A humorist is an intellectual who uses humor, or wit, in writing or public speaking, but is not an artist who seeks only to elicit laughter. Humorists are distinct from comedians, who are show business entertainers whose business is to make an audience laugh. It is possible to play both roles in the course of a career. A raconteur is one who tells anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way.
The Times of India, also known by its abbreviation TOI, is an Indian English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the fourth-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest selling English-language daily in the world. It is the oldest English-language newspaper in India, and the second-oldest Indian newspaper still in circulation, with its first edition published in 1838. It is nicknamed as "The Old Lady of Bori Bunder", and is an Indian "newspaper of record".
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple is a Delhi-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, was published in 1956, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has authored more than 500 short stories, essays, and novels which includes 69 books for children. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
The Statesman is an Indian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper founded in 1875 and published simultaneously in Kolkata, New Delhi, Siliguri and Bhubaneswar. It incorporates and is directly descended from The Friend of India, founded in 1818. It is owned by The Statesman Ltd and headquartered at Statesman House, Chowringhee Square, Kolkata, with its national editorial office at Statesman House, Connaught Place, New Delhi. It is a member of the Asia News Network.
Raj Kamal Jha is an Indian newspaper editor and novelist writing in English. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Indian Express. He has written six novels that have been translated into more than 12 languages. His journalism and fiction have won national and international awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize; Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize; Tata Literature Live! Book of The Year; the International Press Institute India Award for Excellence in Journalism; and the Mumbai Press Club Journalist of the Year award. In September 2021, Jha was awarded Editor of The Year by the India Chapter of the International Advertising Association Annual Leadership Awards.
Jayanta Mahapatra was an Indian poet. He is the first Indian poet to win a Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry. He was the author of poems such as "Indian Summer" and "Hunger", which are regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature. He was awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian honour in India in 2009, but he returned the award in 2015 to protest against rising intolerance in India.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Kamala Surayya , popularly known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das, was an Indian poet in English as well as an author in Malayalam from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the poems and explicit autobiography. She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics including women's issues, child care, politics, etc. Her liberal treatment of female sexuality, marked her as an iconoclast in popular culture of her generation. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at Jehangir Hospital in Pune.
Pritish Nandy is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, parliamentarian, media and television personality, animal activist and maker of films, TV and streaming content. He was a parliamentarian in the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra, elected on a ticket from the Shiv Sena. He is the author of forty books of poetry in English and has translated poems by other writers from Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi into English as well as a new version of the Isha Upanishad. Apart from these, he has authored books of stories and non fiction as well as three books of translations of classical love poetry from Sanskrit. He was Publishing Director of The Times of India Group and Editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Independent, and Filmfare in the 1980s, all simultaneously. He has held six exhibitions of his paintings and calligraphy. He founded Pritish Nandy Communications Ltd, the content company, in 1993. He also founded People for Animals, India's first animal rights NGO which is currently run by co-founder Maneka Gandhi as chairperson.
Ajit Ninan was an Indian political cartoonist, best known for drawing the Centrestage series of cartoons in India Today magazine and Ninan's World in the Times of India.
Thayil Jacob Sony George is an Indian writer and biographer who received a Padma Bhushan award in 2011 in the field of literature and education. The fourth of eight siblings, TJS was born in Kerala, India to Thayil Thomas Jacob, a magistrate, and Chachiamma Jacob, a homemaker. Although his roots are in Thumpamon, Kerala, he lives in Bangalore and Coimbatore with his wife Ammu. He has a daughter, Sheba Thayil and a son, Jeet Thayil. American TV journalist Raj Mathai is his nephew.
Bachi Karkaria is an Indian journalist and columnist. She has served as an editor at The Times of India and has also helped create new brands for the Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd media group. She is best known for her satirical column called Erratica in the newspaper and as the author of the best selling title Dare To Dream: A Life of M.S. Oberoi.
Neelabh Banerjee is an Indian cartoonist, illustrator and comics artist. He created the character of the singing donkey Gardhab Das along with his brother cartoonist Jayanto Banerjee for the Indian children's magazine Target.
Anand Neelakantan is one of India's top selling authors with more than 14 books to his credit. Anand is also a columnist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He is known for writing mythological fiction and has authored Thirteen books in English and one in Malayalam. He has also written screenplays for popular television series in Hindi in various GEC and OTT platforms. He has been writing a column named Acute angle in the New Indian Express since 2017. Anand has acted in two Advertisement films and has also played the role of the antagonist Ettappa Naicker in the Doordarshan Television show Swaraj. He follows the style of telling stories based on the perspective of the antagonists or supporting characters of a larger work. His debut work Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2012) was based on the Indian epic Ramayana, told from the perspective of Ravana—the first book in his Ramayana series. It was followed by series of books based on characters from Mahabharata and Baahubali. His books have been translated to different languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese, English, Sinhalese, Burmese and Indonesian. Anand has written screenplays for popular Hindi television serials like Siya Ke Ram in Star TV, Mahabali Hanuman in SONY TV, Chakravarthy Ashoka in Colors TV, Sarfarosh in Netflix, Swaraj in DD National, Srimad Ramayan in Sony TV etc. He has written the story for the OTT series TAJ in Zee5
Shekhar Gurera, also known as Chander Shekhar Gurera, is an Indian editorial cartoonist, illustrator, and graphic designer. He publishes regular cartoons with comments about India's political and social trends. His daily pocket cartoons appear in several English, Hindi, and regional language daily newspapers Punjab Kesari, Hind Samachar, Jag Bani, Nava Bharat, Central ChronicleThe Pioneer, Sanmarg and Navodaya Times among others. He started his cartoon career in 1984 as a freelancer.
Jugal Kishore (1915–2012) was an Indian homoeopathic physician and the founder Director of Nehru Homoeopathic Medical College and Hospital, New Delhi, a Government of Delhi undertaking. He was honored by the Government of India, in 2012, with the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri.
Arup Kumar Datta is an Indian writer and Journalist from Guwahati, Assam. He has written 18 books for adults and 17 adventure novels for young people. In 2014 he was awarded the Life Time Achievement Honour by Association of Writers and illustrators for Children, New Delhi, the Indian chapter of the International Board of Books for Young People. He has also won numerous awards including the Shankar's Award in 1979, conferred to mark The International Year of the Child. He has been awarded the civilian award Padma Shri by Government of India in 2018.
Dhiren Bhagat (1957–1988) was an Indian journalist. His writing appeared in prominent publications of the pre-1990 era, and have been compiled in a book published by Viking. A contributor to the mainstream Indian and British media, his work was widely noticed, as was his early death at the age of 31.
