‘Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.’ This much-quoted mantra for life is the inspiration for the theme of INK Conference 2018:
Billionaires of Moments. Urging each one of us to be a billionaire of moments – to be hungry for moments that matter, to create them, and amass them. To pause, reflect and redefine success on a new barometer hereon.
Immersive workshops and masterclasses will be a great opportunity for the participants to dive deep into subjects as varied as Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence to Art and Music, facilitated by leading subject-matter experts and practitioners. The format will be kept informal and highly interactive with smaller groups of participants.
After a long day of stimulating talks, the evenings at the INK Conferences are a time to let your hair down. Get to know the remarkable participants and speakers over a drink and some amazing food curated by invited chefs. The evenings have a strong local and cultural flavor with the venue, theme and entertainment.
The main-stage programming at an INK Conference is carefully curated around the theme. Game changers and thought-leaders from every walk of life will share their stories, ideas and perspectives in short talks between 3-18 minutes. Most sessions will begin or end with performances which will have you thoroughly entertained and up on your feet.
Our Partner, RoundGlass, to set up a beautiful lounge for our INK family to experience a wide array of experiences and therapies all centred around holistic wellbeing. Get magnetic bio resonance analysis of your body done, stretch your strained muscles with short acts of Tai-chi or Pilates, get your auras mapped, get your pulse read to determine essentials of your body to give you an amazing insight into what’s unique about you as a being, and how you can be the best version of yourself, with knowledge of age old traditions intermingled with technological advances of today.
Human Rights Crusader; Activist; Founder and Executive Director, The Naz Foundation (India) Trust
An Indian human rights and animal rights activist, Anjali Gopalan is founder and executive director of The Naz Foundation Trust, an NGO dedicated to the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India, with a focus on women and children. With a postgraduate diploma in journalism, and a masters degree in International Development, Anjali began working on issues related to HIV/AIDS and marginalized communities in the United States. In 2012, Time named Gopalan in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Ankit Agarwal is the Founder-CEO of Phool. co, a social enterprise that has pioneered the ‘flowercycling®’ technologies to reduce the pollution in the Rivers Ganges, by up-cycling the vast quantities of flower temple waste in India. At Phool.co, over 11.4 tons of temple waste is collected daily in Uttar Pradesh & Bihar and converted into charcoal-free incense and an animal-free alternative to leather called Fleather (PETA’s Best Innovation in the Vegan World 2020).
Art purveyor Aparajita Jain is amongst the leading names in the Indian art world, putting the country’s contemporary art on the international map. In 2005 she founded gallery Seven Art Limited to showcase cutting-edge ideas in Indian art, discovering pioneering artists like Asim Waqif and Aakash Nihalani. The gallery went on to host the first-ever Indian contemporary art show in China (in MOCA, Shanghai), and opened doors for Indian artists to the Lisbon Biennale. Jain is today the co-founder of Delhi’s most avant garde art space, Nature Morte, showcasing names like Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat and Anita Dube. Her non-profit endeavour, Saat Saath Arts Foundation (SSAF), is a first-of-its-kind initiative built to catalyse international art exchange between India and the world. SSAF is now working with the Rajasthan government to create the first permanent International Art Space in the state, at Nahargarh Fort. Jain was listed as one of the 50 icons of Indian Art by Platform, is on the board of the Delhi Chapter of YPO and a founding member of the Harvard South Asia Institute Arts program.
Balki is currently the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Utopus Insights, a New York-based energy analytics software products company founded in 2017, whose mission is to orchestrate a sustainable future by accelerating the use of renewable energy worldwide. Balki leads all sales and business development initiatives for the company and is passionate about the role of clean energy in changing the world. He previously served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Enel Green Power.
Balki deeply values the power of education in empowering people to help make meaningful change. He is Director of Iyer Educational Institutions (IEI) in Bengaluru, India, that runs schools for children with autism, which he co-founded with his wife.
Balki is a recipient of several awards including the prestigious ‘Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business’ award in 2017.
Bharat is the Director at Intel Labs/Parallel Computing Labs (India). In his 2-decade career at Intel, Bharat has held several technical and management leadership positions within product development groups and has been leading the lab for nearly a decade. At Intel Labs, Bharat’s research focuses on application-driven Architectural Performance leadership for Intel for multi-core/many architectures with special focus on Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing. The lab works in close collaboration with leading academic and industry partners across the globe. Most recently, Bharat, along with his other Intel colleagues, contributed to India’s National AI Strategy discussion document that advocated and created Applied Research Centers (ICTAI) focused on Large Scale National Challenges.
Charlene Ren is the founder of MyH2O Water Information Network, a crowd-based platform that connects clean water resources to rural communities in China. Since its inception in 2015, with a thorough data collection from over thousands of villages, solutions have been delivered to over 1,000 beneficiaries. Charlene has a dual MS degree in Environmental Engineering & Technology and Policy from MIT, with a thesis focused on the water and sanitation monitoring policy structure in rural India. She was selected as 1 of 4 Chinese representatives for Homeward Bound 2018 fellow, an initiative focused on raising profiles of women leaders in STEM, that included a 3-week training expedition in Antarctica. She’s also a 2016 Echoing Green Fellow.
Devdutt Pattanaik writes on relevance of mythology in modern times, especially in areas of management, governance and leadership. Trained in medicine, he worked for 15 years in the healthcare and pharma industries before he focussed on his passion full time. He is author of 30 books and 600 columns, with bestsellers such as My Gita, Jaya, Sita, Business Sutra and the 7 Secret Series. He was a speaker at TEDIndia 2009 and spoke on Myths that Mystify, East versus West. His TV shows include Business Sutra on CNBC-TV18 and Devlok on Epic TV. He consults organisations on culture, diversity and leadership and also consults various television channels and filmmakers on storytelling.
Gary is an environmental-and-water activist, and filmmaker. His foundation, Make a Change World, uncovers uplifting and inspirational stories with an aim to give a voice to the underrepresented and bring about social change. With his younger brother Sam Bencheghib, he has launched a series of expeditions – from kayaking the world’s most polluted river in Java on plastic- bottle kayaks, to standup paddling down New York’s most toxic waterways – to bring to light the impact of growing water pollution. In the past 2 years, Gary’s videos have been viewed by over 500 million people worldwide.
Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of Freshworks, one of the world’s fastest-growing SaaS product company, winning the Economic Times Startup of the Year in 2016, the Business Standard Startup of the Year in 2017, and now part of India’s unicorn club. The homegrown customer-engagement software maker has a suite of products – Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, Freshcaller, Freshteam, Freshchat and Freshmarketer – catering to more than 1,50,000 businesses worldwide including big names like Honda, Cisco, Toshiba, Bridgestone, University of Pennsylvania, and Hugo Boss.
Girish is part of the Product Council for NASSCOM, the trade association of Indian software companies, and actively works to promote and nurture software product companies. With a forward-looking approach, he has invested in several early stage startups and mentors young entrepreneurs
Hanif Kureshi is a multidisciplinary artist and designer living and working in New Delhi, India. His work is focused on the intersection of art, typography and street culture. He is a creative director and Co-founder of St+art India Foundation which aims at making art accessible to a larger audience in India through the series of street art festivals. His ongoing project,handpaintedtype.com attempts to conserve and archive the vernacular street typography of India. His work has been exhibited at the London Design Biennale, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Triennale Design Museum in Milan, among others.
Director at the Power of NeuroGaming Center at Qualcomm Institute, Chukoskie is working to understand the human brain through gaming.
Working at the intersection of neuroscience, social science and education, Leanne Chukoskie is working to understand the human brain through gaming, to aid children with developmental and learning disorders. She is the director of the Power of NeuroGaming (PoNG) Center at the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego, an Assistant Research Scientist in the Institute for Neutral Computation Associate at the centre, as well as Director for the Research for Autism and Development Laboratory (RADLab) at UC San Diego. She is a distinguished professor of Social Sciences at Minerva Schools at KGI, and co-founder of BrainLeap Technologies working at widening the reach for training games. Widely-acclaimed, her ground-breaking research has found space in multiple neuroscience journals, while her mentorship skills continue to help students pave their learning path.
Munaf Kapadia worked at Google India as an Online Advertising Consultant to some of the country’s largest financial institutions. The Bohri Kitchen (TBK) started out as a weekend project to keep his mom-chef busy, but her exceptional culinary skills combined with his social media talents kickstarted a Bohri food revolution! Now he’s the full time Chief Eating Officer of TBK, recognized as the ‘Best Bohri Food Restaurant’ by the Times Food Guide. He hopes to take Bohri cuisine all over the world. Munaf enjoys reading and sailing in his free time.
Navneeth Sundar is a composer, keyboardist, iPad musician and performer. Started as a musical prodigy, Navneeth Sundar owned the stage since a very young age with his performances by creating a distinctive approach to classical-fusion music.
Making his presence felt in the classical and fusion music scene, he is one of the most technically complex artists, well known for being the first musician to explore Carnatic music beyond the constriction of instruments with the help of an iPad, acknowledged by the Limca book of records.He has scored the music for films in Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil and also runs his band “Navneeth Sundar Ensemble” performing his independent music scores and also covers of famous songs, rearranged by him.
Growing up in a small town in Gujarat, Nirman developed a passion for programming when he got my first computer. By 17, he had published 200 apps with over a million downloads. After high school, he ran a profitable startup called CircuiTricks and went on to pursue Entrepreneurship from MIT in Boston and Computer Science from Hampshire College in Amherst. During this time, he built USA’s first interdisciplinary Hackathon event with partners like Google, Viacom and Star Trek.He now works at the intersection of Machine Learning and Behavioral Economics with his startup called Obviously AI, a web app to help SaaS companies predict customer behavior.
Nirupa Rao is a botanical illustrator based in Bangalore. Her illustrations are inspired by field visits into the wild, and are informed by close collaboration with botanists. In 2017, she was named a National Geographic Young Explorer, and received a grant to pursue her work. She has been published in Harper’s Bazaar India, and named in their list of Indian Women to be Proud of; in Chickpea, USA and Medicor (published by the Karolinksa Institutet, Sweden). Her first book, Pillars of Life, with 80 beautiful illustrations of trees native to the Western Ghats rainforests, has been published by the Nature Conservation Foundation and authored by botanists Divya Mudappa and Shankar Raman.
National Awardee Nitin Sisodia is the Founder and CEO of Sohum Innovation Lab, a social enterprise working at developing solutions to improve health and income of people living in resource-poor settings. A 2010 Stanford India Biodesign fellow, Nitin was named one of the top 20 Indian innovators by MIT Tech review in 2013. He received NASSCOM ICT led Healthcare Innovation Award in 2016, Indian Merchant Chamber Inclusive Innovation Award in 2015 and the Sankalp India Award in 2016. He has received several grants including the Grand challenges Canada Star in Global Health, Center for Innovation in Global Health award, BIRAC Biotechnology Ignition Grant & Siemens grant for his research in developing an innovative hearing screening device for newborns. Nitin has a degree in Electrical Engineering from NIT Bhopal, and Industrial Design from NID Ahmedabad, India.
Serial Entrepreneur; Board member XPRIZE Foundation
A silicon-valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, Paresh Ghelani is focused on creating large-scale impact through innovation and entrepreneurship. Alongwith Ratan Tata and Naveen Jain, he brought XPRIZE Foundation to India to resolve challenges in public amenities and raise the quality of life. With his years of hands-on management experience Ghelani co-founded the 2020 Company LLC, building it into a massive endeavour, providing the US government advanced technology in education, defense, and healthcare space (now acquired by a private equity firm). True to his own motto, “work hard in silence and let your success be the noise”, Ghelani is currently engaged in enterprises like Moon Express, Viome Inc, DTV Motor Corporation, Ferrate Treatment Technologies, Casepoint, Radimmune Therapeutics.
Pranav Kothari is the head of the Large Scale Education Programmes division at Educational Initiatives (EI). He leads EI’s work in student assessments and the implementation of their adaptive learning software (Mindspark) in vernacular languages in government and affordable private schools across India. He has spoken on various platforms advocating the need to leverage the twin levers of cutting-edge educational research and technology-based solutions to revolutionize how children in the K-12 space learn. Pranav is an alumnus of Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School and has previously worked with GTI Capital and Boston Consultancy Group.
At 21, Priya was the first Indian woman to start an open-source hardware company in India. At 28, she built Bay Area’s first women-centric co-working space. Presently, at 30, she is the first Indian woman working to build a decentralized internet free of net neutrality, censorship and fake news. She is a community builder and teacher at heart and firmly believes in the power of technology to improve the lives of people. She views entrepreneurship as a deeper path towards self-discovery. Lately, she has found her anchor in Vipassana meditation.
Pulkit Garg is a civil engineer by training and a civil servant by profession. Graduating from IIT Delhi in 2014, Garg went on to become one of the youngest individuals to clear the prestigious Civil Services Examination at 23. An IAS Officer of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) cadre, Pulkit has served as an Executive Magistrate of Bulandshahr district for a year, handling over 150 government departments ranging from development areas such as education, health, PDS (Public Distribution System), ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services) to regulatory bodies like mining, armaments and land for a population of 2 million residents. His field of special interest is urban development and unlocking the land’s potential as a tool for economic development. He is currently posted as Executive Magistrate in Baghpat District, Uttar Pradesh.
Named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his leadership in wireless communications, Dr. Ramesh Rao is a faculty member at UC San Diego and Director of the Qualcomm Institute (QI), UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Prior to QI (Calit2), Professor Rao was also the Director of UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications (CWC). Dr. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of research initiatives at QI. He leads several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects and has been a PI on dozens of federal-, state-, foundation- and industry-funded grants. Among his most recent honors and distinctions, he received a 2011 Casa Familiar Abrazo Award for engagement with underprivileged area of San Diego.
Dr. Rao earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984, after receiving his M.S. from the same institution in 1982. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1980 from the University of Madras.
A Product & Brand Marketing specialist, Ritu has held pivotal profiles across the Telecom, Media and Health Technology industries, ranging from: being Head of Programming for Radio stations like Red FM & RadioOne; developing award- winning and multi-million dollar mobile products as well as launching landmark advertising campaigns like ‘Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai’ for Airtel. A successful entrepreneur, her health-tech startup, Obino, touched over a million lives, raising funding from foreign investors. A prolific speaker, she also mentors other startups and assists in TiE and Google-related startup forums in a bid to give back to the startup ecosystem that nurtured her.
Sanjay is an Eisenhower Fellow and Managing Director at Accenture Labs India. He is responsible for driving software engineering, R&D and leads the company’s Technology4Good program. Sanjay is passionate about using the combinatorial power of technology for building a more inclusive and sustainable world. He believes that as a software engineering researcher, he can solve some of the greatest challenges facing mankind with data science, digital and design thinking.
Sanjay joined Accenture in 2002. Currently, he leads a team of data scientists and software engineering experts to deliver greater automation and augmentation of software engineering activities, and build disruptive solutions for business and society. In the past, he has led several technology transformation programs across systems integration, application outsourcing, infrastructure outsourcing and business process outsourcing for clients across the United States and Europe. Sanjay is a member of Accenture’s Technology Leadership Council (TLC) and Technology Steering Committee for Corporate Citizenship. He is also a technology mentor for social entrepreneurs and startups including Ashoka Fellows and NASSCOM Foundation. A governing council member of the NASSCOM-Digital India IoT Center of Excellence, Sanjay has built a powerful open innovation ecosystem for joint R&D with leading academics in India and the United States.
A certified Bitcoin professional and co-founder of MainChain Research & Consulting, Shikha Mehra holds a degree in Bachelor of Economics and Physics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as LLB and LLM from the Jindal Global Law School, specializing in Tax Law. She is on the advisory panel to IMAI’s (Internet Mobile Association of India) sub-committee on crypto currency and blockchain. As a subject expert, her expertise is sought from audiences as varied as the OECD, the Russian Parliament, the UK Government (F&CO), Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC), YPO, and Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, amongst others.
Siddharth is an entrepreneur, a dedicated researcher, and an ardent advocate for technological advancements in neurotechnology. His relentless pursuit of understanding the intricacies of the human brain, which started in 2010, has led him to the creation of Zeuron.ai, an innovative platform set to revolutionize the way we comprehend and approach brain health.
Sneha Khanwalkar is an Indian music director who works in Bollywood. She is best known for her score for the film, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and also for Gangs of Wasseypur Part 1, Part 2; the latter earned her a nomination in Best Music Director category at the 58th Filmfare Awards.
Founder and president of the Blue Heron Foundation, Magidson is creating a new blueprint for social entrepreneurship.
A global citizen dedicated to empowering her fellow human beings, Magidson is creating a new blueprint for social entrepreneurship through her constant endevours. She heads one of the largest non-profit organizations in the Romanian diaspora, Blue Heron Foundation,giving the disadvantaged youth an access to life-changing opportunities. Her book “Searching for the White Magician” is a series of dialogues explores themes close to her, ranging from immigration and philanthropy to spiritual psychology and self-realization.
Tarun is pioneering the use of agricultural produce as building materials in India, making farmers economically relevant to the construction industry. He recognises the impact of construction on climate change and the importance of farmers in its mitigation. As the Founder and Managing Partner of GreenJams Infrastructures LLP, Tarun manages product innovation and the commercial scale development of carbon-negative bio-aggregate building materials from hemp stalks in collaboration with CSIR-CBRI, Roorkee. He hopes to see these miracle walls adorning everyone’s homes in the days to come. Tarun is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and holds degrees in Civil Engineering and Environmental Science.
Tony is an active investor and entrepreneur with a 30+ year history of founding companies and designing products that profoundly improve people’s lives. He is the Principal at Future Shape LLC, an investment and advisory firm coaching deep tech startups. Currently, Future Shape is coaching 200+ startups innovating game-changing technologies. He is the founder and former CEO of Nest, the company that pioneered the “Internet of Things.” Tony was the SVP of Apple’s iPod Division and led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Throughout his career Tony has authored more than 300 patents. In May 2016, TIME named the Nest Learning Thermostat, the iPod and the iPhone as three of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time.”
Vaibhav is the Co-founder of ftcash, one of India’s fastest growing fintech company which aims to empower India’s 60+ million underserved micro-merchants through the power of financial inclusion using loans and digital payments. Previously, he was a Director, Global Development at XPRIZE, leading the world’s first global prize that targets access to water. He had previously been associated with The World Bank, LGT Impact Fund and ZS Associates. Vaibhav was selected as Davos50, Global Shapers (World Economic Forum), Asia Development Fellow, and Acumen Fellow. Vaibhav is an engineer from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli where he was awarded Distinguished Alumni Award and an alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School.
Varsha Patra is the CEO & Co-founder of Homegrown. She comes from a marketing background spanning over a decade in both digital and traditional media, having worked in both India and Los Angeles. Her experience in marketing started out in a cloud-computing technology startup, continuing to build the Kraft-Foods (Cadbury India) account at Ogilvy Mumbai, and further continued to develop the brand and business strategy for a startup online video entertainment platform in Los Angeles. She holds a Master’s degree in marketing from the University of Southern California.
Varun Sivaram is the Philip D. Reed fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a professor at Georgetown University, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, and a member of the advisory boards for the Stanford University Institutes for Environment and Energy. Forbes named him one of the 30 under 30 in Law and Policy, Grist selected him as one of the top 50 leaders in sustainability, and Rise ranked him as one of the top 5 global thought leaders on solar energy. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Taming the Sun (MIT University Press, February 2018).
A seasoned writer and executive producer, Wendy Calhoun’s rich repertoire of work includes critically-acclaimed shows like Fox’s megahit series, Empire, ABC’s Station 19, Nashville, Revenge, and FX’s Justified; receiving a 2010 Peabody Award for Justified. She has developed new series pilots with Netflix, FX, 20th TV Studios, and ABC Signature; and in a terrific deal with Warner Brothers is currently developing Lean On Me for the CW and Strong Justice for NBC. With a conscious choice of assigning cultural specificity to her characters, she hopes to move the needle on what is considered “good” entertainment. Among her other credits is co-executive producing and writing the historic first season of The virtual reality short, Left Behind, honored as “Best in VR” at Digital Hollywood.
Zain Memon is a story-teller, media-tech specialist, futurist and Media-Producer based out of Mumbai and Goa. He co-founded Memesys Culture Lab, a cinema and new media studio at the intersection of science, philosophy and culture.
In the past few years, Zain has created the world’s first open-source film project, ran India’s largest crowdfunding campaign for a documentary and created India’s first Virtual Reality Platform. He is currently working on Shasn, a political strategy board game. His well-rounded expertise in storytelling, technology, narrative design, and game-design allows him to bridge the gap between technology and effective storytelling.
Amongst the youngest on the Indian literary landscape, Zuni Chopra is focused on carving a world of fantasy and wonder.With a zest for writing, the teen author has a growing repertoire of published work to her credit, including two collections of poetry, her first novel, The House That Spoke(published in January 2017 by Penguin India) and the most recent publication, a collection of short stories, The Island of the Day Before. She has contributed articles to Vogue India and Hindustan Times and was shortlisted for Young Author Awards 2018. Enamoured by the works of T.S. Eliot, Neil Gaiman and Lewis Carroll, Zuni continues to juggle writing with the academic pressure from school, and draws constant encouragement from her six dogs!
