In the 8th edition, City Scripts unfolds new narratives about the city. Explore current conversations about public spaces, citizen interactions, technology and gender. Turn back the clock to cities of the ancient past, discover hidden gems in your neighbourhood, and the culinary secrets of your cities. Engage with authors from across the country and delve into their latest writings.
Vikas Khatri belongs to Phalodi, Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Associated with The Third Eye as a Digital Educator, Vikas is honing his understanding of and skills in story writing, videography, photography, and audio production. He enjoys reading, writing, interacting with people, and experimenting with new technology.
Vijeta Kumar teaches Communicative English at St. Joseph's University, Bengaluru. She has written for Deccan Herald, First Post, The Third Eye, Huffpost, India Today, and The Funambulist Magazine. Check out her personal blog where she writes more regularly at rumlolarum.com.
In late 2018 Vena started Nature Classrooms as part of the Nature Conservation Foundation’s Education and Public Engagement Programme. With her team she works closely with primary school teachers and educators through training workshops, research and by co-developing age appropriate, locally-culturally relevant nature learning curriculum that can be weaved into the school environmental sciences subject, using relevant education theory and pedagogical practices.
Chef Thomas's passion for cooking began in his grandmother’s kitchen in Kerala. He worked at the three Michelin-starred La Berenardin in New York City before returning to India to helm the kitchen at Olive Bar and Kitchen in Mumbai and joining The Bombay Canteen as Chef Partner in 2014. In 2022, Chef Thomas founded The Locavore, a platform committed to championing a local Indian food movement and doing good through food. The Locavore achieves its mission through thoughtful storytelling, organizing curated events and travel experiences, highlighting the work of conscious producers, and building purpose-driven communities through projects.
Dr Theyiesinuo Keditsu is an indigenous feminist, poet, academic, folklorist, writer and educator. She has published two books of poetry, Sopfünuo and Wake and contributed to a number of anthologies & journals in her creative & academic capacities. She has authored a children’s illustrated story book Ukepenuopfü: An Angami Folktale Reimagined. She advocates for the revival of Indigenous Naga textiles and women's narratives through her popular Instagram avatar @mekhalamama. She has over 16 years of teaching experience and is currently an assistant professor in Kohima College, Kohima, Nagaland.
Tara Krishnaswamy is a political activist and co-founder of Citizens for Bengaluru (CfB), a citizen-led group in Bangalore that works towards creating better governance and civic engagement, and Political Shakti, a non-partisan volunteer collective for increased women’s representation. Tara has been a vocal advocate for transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in government decision-making processes. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as The Wire, The News Minute, Hindustan Times and more.
Suresh Jayaram is an artist, art historian, arts administrator, and curator from Bangalore. He is the Founder, Director of Visual Art Collective/1.Shanthiroad Studio. He is involved in art practice, urban mapping, archiving, curation, and arts education. His keen interest in environmental and urban developmental issues influences his work. He has worked on the horticultural history of Mysore state and Bangalore city, edited a book on GH Krumbiegal "Whatever he touched he adorned" (2010), and authored Bangalore's Lalbagh - A Chronicle of the Garden and the City in 2021. Currently, he is working on a book on Cubbon Park.
Sundar Sarukkai has written in many genres including academic books, plays, newspaper articles, books for children as well as novels. He has taught philosophy for three decades and his written oeuvre consists of eleven authored and co-authored books, as well as many edited volumes. Among his other affiliations, he has been a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, as well as Visiting Faculty at the Indian Institute of Science. He is the founder of the Barefoot Philosophers, driven by the belief that it is necessary and possible to spread philosophical thinking to the larger society.
Sohnee Harshey is a feminist researcher and aspiring educator. Currently, she leads the communication strategy work at Nirantar and The Third Eye in New Delhi. Prior to this, Sohnee was part of the founding team of Economic and Political Weekly’s digital initiative Engage where she was involved in creating new knowledge formats to demystify social sciences research.
Sharanya is a writer and editor currently based in New Delhi, India. She writes about food, language, and the commodification of culture. She is an editor at Vittles, a food and culture publication based between the United Kingdom and India. She is currently working on a book of essays. Her work is available on her website: https://www.sharanyadeepak.com/
When she was eight, Samhita Arni started writing and illustrating her first book. The Mahabharata - A Child's View went on to be published in seven language editions and sell over 60,000 copies. Samhita's second book, Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel developed in collaboration with Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar, was on the New York Times Bestseller list for Graphic Novels. She is also the author of a mythological thriller, The Missing Queen, and The Prince, a work of historical fiction set in South India. The Prince won the 2020 Neev Book Prize. In 2021, India Today magazine listed Samhita as one of the "The Next 100 Young Achievers" who symbolize India Tomorrow. Samhita is the Creative Director for the Starlight Effect, and lives in Bangalore with her two cats, Chutki and Zen.
Rituparna (they/she) is a queer rights activist, storyteller based out of Assam. Rituparna is the Founder & Director at Akam Foundation working on education & gender justice. She has been advocating for free, community libraries as feminist spaces ensuring right to read for all. She has been actively mobilising & organising the queer community in Assam with a focus on rural areas & small towns. Rituparna is instrumental in building Chandraprabha Saikiani Feminist Library & Resource Centre as a feminist action hub in Upper Assam.
Puthiya Purayil Sneha is a researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS),Bengaluru, India. Her areas of interest and work include digital media and cultures, higher education and access to knowledge. Her recent work includes writing on the digital turn in archival practices in India, and exploratory research and collaborative work on mapping digital language practices and efforts to create a multilingual internet.
Nisha Susan (The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook, 2020) is a writer and editor. She grew up in India, Nigeria and Oman and lives in Bangalore. She is the co-founder of two award-winning media companies, The Ladies Finger and Grist Media. She currently writes Cheap Thrills, a column on millennials, time and obsessions for Mint Lounge. She was formerly Features Editor, Tehelka magazine and also commissioning editor for Yahoo! Originals, a longform destination for Yahoo! India. Her non-fiction is focused on culture, gender and politics. Her fiction has been published by n+1, Caravan, Penguin, Zubaan and others, and often explores the intimacy and strangeness that the internet has brought to India.
Dr Meera Baindur is a philosopher and has a wide-ranging area of interests in the areas of Indian Philosophy, and Environmental Humanities. She is an associate professor and program head for India studies in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in RV University Bangalore. Her research includes topics in Indian Philosophy, and environmental humanities such as conceptualisation of nature in Indian thought, ecological and environmental ethics, religion and environment, environmental ethics, and sustainability issues. More broadly her research currently is around lived concepts of Indian philosophy including place, aesthetics, decoloniality, ecofeminism and gender issues.
Krish Ashok is not a chef but cooks daily. He is not a scientist, but he can explain science with easy-to-understand clarity. He trained to be an electronic engineer but is now a software engineer. He learnt to cook from the women in his family, who can make the perfectly fluffy idli without lecturing people on lactobacilli and pH levels. He likes the scientific method not because it offers him the ability to bully people with knowledge, but because it confidently lets him say, 'I don't know, let me test it for myself.' When he is not cooking, he's usually playing subversive music on the violin or cello. He lives in Chennai with a wife, who sagely prevents him from buying more gadgets for the kitchen, and a son, who has the flora and fauna in the neighbourhood terrorized.
Kiran Keswani is Co-founder, Everyday City Lab that focuses on design, research and teaching on public spaces. Prior to setting up the lab, Kiran practised as an architect and urban designer for over 20 years. She has been researching ashwath kattes as a neighbourhood community space since 2015. She has taught urban design studios at CEPT University and open courses at Azim Premji University. Recently, the Lab has developed an online portal - Decoding Everyday www.decodingveryday.com – that invites citizens to share stories from their neighbourhoods towards building an inclusive city.
Dr Indira Chandrasekhar is a scientist, fiction writer, literary curator and founder and principal editor of Out of Print magazine that publishes work bearing a connection to the Indian subcontinent. An anthology marking ten years of the magazine was co-published with Context Books in 2020 and reissued in April 2023. She is co-editor of the anthology Pangea, and a collection of her short stories Polymorphism was brought out by HarperCollins.
Harini Nagendra is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, and a well-known public speaker and writer on nature and sustainability. Her non-fiction books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, and two books co-authored with Seema Mundoli – So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities, which received the 2020 Publishing Next Awards for best English non-fiction book in India, and was featured on the 2021 Green Literature Festival’s honor list. The Bangalore Detectives Club is her first crime fiction novel. Harini lives in Bangalore with her family, in a home filled with maps. She loves trees, mysteries, and traditional recipes.
Gurumurthy Kasinathan is one of the founders of IT for Change. Guru leads projects in the area of education, including in research, demonstration projects, systemic teacher education reform and policy advocacy. His areas of expertise include ICT integration in school education, teacher education and pre-service teacher education. He also works in the areas of school leadership and free and open digital technologies. He was earlier with Azim Premji Foundation, where he was deputed to work in the ‘Policy Planning Unit’ in the Karnataka education department. He has been a visiting faculty at TISS Mumbai and Hyderabad for their 'Education Leadership and Management' and "ICT and Education" courses.
Elizabeth is a chef turned food researcher, writer and an advocate for sustainable food systems. She is the co-founder of Edible Issues, a collective that is fostering thought and conversation on the Indian Food System, and the founder of Saving Grains, an upcycling food initiative inspired by the historically circular relationship between brewers and bakers.
Bidisha works as a projects manager and coordinates research in Zubaan. She’s previously worked on peace-building, conflict resolution, gender-based violence and livelihood issues with women’s collectives in Northeast India and has experience with state human rights commissions, focusing on police and state impunity. However, she’d rather spend her time cooking thekera tenga with fish or making a mean smoked pork curry with bhut jolokia and lai xaak. She’s currently co-editing a book on visual documentation practices in Northeast India and is working on a chapter on indigenous feminist responses to citizenship rights in the Northeast.
Berty Ashley is a Molecular Geneticist at the Dystrophy Annihilation Research Trust, Bengaluru. When he is not busy doing his research, he can be usually seen at a concert playing the guitar, keyboards and drums, or at a quiz. He and his team have won the first India Coffee Board Coffee Quiz. He has been the senior content editor for the south Indian version of Kaun Banega Crorepati. He is the author of the popular ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning’ quiz in the Hindu Sunday Magazine and published a collection of these quizzes in his book ‘Quizzes for Quirky Minds’. Berty and his partner Akhila Phadnis have gone on to co-author a series of 7 quiz books. He is known for his fun and work-outable quizzes which are usually filled with puns and bad jokes.
Banashree Banerjee is an architect, urban planner, researcher, and teacher. She works as an independent consultant and as Senior Housing and Urban Management Expert at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Rotterdam. She has practiced and written extensively on participatory planning and improvement of housing environments in several Asian cities. She actively supports and proposes regeneration of streets and public open spaces for making cities and neighbourhoods liveable.
Asha Nehemiah is a popular author with children of all ages from 3-12 years. Wonderfully funny characters get into wacky adventures in her stories. Her best-loved mysteries include The Mystery of The Secret Hair Oil Formula, The Mystery of the Silk Umbrella and the short stories from Zigzag and The Boy whose Nose was Rose.
Archana Pidathala is the author of two cookbooks Five Morsels of Love (2018) and Why Cook (2022). Her book Five Morsels of Love won the 2017 Gourmand World Cookbook Award. She is also the founder of Five Morsels Press, an independent publishing house based in Bangalore, India.
Aravind Jayan is from Trivandrum, Kerala. He is the winner of the 2017 Toto Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2021. His first novel, Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2022. He lives in Bangalore.
Annie Zaidi is the author of ‘City of Incident,’ ‘Prelude to a Riot’ which received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020), and the editor of ‘Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing’. She received the Nine Dots Prize in 2019 for an essay that was developed into ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation’. Other published work includes a novella ‘Gulab’, a collection of short stories ‘Love Stories # 1 to 14’, and a collection of essays ‘Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales’.
Abhishek Anicca is a writer, poet, performer and activist. He identifies as a person with locomotor disability and chronic illness which shapes his creative endeavours. He has written on disability and illness for several publications and his poetry has been widely published in Hindi and English. He uses spoken word poetry and solo performances as a tool of activism. He edits Dislang, a magazine that uses personal narratives of persons with disabilities to resist different forms of ableism. His first book, a collection of personal essays on disability and illness tentatively titled 'The body comes first' is scheduled for release in late 2023.
No. 197/36, 2nd Main Road, Sadashivanagar,
Bengaluru 560080, Karnataka, India
