Mayank Austen Soofi | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Writer, blogger, and photojournalist |
Known for | Delhiwale |
Website | www |
Mayank Austen Soofi is a Delhi-based Indian writer, blogger and photojournalist, who writes columns for Hindustan Times and Mint on culture, food and literary landscapes of Delhi.
He is best known for his website and blog, Delhiwale, a multifaceted guide of the city, that has been praised as being "the most compelling guide to India's capital" by (The Independent [1] and "a one-man encyclopedia of the city" by Time Out Delhi. [2]
Soofi was born in Nainital in the mountains of Uttarakhand and moved to Delhi around 2004. [3] He uses 'Austen' as his middle name as a tribute to the author Jane Austen, about whom he often blogs. [4] [5] His writings were featured in Volume 4 of "Penguin Book of New Writing from India" published by Penguin. [6]
In 2011, he published four alternative guidebooks to the city of Delhi: The Delhi Walla - Portraits, Delhi Food, Delhi Hangouts and Delhi Monuments. [7] His latest book Nobody Can Love You More , published in 2012 by Penguin Books, deals with the life of a 'kotha', Hindi for brothel, in Delhi's largest red-light district, G. B. Road, which is home to 5,000 sex workers. [8] [9] [10]
Also well known for his popular columns on Delhi in the city supplement of Hindustan Times titled "The Delhiwalla", [11] Soofi now writes a column, "Delhi's Belly", for the weekend supplement of the business newspaper Mint. [3] [12]
He has initiated many projects, including Mission Delhi, which aims to profile 1% of Delhi's 14 million people, [13] and a blog dedicated to Arundhati Roy's debut novel, The God of Small Things, and to its readers. He recently started a reading club called The Delhi Proustians, which centers around the French novelist Marcel Proust and his seven volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. [14]
Khushwant SinghFKC was an Indian author, lawyer, diplomat, journalist and politician. His experience in the 1947 Partition of India inspired him to write Train to Pakistan in 1956, which became his most well-known novel.
Tilak Nagar is a suburban area and commercial hub in the district of West Delhi, Delhi, India.
Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah is the dargah (mausoleum) of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Situated in the Nizamuddin West area of Delhi, the dargah is visited by thousands of pilgrims every week. The site is also known for its evening qawwali devotional music sessions.
Jai Arjun Singh is an Indian freelance writer and journalist based in New Delhi. He has written for Yahoo! India, Business Standard, The Hindu, The Man, Tehelka, Outlook Traveler, The Sunday Guardian and the Hindustan Times, among other publications. His book about the making of the cult comedy film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was published by HarperCollins India in 2010. He has also edited The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies Do to Writers, an anthology of original film-related essays for Tranquebar. He writes a popular blog called Jabberwock. He has contributed a story, "Milky Ways", in a book edited by Jaishree Mishra "Of Mothers and Others".
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi was an Indian Urdu language poet, author, critic, and theorist. He is known for ushering modernism to Urdu literature. He formulated fresh models of literary appreciation that combined Western principles of literary criticism and subsequently applied them to Urdu literature after adapting them to address literary aesthetics native to Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Some of his notable works included Sher-e-Shor Angez (1996), Ka’i Chand The Sar-e Asman (2006), The Mirror of Beauty (2013), and The Sun that Rose from the Earth (2014). He was also the editor and publisher of the Urdu literary magazine Shabkhoon.
Anupama Vinod Chopra (née Chandra) is an Indian author, journalist and film critic who served as the festival director of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival from 2015 to 2023. She is also the founder and editor of the now-defunct digital platform Film Companion, which offered a curated look at cinema with an emphasis on Indian film. She has written several books on Indian cinema and has been a film critic for NDTV and India Today, as well as the Hindustan Times. She also hosted a weekly film review show, The Front Row With Anupama Chopra, on Star World. She won the 2000 National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema for her first book Sholay: The Making of a Classic. Chopra joined the Indian iteration of the film journalism outlet The Hollywood Reporter in 2024, launched domestically in the same year by the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group.
Sadia Dehlvi was a Delhi-based activist, writer and a columnist with the daily newspaper, the Hindustan Times, and frequently published in Frontline and Urdu, Hindi and English newspapers and magazines. She was a devotee of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz of Ajmer and Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi. She criticized radical interpretations of Islam and called for a pluralistic understanding of Islam. She produced and scripted documentaries and television programs, including Amma and Family (1995), starring Zohra Sehgal, a veteran stage actor.
Navtej Singh Sarna is an Indian author, columnist, diplomat and former Indian Ambassador to the United States. He previously served as the High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom, and the Ambassador to Israel.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is an Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator.
G.B. Road,Garstin Bastion Road, is a road running from Ajmeri Gate to Lahori Gate in Delhi, India. It is a large red-light district. It has several hundred multi-storey brothels and there are estimated to be over 1,000 sex workers. It is lined with two or three-storey buildings that have shops on the ground floor. About twenty of these buildings have about 100 brothels on the first floor that open at night after the shops at ground level close. It is the biggest red light area in Delhi.
Barakhamba, also known as Barakhamba Monument, is a 14th-century tomb building from the Tughlaq period that is located in New Delhi, India. Barakhamba means '12 Pillars' in Urdu and Hindi languages. The name has also been used for an upscale modern metro road named the "Barakhamba road" in Connaught Place at the heart of the city.
Shahpur Jat is an urban village located near Hauz Khas, in the South Delhi district of Delhi, India.
Nobody Can Love You More: Life in Delhi's Red Light District is a 2012 book by the Indian writer and photojournalist Mayank Austen Soofi.
S.M. Yunus Jaffery was an Indian scholar of the Persian language. He was from Delhi, India.
Madan Mahatta (1932–2014) was an Indian photographer. He was mainly interested in architectural photography. He worked closely with architects including Raj Rewal, Charles Correa, Habib Rahman, and Achyut Kanvinde. Many of his works are in black-and-white. Mahatta died of cancer on 5 March 2014.
Fahad Shah is an Indian journalist from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. He is the founder and editor of the news magazine The Kashmir Walla. He was a recipient of a Human Rights Press Award in 2021.
Minto Bridge is a railway underbridge in New Delhi.
Tolstoy Marg is a road in the Connaught Place, New Delhi area.