#ChangeMakers: Celebrating 50 years of SCMSophia in Arts and Media

Aniketh Mendonca is a multipotentialite by nature. He has been involved in a variety of things over the last decade. His education includes studying science, humanities, hospitality and media. His career with media began in a startup where he took on various roles; after which, he moved to a digital marketing agency that catered to brands like NBA, Sony Sports Network and IPL. In the last three years, Aniketh has ventured into the development sector, beginning with the Gandhi Fellowship wherein he worked on improving the quality of education in Government Primary Schools in Uttarakhand. During that time, he initiated a project to use sports to inculcate life skills in school children which was projected to impact nearly 50,000 children. He is currently working with ELMS Sports Foundation to improve Physical Education in schools. He intends to use his varied skillset and experience to impact the lives of many in the future, especially through sports!

Aparna Shukla is a journalist, social worker and storyteller on the move, who finds homes in communities at every stop. She tells stories and local narratives from rural communities about women and climate change through the Internews Earth Journalism for Climate Change Resilience grant. When she not directing and producing programs for a local community radio station in Tamil Nadu, she is training a group of young community journalists in Vilundamavadi, a small coastal village in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu. The journalists are on their way to produce the first copy of Coastal Watch, a community run local newsletter which tells stories of women, farmers and fishermen, the inhabitants of the coast who are prone to disasters.

Dilshad Master has worked in the media and entertainment space for over 22 years and has several television channel launches to her credit. Her last held broadcasting responsibility was as COO of UTV Entertainment and prior to that she was the Senior Vice President of National Geographic Channel and The History Channel, heading marketing and programming. As Senior Vice President of STAR TV, she was responsible for the launch of the STAR brand in UK. Her stints in senior positions at STAR TV, National Geographic Channel, and UTV Entertainment saw her gain deep insight into branding and positioning products in the entertainment space. “Of all the TV channels I worked with, the stint I enjoyed the most was at National Geographic Channel. As the head of programming and marketing, I devised show concepts and marketing strategies that were more ‘glocal’ in appeal – local connect with a global outlook. It’s always difficult to pick one marketing strategy that works around the world, and my main aim was to ensure that the marketing strategies and communication collaterals we received from Washington made sense to the Indian viewer. Often, we simply had to tank the strategies we got and re-create them in an Indian context” she says. “The traveler in me began to quibble when I realized that sitting behind a desk while at Nat Geo wasn’t cutting it for me. I didn't want to send production crews across India, I wanted to go myself; I didn't want to select locations best for the camera, I wanted to see them first-hand. I then I realized it was really very simple to do that. I quit. I took up my next best passion after TV – adventure travel. Today I sit on the board of Outward Bound India-Himalaya, and as head of operations and business development, I provide students and professionals an opportunity to get out of their comfort zones and into the wilderness to explore their true potential.” Dilshad has led treks to Everest Base Camp, tackled Grade 5 rapids on the wild Zanskar river in Ladakh, canoed in the back-waters of Cambodia and is the first and only female to ever lead a civilian trek to the Siachen Glacier – all of this after surviving cancer. She counts the Siachen Glacier trek as one of her most amazing adventures: “It’s an amazing sheet of undulating white, with 40% less oxygen, no trees, just the dense black Karakoram range and deep blue skies. It’s a surreal world and our soldiers there are probably some of the toughest in the world” she says. Dilshad loves writing about her travels and uses social media tools to urge friends to get off their behinds and see the world; savours her glass of Merlot; is constantly on the lookout for the perfect trekking shoes; her Oakleys and she can never be parted; her favourite funny movies are Cliff Hanger and Vertical Limits (“though I'm guessing they weren't meant to be funny”), and she’s aiming to get back to swimming 36 lengths of a full sized pool someday. Dilshad has a Masters in Telecommunications Management from Michigan State University, USA.

Durga Raghunath has spent over 15 years in the media industry. Hers is a career that has been shaped by digital technology, story-telling and trying to solve media business problems. She began in Book Publishing with HarperCollins in New York and then c0-founded Juggernaut Books, a publishing company focussed on reading and writing on the smartphone. She has also spent over ten years in the news industry during which she launched Firspost, India's first exclusively digital newsroom and later became the CEO Digital of Network18 Group and more recently Indian Express Group. She is currently Senior Vice President at Zomato Media, a food-tech unicorn, where she oversees Growth for 24 countries.

Jerry Pinto "Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award and Windham-Campbell Prize , Jerry Pinto has written several books, written television scripts, edited a travel dotcom, and contributed articles and columns to several magazines and newspapers. He is the author of the novels Murder in Mahim (2017) and Em and the Big Hoom (2012; winner of the Hindu Prize and the Crossword Book Award), and the non-fiction book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (2006; winner of the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema). He has translated several books from Marathi; his first translation from Hindi is expected shortly. He is a member of the board of the non-governmental organisation, Meljol, which works in the sphere of child rights; and the People's Free Reading Room & Library. He is a commissioning editor for Speaking Tiger Books."

Jeroo Mulla "Former Head of Department of SCM, Jeroo Mulla has been teaching Photography and Film Appreciation for 40 years. During this time she has also supervised over 100 student documentary film productions. She was recently honoured with the Prof. Satish Bahadur Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contribution to Film Education in South Asia by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad at the Alpaviraam South Asia Film Festival. In 2007 she was the only woman among 10 other awardees who was honoured with a Fellowship and a Gold Medal by the Association of Business Communicators of India in recognition of a long and distinguished career in communication practice, and for having exhibited personal and professional qualities that have served as a role model for practitioners. Apart from teaching she is also an accomplished BharataNatyam exponent who has trained under the renowned guru, Acharya Parvatikumar. In 2010 she served as a Jury member for the National Film Awards. She was also on the Selection Committee for MIFF, the International Children’s Film Festival Hyderabad, and for the Childrens' secton of MAMI. She was appointed to the Film Censor Board as an Advisory Panel member in 1987 where she served for three years. "

Kajri Babbar has been a part of Ekjute Theatre Group since the age of 8 and has since performed in many successful plays. She finished her SCM diploma in 2016 and achieved a scholarship for Masters in Film Directing at Arts University Bournemouth, United Kingdom. In the UK, Kajri made several documentaries and short films that aimed at initiating a debate on some of the most pressing social issues. Some of it has been selected and screened at ‘Student Oscars’ and The Cannes Film Festival. This year in July, the British Council selected Kajri as one of the four Future Leaders of India by the British Council. She will be attending a fully sponsored and paid Leadership and Development programme at the University of Cambridge. Also attend British Parliament and get mentored by The Elders (A group started by Nelson Mandela consisting of retired Statesmen, Presidents, PMs and UN Secretaries)

Maya Mirchandani is an award winning Indian journalist who now teaches Media Studies and Broadcast News at India’s premier Liberal Arts institution, Ashoka University. She focuses on principles and practice of conflict journalism in an environment where free speech, debate and dissent are increasingly challenged, condemned, or silenced. Maya moved to research and teaching after over two decades with NDTV, India’s pioneering private news network where she reported and anchored prime time shows on Indian Foreign policy and national politics. Maya has won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism twice, the Red Ink Award for Reporting on Human Rights as well as the Exchange for Media Broadcast Journalism Award for best International Affairs reporting for her reportage of Indian foreign policy, ethnic conflict in Kashmir, Sexual violence as a weapon of war in Bastar and post war reconstruction in Sri Lanka, respectively. Maya is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Delhi based Observer Research Foundation, leading research on ‘Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism’ (P/CVE), De-radicalization, and the impact of Hate Speech and Misinformation on violence and terrorism. As part of this research, she now chairs an annual conference that brings together a cohort of international researchers, practitioners and activists to evolve new frameworks to tackle social and political violence. Tackling Insurgent Ideologies held its second edition in August 2019. Maya continues her journalism independently, with a regular video blog called Wide Angle, and writes columns for TheWire.in . For Maya, the doors of reporting haven’t always open up peacefully. She survived a suicide bomb attack at President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s election rally in 1999, reported on 9/11 as the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York and survived pro government mobs attacking the media during the Anti-Mubarak protests in Cairo, Egypt. From Moscow to Washington DC, Cairo to Islamabad, Freetown, Sierra Leone to Rangoon, and several places in between, Maya has traveled extensively, always in search of a good story to tell. Today those stories enrich her teaching in the classroom.

Minnie Vaid wears many hats- journalist (both print and television), documentary film maker, author, writer/researcher, television professional and creative producer for feature films. She has authored four books, viz, A Doctor to Defend: the Binayak Sen Story, Iron Irom: Two Journeys, The Ant in the Ear of the elephant, and Those magnificent women and their flying machines, Isro’s mission to Mars’ which were all well- received and reviewed. Over the last 25 years, she has produced, directed, and scripted over 30 films and television programs, some of which have won national and international awards. As a television journalist with Newstrack in the early Nineties, she was known to have a knack for uncovering the most unusual of stories and executing them with flair and boldness. Later she produced ROOTS, a fortnightly television program on Business India Television on social issues in India. For the film Nowhere to hide, she and her team filed exclusives from insurgency areas such as the North-eastern state of Manipur. ROOTS won the 1stAsian television award at Singapore for the Best documentary. From 1997-2000 she worked at Star Plus as an Executive Producer, and briefly also as Commissioning Editor, supervising content for fiction and non-fiction programs. Minnie formed her own company, Little Doc Productions, in 2000 and work as an independent film-maker and producer, handling all aspects from ideation to research to scripting to production of a documentary film/ television program as also to negotiations with channels over acquisition and telecast; taking it to festivals and public screenings, this has been part of my normal work profile in recent years. She continues to do this today, along with writing non-fiction books. Minnie also makes short films for edutainment/Corporate Social Responsibility purposes. In 2008, she joined Mumbai Mantra, the film company of the corporate Mahindra and Mahindra, where she was Creative Producer heading the creative department of the company, dealing with commissioned writers and in-house writers, organising script labs and managing a host of other activities. She has also provided consultancy services related to creative supervision and ideation for scripts for feature films for a Dutch-based company, Pardesi Films, for a period of two years from 2009-2011.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer from Mumbai whose work spans non-fiction, fiction, film, writing, sound installation, acting, music videos and digital art to explore themes of urban life, popular culture, love, desire and feminism. Her work has been broadcast internationally, shown at the Tate Modern, The Wellcome Collection and the National Gallery of Modern Art and is taught in universities around the world. In 2012 Time Out Mumbai listed her as one of 10 people to change the way Indians watch films. Her work as a director includes the landmark documentaries Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Morality TV aur Loving Jehad, Where’s Sandra, Partners in Crime and several more, the cutting edge prime time TV series Connected Hum Tum on Zee TV, and the music videos Love in the Garden of Consent and Superhit Consent Lavani. She is the writer of the feature Khamosh Pani, the comic Priya’s Mirror, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle, and several documentaries including Skin Deep. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published in books, popular periodicals as well as academic journals. She writes the popular weekly column Paronormal Activity. In 2015, she founded Agents of Ishq, India’s best loved website about sex, love and desire for young Indians.

Poulomi Basu is an Indian transmedia artist, photographer and activist. Widely published and exhibited, her work explores the way in which the formation of identity becomes entwined with geopolitics, revealing the hidden power structures buried deep within our societies. In 2018 her forthcoming book Centralia was recognised through the award of the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant Main Prize. A Magnum Foundation Social Justice Fellow and grantee, Poulomi is known for advocating the rights of women through her work and in 2019 Amnesty International noted her as an 'important and brilliant human rights activist’. She also featured on ‘The Conversation’ (BBC World Service) alongside Lynsey Addario as one of the most significant contemporary war photographers. Her immersive Virtual Reality films, Blood Speaks, are collected and distributed by the Tribeca Film Institute.

P Sainath Ramon Magsaysay Award winner and former Rural Affairs Editor at The Hindu, P Sainath was also the first reporter in the world to win Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize and the first Indian reporter to win the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Prize for human rights journalism. The B.D. Goenka Award winner for Excellence in Journalism, his landmark book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought is still a bestseller and being used as a teaching aid at over a hundred universities worldwide. Sainath is perhaps the most influential voice in the public discourse on agriculture, in particular with his ground-breaking work on farmer suicides. Sainath was the journalist who first established the scale of the disaster, locating it within a larger — policy-driven — agrarian crisis afflicting the peasantry. In this, as in his previous work, Sainath sets the agenda for investigative rural reporting. His latest project, the People’s Archive of Rural India launched on Dec. 20, 2014. It aims at capturing the ‘everyday lives of everyday people’ – their labour, languages, livelihoods, arts, crafts and many other aspects of rural India. Sainath’s association with SCM is over 3 decades old. He teaches Journalism and Media ethics at the department.

Reema Kagti began her career as an assistant director with leading Bollywood directors Farhan Akhtar (Dil Chahta Hai, Lakshva), Ashutosh Gowariker (Laggan), Honey Irani (Arman).She made her debut as director with the critically acclaimed Honeymoon Travel Pvt. Ltd. (2007), which was followed by Talaash (2012) and more recently Gold. Reema is also a scriptwriter collaborating on various films that include Gully Boy, Dil Dhadakne Do, Zindagi na Milegi Dobara. More recently Reema alongwith friend Zoya Akthar launched their own production house Tiger Baby productions. The critically acclaimed and successful web series Made in Heaven was also produced under their banner.

Richa Chadda debuted with the film Oye Lucky! Lucky! Oye! Her major breakthrough was the lead role in the gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur which also earned her a Filmfare award. Richa received a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival for her role in Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan. She also starred in the international production Love Sonia. Apart from various roles in mainstream cinema, Richa has also been acting in the digital space in various shows including Excel entertainment's show Inside Edge. Her most recent release is Section 375 directed by Ajay Bahl

Shalini Singh is a multiple award-winning journalist, who completed the prestigious Nieman fellowship in journalism at Harvard University last year. Her two full-time stints before that were as a Principal Correspondent for the Hindustan Times newspaper and The Week magazine in Delhi. She has been described by Elle magazine in 2013 as “a headliner, one of journalism’s new guard that asks difficult questions, risks life and limb, and will stop at nothing for the truth.” On a Centre for Science and Environment fellowship that took her to Goa in 2010, she exposed the illegal mining in the state and devastation caused from unplanned tourism. In Odisha a year later, while still with the Hindustan Times, she wrote about a beleaguered community standing up to the South Korean giant POSCO. In a span of four years, Shalini was the recipient of the three biggest awards in environmental journalism including The Indian Express’ Ramnath Goenka award in 2013 and the first Cushrow Irani Prize given by The Statesman newspaper in 2011. Her citation for the prestigious Prem Bhatia award in 2012 commended her for her “vigilance, humane perspective and tenacity to pursue the issues that matter”. Furthering her commitment to help the unheard to tell their stories, Shalini teamed up with the legendary journalist P. Sainath to start People’s Archive of Rural India in 2014. A living repository on the everyday lives of everyday people. A native of Delhi, Shalini graduated in Economics from Sri Venkateswara College a in 2002 and did her SCM at Sophia Polytechnic Mumbai, one of India’s leading mass communication schools, in 2003-04.