-length plays and four short plays and co-scripted a street-play. Recently, he won the Calcutta (Kolkata) based Oxford Bookstore e-author prize for best novel (2008) in an all-India competition for his manuscript Origins and Descents.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Travelling in a traditionally hostile neighbouring land, I countenanced my most different, challenging and memorable trip anywhere. Pakistan was extraordinary. There were lathi-charges avoided at the Wagah border, receptions at Lahore airport by machine-gun wielding security guards, deflected bribery in Karachi, feudal familial fiefdoms with an army of domestic helpers, an assumed other national identity (Sri Lankan) to see Mohenjodaro of the Indus Valley Civilisation, and through it all, there was the countenancing of such unstinting hospitality, laughter in the cracks, and in the dust of little bus-by villages, the sheer pleasure of dances in the now.

WORKS
Though They Be Red (New York: Playscripts Inc. 2003)

OTHER
Whilst at college in Madras, 16 species of snake went through my room (actively procured from the 373 acre campus). One of them (a baby cobra) bit me once through my mother�s sent kitchen gloves, and four hours later, sans anti-venom (among the most foolhardy decisions I made) and through a cytology lab experiment, I survived, relatively unscathed, to tell the tale. Unfortunately for the cobra, it didn�t, perishing of unknown causes two days later.

John Frame

John Frame has been making sculpture in the Southern California area of the United States since the early 1980s; his work has been exhibited extensively in the US as well as in Europe, Japan, and Taiwan. From the beginning of his career, he has undertaken an in-depth exploration of the human condition. Those who review Frame’s work frequently suggest that its appeal lies in his propensity to probe the deep questions of life without arriving at easy answers. One critic captures this tension thus: �In Frame’s work the meaning eludes us while the search for meaning captivates us.�

John twice has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and received the New Talent Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1995 he was awarded the J. Paul Getty Museum�s Individual Artist Fellowship. He received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle in 2009.

A survey of the artist�s work was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1992. In 2005 the Long Beach Museum of Art organized a retrospective exhibition, �Enigma Variations: The Sculpture of John Frame, 1980 to 2005.� In 2011 the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, California, mounted a major exhibition, �Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame� The exhibition consisted of more than thirty-five pieces of sculpture, a theatrical stage, multiple sets and a short animated film using the artist�s works that had been specifically designed for that purpose. Frame also created the score for the film.

His work can be found in more than 300 public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the Renwick Gallery of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Southern California. In 2011 he was invited to guest curate an exhibition of rarely seen works by William Blake at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Frame has been artist in residence, visiting artist, or guest lecturer at more than 50 museums, universities, and art-related institutions around the United States. He has also taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and at the Claremont Graduate University. He lives and works in Wrightwood, California.

In the year 2000, after working for more than twenty years as a successful sculptor, I found that I had arrived at what appeared to be the end of my exploration of my chosen territory. After five years of failed attempts to find my way into the next phase of my work, I finally gave up completely and hopelessly. Almost immediately, I was awakened in the middle of the night with a vision of a vast world complete with multiple characters, scenes and a complete �Tale.� My journey since that day has been to bring that world into this.

WORKS
Films: “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale” , 2011; “Happy Medium” Film, 2011
Books: Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame, published by the University of California Press and the Huntington Press in 2011; EnigmaVariations: The Sculpture of John Frame, 1980-2005 published by the Long Beach Museum in 2005

WEBSITE
www.JohnFrameSculpture.com

John Hardy

Jewelry designer John Hardy co-founded the extraordinary Green School in Bali, where kids get a holistic and green education. At the Green School, students learn in open-air classrooms surrounded by acres of gardens that they tend; they learn to build with bamboo; and meanwhile they’re being prepared for traditional British school exams. The centerpiece of the campus is the spiraling Heart of School, which may be called Asia’s largest bamboo building.

WEBSITE
www.greenschool.org

Joi

Joi is a contemporary music band that mixes the sounds of rock, soul, folk and worldbeat. Their debut album, Joi – Looking out of the Window, was released December 21, 2010. Group members include Joi Barua, Pawan Rasaily, Ibson Lal Baruah, Manas Chowdhary and Partho Goswami. Their lead singer, Joi Barua, was an INK2010 Fellow and returns this year with his band to bring down the house at INK2011.

WEBSITE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_Barua

Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor is an American film, opera and theater director.

Her most recent film, The Tempest, stars Helen Mirren as Prosepra (2010). Taymor’s previous film, Across The Universe, a re-imagining of 35 Beatles songs starring Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgess, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Musical/Comedy (2008). Her film, Frida (2002), starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina, earned six Academy Award nominations and won two. In 1999, Taymor made her feature film directorial debut with Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. The hour-long Fool’s Fire, which she both directed and adapted from an Edgar Allan Poe short story, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on PBS (1992).

Taymor is best known for her direction of The Lion King on Broadway (1997), which has presented in over a dozen countries worldwide and opens in Madrid in 2011. The Lion King garnered Taymor two Tony Awards: for best direction of a musical (making her the first woman to receive this award), and for her original costume designs, among numerous other awards. Her many other theater productions include Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird on Broadway (2000); an original visual music-theater work, Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, presented at Lincoln Center (1996) which received five Tony nominations including best director, and numerous Shakespeare plays. Most recently, Taymor directed Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark on Broadway with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge.

Taymor’s many opera directions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, currently in the repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City; Oedipus Rex which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Jury Award at the Montreal Festival of Films on Art and an Emmy; The Flying Dutchman for the Los Angeles Music Center in a co-production with the Houston Grand Opera; and Salomé for the Kirov Opera in Russia, Germany, and Israel. Most recently, Taymor directed an original opera, Grendel, based on James Gardner’s darkly comic retelling of the Beowulf tale. Composed by Elliot Goldenthal and co-commissioned by The Los Angeles Opera and New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, the opera was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer (2006).

Taymor graduated from Oberlin in 1974 Phi Beta Kappa and was presented with a Watson traveling fellowship, allowing her to travel to Japan and Indonesia (1975-79). In Indonesia, she developed a mask/dance company, Teatr Loh, which toured throughout Indonesia with two original productions, WAY OF SNOW and TIRAI (subsequently performed in the United States).

In addition to her two Tony awards, she has also received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, the first Annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theater, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Award.

WORKS: An illustrated book on her career, Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire, was recently expanded and revised by Harry N. Abrams. Her book, The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway, is published by Hyperion. Taymor’s adapted screenplay for TITUS is published in an illustrated book by Newmarket Press. An illustrated book, Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo’s Life and Art to Film, is available from Newmarket Press. An illustrated screenplay of Taymor’s adaptation of THE TEMPEST is also on the Abrams imprint.

Lisa Staprans

Lisa Staprans has practiced interior design and product design for 20 years. She travels the world for inspiration and to learn and study other cultures, art, architecture and lifestyles. The book she is currently writing, The Soul of Design, features art, interior design, architecture, gardens, and other soulful spaces around the world.

Lisa earned a Bachelors degree in Fine Art from the University of California at Berkeley, and later studied at the School of Visual Arts and Parson�s School of Design, both located in New York City. Her career in design began in New York City working for large and small firms. In 1992 she and her husband founded the company, Lisa Staprans Interior Design, currently known as Staprans Design. Lisa�s clients have homes in Virginia, New York, Utah, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, and many places in California.

�I entered college intent on becoming a fine artist. By graduation I�d become captivated by the idea of using interior design to make a palpable difference in people�s everyday lives. The best part is � I get to collaborate with interesting, creative and inspiring people every day. Sometimes it�s a team of architects, contractors, artisans, craftspeople and, of course, home owners. Other times it�s a small group, just me, my project manager, and the owners. Whatever the size of the team, it�s a wonderful feeling when we unite behind a vision to create a beautiful home.�

�I also have a growing passion for finding ways to make the practice of sustainable consumption an integral part of our interior design. I find fulfillment in working with artisans and firms that have integrity and a sense of social responsibility. �Green� materials take first preference, while reclaimed lumber and antiques add a sense of warmth and history. I prefer products that are not mass-produced, but instead they are made for individual spaces by individual artists. I support the small village and family with my choices of where things are manufactured. If I use products from other countries I strive to make sure that the people creating those products are not using child labor or subjecting workers to inhumane conditions.�

Lisa frequently travels the globe, making yearly visitis to her Latvian home on the Baltic Sea, always buying treasures for projects and her small showroom in the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park. She travels the world for inspiration and to learn and study other cultures, art, architecture and lifestyles. The book she is currently writing, The Soul of Design, features art, interior design, architecture, gardens, and other soulful spaces around the world.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
My personal journey began when I was diagnosed with cancer 7 years ago with 2 young sons at home. I had been questioning my work and how I was making a difference before I got sick. I wanted to leave a legacy for my sons so they would know why I left home each day and traveled the country and parts of the world for my work. Getting cancer helped me to realize that there is a much bigger purpose to creating and living design: we can support indigenous cultures by supporting their work through design and that we can make a difference in our communities both at home and globally if we think about the cause and effect of how we consume. This seed took root during a trip to India 5 years ago with Lakshmi (the host of this wonderful conference) and a group of extraordinary women from the Bay Area of California. Being in India helped me to see the humility in humanity and the true difference we can make in someone�s life through the choices we make and support.

WEBSITE
www.stapransdesign.com

Michael Pollack

Michael Pollack manages his family investment firm, Pollack Holdings, which has interests in a broad array of both public and private securities. He also established and now runs his private, family foundation, SCA.

SCA is active in venture philanthropy, primarily in India, where it collaborates with social entrepreneurs to scale their business models. Additionally, Michael teaches Philosophy/Ethics and Social Entrepreneurship courses as an Adjunct Professor at New York University Stern School of Business. From 2001 to 2008, Michael co-founded and was one of two general partners at Glenhill Capital, a long/short public equities investment firm. Before leaving Glenhill to form SCA and Pollack Holdings, he helped grow Glenhill into a global investment business with more than $2.5 billion under management. Michael graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.

PERSONAL JOURNEY

Sat, Chit, Ananda. Existence, Knowledge, Bliss. These three words have become the defining philosophy of my life. I fundamentally believe that knowledge is the key to better decision making, and better decision making the key to a more fulfilled, connected, healthier life. Born the son of a social worker and teacher, I was the lucky recipient of a world class education that enabled me to achieve disproportionate financial success young in life. Three years ago I had a life changing experience, narrowly surviving 26/11. My driving aim since 26/11 is to use my good fortune to empower world-class social entrepreneurs to educate those born less fortunate.

WEBSITE

www.scacharitablefoundation.org

N.V. ‘Tiger’ Tyagarajan

Tiger is one of the pioneers of the business process management industry who transformed Genpact from a unit of GE in 1997 into a leading global business process and technology management services company. Tiger began his career with the Unilever Group in India where he spent seven years in sales and marketing. He then shifted to the financial services industry and spent three years with Citibank’s Consumer Financial Services businesses, where he earned a reputation for turning around inefficient businesses. He joined GE Capital in 1994 as Head of Risk in India and went on to become CEO for GE Capital’s Global Consumer Finance and Auto Financial Services operations in India. In 2002, he was transferred within GE to the Global Commercial Lending Businesses in the U.S. as Global Head of Six Sigma and Global Operations. Tiger rejoined Genpact in 2005 and became President and CEO in June 2011.

Tiger has a degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and an MBA, majoring in Finance and Marketing, from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. By playing a key leadership role in the founding of Genpact, Tiger also spawned the business process management industry as a whole which has had an extraordinary positive impact on economic growth and workforce development in many emerging markets – opening doors to employment, training, and educational opportunities along with infrastructure and services. Genpact also indirectly contributes to the employment of an additional one million people who work in businesses that support the company and its employees.

Known for his extraordinary energy, frequent engagement with clients, and activity in social media forums, Tiger speaks at many industry and global business events including the World Economic Forum and the Wall Street Journal CEO Council. He and his wife have one son who is attending a university in the U.S.

PERSONAL JOURNEYDuring my career, I have believed in joining a company, not just taking a job. After great opportunities working in sales management for Unilever and consumer and commercial finance at Citibank, I read Jack Welch’s two books and decided that I had to work for GE. I interviewed for sales but ended up in risk management because I was so passionate about the company, and I still am. I also believe in continually taking on projects that challenge and stretch your capabilities. By doing this, you take the necessary risks that will bring you to the next level

Naveen Tewari

As Founder and CEO, Naveen is responsible for the overall vision, strategy and execution at InMobi. Prior to founding InMobi, he worked at Charles River Ventures and a Silicon Valley startup. He started his journey with McKinsey & Company. Naveen holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s degree from IIT Kanpur. He is the founder of the U.S. based non-profit India School Fund that sets up schools in rural India

Parag Khanna

Parag Khanna is a leading global strategist, world traveler and best-selling author. He is Managing Partner of Hybrid Reality, Co-Founder & CEO of Factotum, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, and Adjunct Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

He is co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2012), and author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008) and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011).

In 2008, Parag was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” and featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” Parag is regularly featured in media around the world such as the New York Times, TIME, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, and appears regularly on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, PBS, and NPR.

He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Born in India, Parag grew up in the United Arab Emirates, New York, and Germany.

He has traveled to more than 100 countries and is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Prakash Amte

Magsaysay Awardee Prakash Amte runs Lok Biradari Prakalp to provide community services to tribal people in rural Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Chhatisgarh. The project has grown into a hospital, residential school and an orphanage for injured wild animals.

Prakash Amte is a M.B.B.S. graduate by profession but the spectrum of activities he carries out ranges from performing complex surgeries, fractures, and simple eye surgeries. He has first hand experience in hand rearing of wild-life animals from leoprads to huge bears,even the deadliest snakes have been befriended by him. He heads an rare informal court where the adivasis from far away come out of love and trust that justice will be granted. The most unusual being repairing watches and radios of the adivasis which he still continues to do.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Way back in 1970 Lt. Baba urged his sons to come for a picnic in dandakaranya forest. Prakash accompanied his visionary father Lt. Baba Amte into the dense forests of bhamragad. Moved by the extreme poverty, exploitation, illiteracy and malnuitrition Baba decided to start a project for tribal development. At that time Prakash was young and freshly graduated; seeing his aged father’s enthusiasm and dedication, he promised Baba to join him in his mission. This trip was a turning point in Prakash’s life. Shortly after, he was joined by his young and able physician wife Mandakini.

WORKS
Prakashwata (Marathi Autobiography)

WEBSITE
lokbiradariprakalp.org

Rajika Puri

Rajika Puri is an exponent of two forms of Indian dance – Bharatanatyam and Odissi – which for several years she performed internationally in solo recital (including a command performance for the President of Mexico). After playing ‘Narrator/goddess Kali’ in The Transposed Heads directed by Julie Taymor (Lincoln Center Theater, ’86), she developed a form of danced storytelling in which she accompanies her dances with songs, chants, vocalized rhythmic syllables, and a narrative in English. An evening of such stories, commissioned by the Rubin Museum of Art, was also presented off-Broadway: Devi-Malika: a garland of danced stories on the feminine divine in India (Duke on 42nd, ’08).

Familiarity with other kinds of music and dance – western classical, modern, flamenco – drew her to cross-cultural ventures. She is best known for several phases of Flamenco Natyam in which she weaves Indian dance and music, with flamenco (Works & Process at the Guggenheim, NY; Kala Ghoda Festival & NCPA, Mumbai; Habitat Centre, Delhi). The Museum of Flamenco Dance in Seville recently dedicated a week – entitled Namaste – to her lectures, workshops and performances tracing the cultural connections between Andalusia and south India. With noted singer Nora York, she also explored – through American song, and Odissi music and dance – two passionate ways of relating to deity: as lover, Krishna, and as mother, Kali (Union/Severed, Asia Society, NY, ’05).

Since 2005, her company Rajika Puri and Dancers – which includes a creative team of film/opera directors, lighting designers and musician-composers – has created thematic evening-length productions of choreographed group dances and danced stories like Conversations with Shiva: Bharatanatyam Unwrapped (Joyce SoHo, ’07) and Tapasya: Ascetic Power and Tales of the Ganges (Joyce, SoHo and on film,’09).

With a Masters degree in ‘The Anthropology of Human Movement’ from New York University (which focused on forms of communication that use the body: sign languages, martial arts, dance-theatres) she brings a cross-cultural perspective both to her theatrical productions and her writings on dance, music and theatre.

For a while Rajika was active on the western stage, and also took part in films. In New York, apart from starring in The Transposed Heads at Lincoln Center Theater, she performed in Cymbeline at the Public Theater, in Phaedra Britannica at the Classic Stage Company, and Macbeth with Theater for a New Audience. In India, she played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet. Her films include Mira Nair’s Mississipi Masala, Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open, and Norman Rene’s Longtime Companion.

Deeply committed to the performing arts, Rajika and her husband both support and are actively engaged with several music, theatre, and dance institutions, and museums, in New York. She is co-curator of the Indo-American Arts Council’s Erasing Borders dance festival, and a member of the Board at the World Music Institute.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Born in Tanzania at the end of World War II when my father was fighting in Burma, I spent a peripatetic childhood. By thirteen I had been to eleven different schools – in Cairo, London, Dehra Dun, Delhi, and Kasauli – and spoke smatterings of Nepali, Arabic, and Swahili. Today, other than English and Hindi, I speak Spanish, French, and some Italian. My world changed when I was introduced to social anthropology and realized that I had, all my life, been ‘translating cultures’ as an amateur, – and that there was an art, and science to this, which I could learn.

WEBSITE
www.rajikapuri.com

INTERESTING FACTS
I adore traveling and reading cultural histories of different countries I visit, even picking up a smattering of language. Apart from listening to flamenco (prefer deep song to ‘new flamenco’) and watching and listening to dance, theater, and music from all over the world, I am an opera buff. Spend far too much time, though, on the computer – updating my Facebook pages: Flamenco Natyam, Rajika Puri and Dancers, and two others I manage: World Music Institute, and NY Indian Dance – and writing emails!!

Ramji Raghavan

Mr. Raghavan is the Founder Chairman of Agastya International Foundation, the world’s largest hands-on mobile science education program for economically disadvantaged children and rural teachers.

In 1998 Mr. Raghavan left a career in banking in London to create Agastya International Foundation, a transformative and innovative education charity in India. Prior to Agastya, he worked as a senior executive in financial service organizations in the US, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia .

As Chairman of Agastya, Mr. Raghavan leads a grassroots initiative to support and transform primary and secondary education in India. Operating with a fleet of 80 Mobile Labs, 36 rural science centers, 2 Lab on Bikes ( 30 in the pipeline), and a 172-acre campus Creativity Lab near Bangalore, Agastya has reached creative hands-on science education to nearly 5 million poor and disadvantaged children and 200,000 teachers and pioneered innovations including mobile science, ecology and art labs, Young Instructor Leaders (children-teaching-children) and a Creativity Lab that incorporates science labs, an interactive museum, model making, teacher training, art and ecology. Under the leadership of Mr. Raghavan, Agastya’s innovative “TechLaBike Project” was announced as one of the 4 winners of the Google Impact Challenge in India on Oct 31st 2013. Agastya received a Rs 3 crore Global Impact Award, 10 Nexus tablets and support from Google to make their project a reality.

Mr. Raghavan was a member of the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission (Working Group on Attracting children to Science and Math), is a member of the board of Vigyan Prasar, New Delhi, the Karnataka State Innovation Council and executive council member of the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum. In 2009 Mr. Raghavan was elected a Senior Fellow by Ashoka: Innovators for the public and in 2011 he was conferred the People’s Hero Award by the Confederation of Indian Industry (Southern Zone). He has written articles on education for Indian and foreign journals and spoken on creativity and leadership to audiences at prestigious forums including the Education World Forum (London), Harvard India Conference (Boston), Clinton Global Initiative (New York), Peking University, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore,Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, National College for School Leadership (UK), the PanIIT Conference and the IIMPACT Alumni Meet (Singapore).

Rob Cook

Rob Cook was the co-architect and primary author of Pixar’s RenderMan software, which creates photo-realistic computer images. In 2001, he and two colleagues received Oscars for their contributions, the first ever given for software.

In the last 17 years, every film that has won a Visual Effects Oscar has used RenderMan. Rob has a Bachelors degree in physics from Duke University and a Masters degree in Computer Graphics from Cornell University. At Cornell, he worked on simulating realistic surfaces, taking computer-generated images beyond the distinctive plastic look they had at the time. In 1981, he joined Lucasfilm/Pixar, where he developed the first programmable shader; programmable shading is now an essential part of GPUs and game engines as well as high-end renderers. He was the first to use Monte Carlo techniques in computer graphics, which was essential for simulation of complex, realistic lights and camera effects. The latter proved particularly important in the special effects industry, because it allowed computer-generated imagery to match the motion blur and depth of field of the live-action footage with which it was combined. In 1987, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in recognition of these contributions, and in 2009, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award for his lifetime contributions to the field. In 1999, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has been named to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Engineering.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
I grew up in rural east Tennessee, and my family didn�t have the resources or interest to do much traveling. So it wasn�t until my twenties that I took my first trip overseas. That experience got me hooked on travel and adventure. I became enthralled with other cultures and peoples, and the excitement of traveling has stayed with me ever since.

Robert Vijay Gupta

Violinist Robert Vijay Gupta joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic in June 2007 at the age of 19.

Before joining the orchestra, Robert received a Master’s degree in Music from Yale University and a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Marist College. Parallel to his undergraduate studies in biology, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School of Music, Pre-College Division. His principal teachers have included Glenn Dicterow, Ani Kavafian, and Isaac Stern.

Robert made his solo debut at the age of eleven in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Zubin Mehta. He has performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Bombay Symphony Orchestra among many others. He has also performed widely as a chamber musician and recitalist on an international scale since the age of eight, and frequently appears on the Philharmonic’s Chamber Music Society and Green Umbrella new music series. Robert has also performed as a guest concertmaster with the Los Angeles Opera under James Conlon and the Orquestra Comunitat de Valencia at the Palau de Les Arts in Valencia, Spain under Mehta.

Robert curates and directs a free outreach concert series for the homeless, veterans, and mentally ill on skid row in downtown Los Angeles called The Street Symphony, which brings musical activism to underserved communities throughout Southern California. The project aims to bring live musical performance to audiences without access in order to remove the stigma associated with homelessness and mental health.

Throughout his undergraduate course of study, Robert held Research Assistant positions at CUNY Hunter College in New York City, where he worked on spinal chord neuronal regeneration, and at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine Center for Neurologic Diseases, where he studied the biochemical pathology of Parkinson’s disease. He is passionate about discovering more about how music affects the brain, especially in neurological disorders. Robert is a TED Senior Fellow.

Robert recorded his debut album in July 2011 with Yarlung Records, in Walt Disney Concert Hall. The album includes solo violin works by John Harbison, Eugene Ysaÿe, and HIF Biber, as well as the premiere recordings of LA Phil principal timpanist Joseph Pereira’s Partita for Solo Violin and Gupta’s own composition upon the Indian raga “Jaunpuri”. The album was recorded on the 1716 “Milstein” Stradivarius.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: In 2008, I met Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless, paranoid schizophrenic man, that I have come to call a close friend, and certainly, amongst my most effective teachers. Nathaniel studied musical performance at the prestigious Juilliard School, where I would later attend, but he dropped out after his diagnosis with mental illness, and lived homeless in Los Angeles for 30 years. I became his violin teacher, and time after time, the music would bring him back from the very brink of a schizophrenic episode. Nathaniel showed me that music was medicine, that music was sanity.

WEBSITE: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/artist-detail.cfm?id=3309

Ruchi Sanghvi

Ruchi is the founder and CEO of Cove – a company she started with other early ex-Facebookers. Prior to starting her own company, Ruchi was the first female engineer at Facebook.

Just a few months out of school, Ruchi is credited with building one of Facebook’s key features – News Feed, a feature users rebelled against and then eventually came to love. She then led product management and strategy for Privacy, Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

Her current company, Cove, is a stealth Internet startup that recently raised a seed round of financing from investors like Peter Thiel, Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook), Kraft Family (owner of Patriots) and others.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: When I was in school, I heard an impromptu speech given by one of India’s premier entrepreneurs Rahul Bajaj. He said, “I ran the race, I didn’t also run the race but I ran the race”. I’d like to embark on a simple journey. I want to run the race, I want to be an active participant. I want to build a company that creates products that impact our lives in meaningful ways.

Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous “jam study,” done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking — that when we’re presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

Iyengar’s research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. But she and her team at the Columbia Business School throw a much broader net. Her analysis touches, for example, on the medical decisionmaking that might lead up to choosing physician-assisted suicide, on the drawbacks of providing too many choices and options in social-welfare programs, and on the cultural and geographical underpinning of choice. Her book The Art of Choosing shares her research in an accessible and charming story that draws examples from her own life.

Shirin Juwaley

An acid attack survivor herself, Shirin started the Palash Foundation to address social reintegration and livelihoods for people with disfigurement. In 1998, her husband threw acid on her after she requested divorce.

She has an MSc in Development & Human Rights and earned a distinction for her thesis, ‘Does disfigurement lead to disability due to social exclusion?’ Prior to Palash, she worked on a range of projects in the social sector.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Being burned was the best experience of my life. The many masks that I was carrying started melting one by one. The disfigurement of my face also helped in sifting out people who genuinely cared for me. Having a second lease on life, the realisation came very strong to stop complaining and enjoy what I have. I started appreciating all things made by the creator and the imperfections of life. The journey inward had begun and I am still a work in progress.

WEBSITE
doilooknormal.blogspot.com

Shoba Murali

Shoba Murali, CEO and co-founder of The UCAN Company, helped shape the overall manufacturing, formulation, clinical trials and marketing strategy of the company. The company markets glucose sustaining consumer-based nutritional products in sports nutrition, fitness, weight management and diabetes markets.

She was also involved from start-up to IPO, as President and Co-founder of Acorn Information Services. Ms. Murali holds a M.S in Computer Sciences from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a B.E. in Electronics from Osmania University.

WEBSITE
www.generationucan.com

Swanand Kirkire

Swanand Kirkire has many strings to his bow, he is a writer, song-writer, actor, playwright and director in the Hindi film industry. Graduating from the National School of Drama in 1996 he soon moved into the world of television, and then, in 2003, progressed to film, making his debut as a lyricist & singer with Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi.

Swanand has since won two National Film Awards for the lyrics of Lage Raho Munna Bhai in 2007 and again in 2009 for 3 Idiots.

UNTOLD STORY

When Swanand was in eleventh grade, students were asked to write an essay on their heroes. Whilst everybody else wrote about Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose, Swanand wrote about actor Om Puri. He achieved full marks!

Talavya

Globe-trotting percussion ensemble Talavya bring tabla to the center stage, distilling its age-old classical spirit and practice into a high-energy, highly accessible performance. Composed by music maestro Pandit Divyang Vakil, the quartet of Rushi Vakil, Kaumil Shah, Sahil Patel and Rahul Shrimali with accompaniment by Heena Patel moves between rousing peaks and smooth meditative passages, revealing the colours of tabla.

Vikram Bhaskaran

Vikram Bhaskaran is the CEO and Co-Founder of Samosa Media whose flagship product is Samosapedia: The Definitive Guide to South Asian Lingo.

Vikram has a background in strategy, operations and business development in the digital media sector. He is passionate about south asian culture and language and his goal is to build the most lovable south asian humor brand that makes people laugh out loud or perhaps break into an uncontrollable smile. He calls Bangalore and New York home.

PERSONAL JOURNEY: Samosapedia is as much about celebrating urban slang as it is about documenting and capturing words and concepts that are quickly vanishing. While the site is a great way to inspire young people globally to contribute entries, there is a whole community of older people who we probably never reach. The journey I want to take is an oral history project, where I travel around south asia with a small team of talented writers and documentary filmmakers to capture words, phrases and concepts that are quickly disappearing from the modern south asian landscape.

WEBSITE: www.samosapedia.com

Vineet Singal

Named by The Huffington Post as one of the “Top 10 Changemakers Under 40”, Vineet Singal is a senior at Stanford University and leads 100KCheeks, an initiative to register 100,000 new bone marrow donors using the power of personal stories and social media.

In working closely with Professor Jennifer Aaker at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a team of 12 dedicated Stanford students, Vineet helped 100KCheeks reach its goal in 1 year. Vineet is currently leading efforts to register a million bone marrow donors worldwide in 2012 and jumpstart the creation of national marrow registries in countries like India and Indonesia.

Vineet wants to use his skills as a social entrepreneur and future physician to fight for greater access to quality and affordable healthcare for the underserved. His resolve solidified in Galveston, TX during the fall of 2009, when he took a leave of absence from Stanford to volunteer full time at St. Vincent�s free clinic. Back at Stanford, Vineet co-founded Anjna, a national nonprofit organization that aims to utilize technology at free clinics. Vineet helped build a network of 250+ undergraduates, medical students and faculty and is leading efforts to create health education programs at free clinics in high need areas nationwide, in addition to conducting groundbreaking pilot studies on utilizing interactive, tablet based education and SMS technology at clinics in the bay area.

Vineet has delivered talks on his social entrepreneurship work at Stanford Business School, Techonomy, TEDxTampaBay, Medicine 2.0 and at other various conferences and events. His work has been featured in Forbes, New York Times, Huffington Post, PBS, AdAge and the Clinton Global Initiative University among others.

He has completed and published research projects at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic and has received research awards from Intel, the College Board, Sigma Xi, the Irene and Eric Simon Foundation and the National Cancer Institute. In 2011, Vineet was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, a prestigious national award conferred to undergraduates studying the sciences. Vineet is an Staples/Ashoka Global Youth Social Entrepreneur, Ashoka Youth Venture Fellow, Donald A. Strauss Scholar, a Haas Public Service Fellow, a DoSomething/AT&T Fellow and a Pearson Prize Fellow. Vineet serves on the Stanford University Board of Trustees and on the board of directors for Clinic by the Bay, a Volunteers in Medicine affiliated free clinic in San Francisco.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Being a foreigner and stranger has defined my upbringing; I may well be one of the only people who has bathed in the Ganges, been taken hostage in a Saudi terrorist attack and walked the Lord of the Rings trail.

I vividly recall trying to protect my mother from the Saudi policeman’s whips (her hair wasn’t completely covered) or being physically and verbally harassed for having an Indian accent at the all boys’ high school I attended in New Zealand. However, I never ran away from who I was even in the face of physical intimidation.

When my family moved to the Bronx, I was yet again a foreigner, this time to America�s educational system and culture. However, I felt welcome in the United States. Graduating as my high school�s valedictorian and one of the top debaters in the country imbued me in perseverance and an ethic of compassion learned in adversity.

My experiences instill in me incessant empathy for my future patients, and an unyielding belief that no matter our differences, the things that unite us and bring us together are stronger and far outnumber those that drive us apart.

WEBSITE
www.gsb.stanford.edu/phi/students/experiential

Wolfgang Lehmacher

Yann Vasnier

Yann Vasnier was born in Brittany, France and from an early age he was drawn to appreciate the nuances of fragrances. He trained as a perfumer at ISIPCA, the prestigious Versailles perfumery school and he graduated Valedictorian in 1999. During his studies, Yann also worked as a trainee perfumer for Quest International in Paris. Upon graduating, he was offered a position as a junior perfumer with the Fine Fragrance team in Paris, trained by Francoise Caron. In 2001, Yann was the recipient of the International Young Perfumer Award. In July 2003, Yann joined the Quest New York as a perfumer and in 2007 joined Givaudan.

His creative vision as a perfumer is that every fragrance should represent a dimension of subtlety and an aspect of definitive character. Fragrance composition should not be shy. And for him, the most evocative fragrances are the ones worn by people you love or have loved.

His intense love of travel lends him cultural and environmental inspiration for his scents, he believes that inspiration can come from everywhere. His life as a New Yorker has put him at the center of renowned creatives from the world of art, design, fashion and technology. His most recent collaboration with Visionaire Sixty Religion, he scented the limited edition volume. Amongst others, he has crafted fragrances for Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Donna Karan, Comme des Garçons and Tommy Hilfiger.

PERSONAL JOURNEY
Becoming a perfumer has certainly been quite a journey: from the first smell of my parents’ roses or noticing the intense change in odors as we drove to the South of France on summer holidays, to working in a beautiful lab on 57th Street in New York for the most prestigious designers. The journey still takes a lot of time, will power, luck, navigating, rejection, and competition. It’s a never ending game of trial and error, always trying to imagine and create the next masterpiece and the next success. For me, the journey of perfumery never ends.

WORKS
Fragrances created or co-created: TOM FORD PRIVATE BLEND SANTAL BLUSH (2011) MARC JACOBS BANG BANG (2011) MARC JACOBS OH LOLA! (2011) VISIONAIRE SIXTY RICCARDO TISCI RELIGION (2011) NAUTICA DISCOVERY PURE (2011) MARC JACOBS SPLASH CURACAO (2011) MARC JACOBS SPLASH GINGER (2011) TOM FORD PRIVATE BLEND LAVENDER PALM (2011) DELRAE PANACHE (2010) TRUE RELIGION DRIFTER (2010) SIX SCENTS SERIES THREE OHNE TITEL (2010) TOMMY HILFIGER LOUD FOR HIM (2010) TOMMY HILFIGER LOUD FOR HER (2010) MARC JACOBS BANG (2010) DELRAE COUP DE FOUDRE (2010) MARC JACOBS SPLASH APPLE (2010) SIX SCENTS SERIES TWO DAMIR DOMA (2009) TOM FORD PRIVATE BLEND URBAN MUSK (2009) ELIZABETH ARDEN 5TH AVENUE STYLE (2009) MARC JACOBS LOLA (2009) DIVINE EAU DIVINE (2009) LYNX SUMMER EDITION (2009) IMPULSE ROMANTIC SPARK (2009) DELRAE MYTHIQUE (2009) EDDIE BAUER ADVENTURER II (2009) SJP ENDLESS LOVELY COLLECTION (2009) DIVINE L’ETRE AIME HOMME & FEMME (2009) AXE INSTINCT (2009) MARC JACOBS SPLASH FIG (2008) PUMA FREE FLOWING MAN (2008) BABY PHAT FABULOSITY (2008) LE LABO ALDEHYDE 44 (2007) BBW SWEET PEA EDT (2006) DONNA KARAN GOLD (2006) AXE CLICK (2006) BBW PECAN PASSION (2006) AVON MIDNIGHT FOR MEN (2006) CERRUTI 1881 COLLECTION CERRUTI (2005) JACK BLACK SIGNATURE BLACK MARK (2005) AVON FLORAL PRINT MAGNOLIA (2005) APOTHIA L (2005) DIVINE L’HOMME SAGE (2005) KEIKO MECHERI GOURMANDISES (2004) DIVINE L’AME S’UR (2004) DIVINE L’INFANTE (2004) DIVINE L’HOMME DE C’UR (2003) KANGOL 38-83 (2003) COMME DES GARCONS RED SERIES PALISANDER (2001) COMME DES GARCONS RED SERIES ROSE (2001)

Zohre Elahian

Zohre Elahian has been actively involved in international development for over 10 years. With her husband, Zohre started Schools Online, a not-for-profit organization that has brought computers to schools and introduced ICT in education in many countries around the world and within the US. As the Managing Director of Global Catalyst Foundation, Zohre has also evaluated many projects, addressing critical needs in education, ICT and microfinance; and her Foundation has provided funding to such projects in many countries.

Zohre has also served on the board of directors of Relief International for over 8 years working on different developmental and humanitarian projects in countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and many other countries. Prior to her humanitarian activities, she co-managed a successful private business for 15 years.

Zohre holds an M.A. in Anthropology. In 2009 Zohre received the Unsung Heroes of Compassion award and special blessing from his Holiness, The Dalai Lama.

WEBSITE
www.global-catalyst.org