A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Some of the bios might be dated

Aahung: Aahung is a Karachi-based NGO that works on improving the sexual and reproductive health of men, women and young people. Through capacity building and information dissemination, Aahung focuses on the creation of an enabling environment in Pakistan where people have comfort with their body, are practicing healthy behaviors and are able to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights.

Aakriti: Aakriti is a vocal proud love-being-naked hairy feminist whose only mission in life is to keep learning. She is a middle-class, cis-gender, heterosexual (for now), Hindu, able-bodied woman who has had the privilege of studying quite a bit. With a background in psychology and social work, she is now, in her own imagination, doing a PhD in gender and sexuality with special emphasis on pleasure.

Aamena: Aamena has a Masters degree in Counselling Psychology from the Indian Institute of Psychology and Research, Bangalore. Her interest lies in decoding the whys of human behaviour. She also likes to travel and read. She is currently working as an Employee Relations specialist in an IT firm.

Aanchal Bhatnagar: Aanchal Bhatnagar is a Trainee Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in New Delhi, India. She is a member of the American Psychological Association and the recipient of the APA Div39 (Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy) Scholar Award 2019. Her current works include archiving the narratives of loss and psychic continuity. With a keen interest in films and mythology, she holds a discussion group in New Delhi around their varied strands.

Abdullah Erikat: Abdullah is a Junior Scientist in Genomics and Drug Discovery in metabolic diseases. Besides science, he is passionate about steering discussions on sexual and gender diversity. He enjoys writing about the entangling effect of socio-bio-political power on sexualities and gender. He likes performing arts, dancing, and languages.

Abhaya Tatavarti: Abhaya Tatavarti works in the diversity and inclusion space in Bangalore, India. A feminist before knowing what the word meant, she graduated with a B.A in International Studies. She believes that discomfort is an important process in generating change. She enjoys fitness, frankies and reading. Her favourite feminist icons range from Rihanna to Nur Jahan.

Abhishek Chaudhary: Abhishek Chaudhary aka makhee is a visual artist who works with photographs, fiction and forms of new media inquiries. You can view more of his work at www.rangeenmakhee.tumblr.com and on his instagram.

Abhiruchi Chatterjee: Abhiruchi Chatterjee is a Development Professional, and has worked at the grassroots as well as in the policy making space.Her work, cutting across the themes of gender, urbanization, development, and migration, and her experience in the remote tribal areas of Jharkhand to the decision-making seats of power in New Delhi, lend her a keen eye for inclusion of intersectional experiences and perspectives. Her formative background in academic research continues to shape her inquisitive mind. A minimalist, she believes that responsible consumerism is integral to promoting indigenous art, literature and culture.

Aditi Padiyar: Aditi Padiyar is a published writer and feminist. She writes on areas of finance, technology, thought leadership and her experiences in travelling alone as a woman. Her writings have been published in DNA, Feminism in India, National Geographic Traveller, The Alipore Post and more. She is a Media and Cultural Studies graduate from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai who has spent the last 4 years working in the higher education sphere with philanthropic liberal arts universities. She has a keen interest in feminist studies and the LGBTQ+ rights movement in India.

Aditi Rajgopal: A British-born Indian from England, she has contributed to the blog because of her interest in social issues and love for sport. Her other interests are reading, running and eating. Studying towards becoming a doctor, she is currently in Year 12 of school.

Aditi and Sunali: Aditi and Sunali are co-founders of India’s first indigenous dating app for queer people. They aspire to take AYA – As you Are to as many singles in the queer community as possible. You can reach them on asyouareindia@gmail.com

Aersh: A lone wolf in a wolf pack. An International Relations scholar researching political violence. Part time philosopher and full time procrastinator.

Aiman Khan: Before joining Nirantar in 2016 , Aiman did her post-graduation in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Her master’s thesis was ‘A Gendered Study on Access to Public Toilets in Mumbai’. As a part of Nirantar, she is a part of the action research team, which focusses on using theater as a tool, to instrument discussion on Gender and Sexuality. Her work here includes planning theater sessions with the team, documentation, and coordination with partner organisations for the research.

Aindrila Chaudhuri: An IT engineer who identifies as a sex positive, spiritual feminist. Has recently finished her post graduation in Women Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and worked as a Programme Associate at TARSHI.

Aishwarya Singh: Aishwarya Singh is a lawyer based in Mumbai. She is interested in gender and sexuality studies and its interplay with law. She is also the former founder editor of the Maya Magazine, an initiative of the LGBTQI community of Jindal Global University, Sonipat to serve as a platform for queer visibility and engagement.

Aishwarya and Reshma: Aishwarya Manjunath is a middle-school English teacher with a penchant for all things gender and mental health since 2012. She is also The Red Door’s Peaceful Warrior program advisor. Reshma Valliappan is a consultant and interventionist implementing the Peaceful Warrior program at two community schools in Pune. She is also a visiting lecturer and speaker at colleges and universities within and outside India.

Ajay Maherchandani:  A law student, with his heart beating after social theory. He perennially imagines standing at India Gate and having kulfi at 0 degree temperature or enjoying the Bombay monsoons at Marine Drive. Thinking is like breathing to him. He mixes love with ordinary day-to-day living which involves washing utensils for his lover and flirting with strangers.

Akhil Kang: Akhil Kang is a lawyer/researcher based out of Delhi and is part of Queering Dalit Collective. He writes about sex and desires at http://www.desi-underground-gay.com/

Akhil Katyal: A writer and translator based in Delhi. He finished his PhD on Sexuality and South Asia at SOAS, University of London. He currently teaches literature at Shiv Nadar University. His poetry and translations are widely published.

Alankaar Sharma: A social work educator, researcher, and practitioner focussing on sexual and gender-based violence, gender and sexuality, men and masculinities, and child abuse and protection. He has worked in India and internationally on issues such as child sexual abuse, violence against women, and sexual and reproductive health and rights; and in the USA as social work educator and researcher at two universities. He is currently doing research on sexual violence, editing an academic journal issue on ‘Men, Masculinities, and Violence’, and consults with civil society organisations on resource development and capacity building.

Alankrita Singh: The author, Alankrita Singh, is an officer of the Indian Police Service. She has interest in Gender Issues, Social Legislations, Juvenile Justice, Workplace Sexual Harassment, Violence against Women and Children, Police Investigation, Police Sub-culture and Women in Police. She is a mother and a trainer and a photographer.

Almas Shamim: Almas has trained as a public health doctor from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in Trivandrum. She has a great interest in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and feminism among Muslim women. She dreams of a world where all are equal, and works now with an international humanitarian aid organization in New Delhi.

Amit Timilsina: Amit Timilsina is a Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and Gender activist and has been advocating on these issues for over 6 years locally, nationally and also at regional and international platforms. Amit has served as President of youth led organization YUWA. Currently, Amit serves on the Board of Directors for the Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (YCSRR), is a member of the Asia Pacific Alliance for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, International Member of the youth steering committee of the Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR), and a Women Deliver Young Leader 2018.

Amrit Hallan: A professional content writer and a struggling literary writer. Cerebral palsied since birth, he thinks he knows a thing or two about the disability and hence, is working on a book on the topic. You can follow him on Twitter or find him on Facebook.

Anil Pradhan: Anil Pradhan is a PhD candidate and Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He received his MPhil and MA in English from Jadavpur University and his BA in English from Presidency University, Kolkata, India. His areas of interest include cultural studies; queer studies, literature and films; diaspora studies and literature (with focus on South Asian queer diaspora) and Indian queer literature in English. His first book of poems titled Flitting Oddments will be published soon by Writers Workshop, Kolkata, India.

Anjali: Anjali studied English Literature from Delhi University and is patiently waiting for the day someone asks for her analysis of Dickens’ Hard Times. She likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. Currently, she works at TARSHI.

An kush: An kush is presently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He has completed his Masters in Arts and Aesthetics and an MPhil in Cinema Studies from JNU. His MPhil dissertation was on Bodo digital films, music videos from Assam and its presence on social media. He was one of the recipients of the Social Media Research Grant for 2016 from The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (Sarai-CSDS), New Delhi. He has also worked as a copy-editor and his research interests are popular film forms, film history, gender, sexuality, and visual and performative art.

Anannya Chatterjee: Anannya Chatterjee is currently pursuing her Masters in Sociology, and has also recently completed her Masters in Gender Studies. She is a Bharatanatyam dancer and seeks to bring together her art and her feminist politics together. She constantly dreams of a world emancipated from power structures and when not working, she can be found sitting alone reading a book with a cup of tea, or dancing behind closed doors to random music.

Anees Rao: An engineer by day, and writer by night. His other interests include trekking, teaching, personal finance and philosophy, but the boundaries between these disparate fields often get blurred when he thinks about them. He’s been happily married for two years and lives in Pune. He blogs at www.medium.com/@completebhejafry.

Anindita Majumdar: She has recently been awarded a doctorate in Sociology from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her doctoral thesis was on commercial surrogacy and kinship, parts of which have been published in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Gender, Technology and Development, and Economic and Political Weekly.

Anisha Dutt : Anisha Dutt is a consultant with TARSHI. A human rights advocate, Anisha has previously worked in the Indian and American nonprofit world around issues of gender, violence and sexuality and has a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Rochester Institute of Technology, NY. She is also interested in alternative therapy and is currently a healing practitioner.

Anindita Sengupta: At present, she is working at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the Ohio State University (OSU) in May 2017. Her dissertation “The Desired Baby: Assisted Reproductive Technology, Secrecy, and a Cultural Account of Family Building in India” research examines assisted reproductive and genetic technologies, and the transnational fertility industry from the perspectives of family, kinship, parenthood, and reproductive justice. Her areas of research and teaching interests feminist reproductive politics, LGBTQ families, global and transnational feminism, science and feminism.

Anirban Ghosh: Storytelling fascinates Anirban as he uses his short films, documentaries and illustrations to narrate stories on gender, sexuality, human rights as well as mundane tales of growing up and the world around. A graduate in Mass Communication from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, Anirban specialized in Animation Film Design from National Institute of Design. Check out his portfolio.

Anita: An outreach worker with Vesya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP) in Maharashtra, she contributed her story to this blog.

Aniruddhan Vasudevan: Aniruddhan is a writer, translator, and performer from Chennai.He is currently doing his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. His English translation of Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan’s novel ‘Madhorubagan’ was published by Penguin India in 2013, entitled ‘One Part Woman’.

Anjora Sarangi: Anjora works as an Analyst at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business (ISB). She has studied political science at Lady Shri Ram College and at the London School of Economics. Her interests are in gender and violence, women in politics and policy making, and education. Anjora has previously interned at Feminist Approach to Technology (FAT) and Youth Ki Awaaz. She loves exploring new food and all things Harry Potter. She can be reached at

Ankit Gupta: Has worked on issues ranging from sexual and gender rights and public safety to HIV and AIDS and environmental issues. He has been closely involved with a Delhi based queer youth group. His areas of interest include disability and queer issues. Currently he works as a Junior Programme Associate – Education and Outreach at TARSHI.

Ankita Khanna: Ankita is a counselling psychologist whose most-loved interests include children, books, writing, travel and dogs. She loves to engage with the magical, and often misunderstood, narratives of children and adolescents, and aspires to create ‘safe spaces’ for their voices to be heard. She blogs about the ‘big’ things that matter to ‘little’ people at Litte Bigger. She is a consultant counselling psychologist & arts-based therapist at Children First.

Annie McCarthy: A PhD student from the Australian National University who spent a year in Delhi doing fieldwork for her Anthropology PhD, and along the way made many happy memories and equally as many mistakes trying to navigate issues of gender and sexuality in this new context.

Anne Sprinkel: Anne Sprinkel has been working at the intersection of gender and social and behaviour change for over nine years, with a focus on adolescents, sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence. She is the project director for the Tipping Point Initiative, which focuses on community-based solutions to child marriage, evidence generation in Nepal and Bangladesh, and multi-level advocacy across the globe.

Anshul Tiwari: Anshul is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Youth Ki Awaaz, which is India’s largest online platform for young people to express themselves on issues of importance. He is also a Director on the Board of  Collectively, a global platform that uses the power of positivity and collaboration to make sustainability the new norm, through stories of young people who stand against the status quo. He has been a UN awardee for innovation in crowd-sourcing and youth empowerment. He currently heads the strategic vision and expansion of Youth Ki Awaaz.

Anubhav Gupta: Anubhav is a Delhi based media professional and founder of Jeevan Trust. Having done master’s in media from India’s leading media institute at Jamia, he has worked with print, electronic and cyber media both in regular and freelance capacities.  He also enjoys anchoring and editing novels.  A published poet, avid traveler and photographer, Anubhav opened his non profit Jeevan trust in 2010 to promote socially responsible media, having worked extensively on gender and rare genetic condition called Albinism.

Anubha Sarkar: Anubha Sarkar is a final year PhD candidate at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on Bollywood in which she explores the intersections between cultural economy, cultural policy and soft power.

Anupom Kumar Hazarika: Born and raised in Golaghat, Anupom Kumar Hazarika is pursuing a PhD at Indian Institute of Technology,: :  Guwahati. His research interests include urban space, gender and sexuality studies, science fiction, and Indian writing in English. He has had poetry published in The Assam Tribune, The Eastern Today, Nagaland Page, Terror House Magazine, Spark and CC&D Magazine.

Arnab Adak: Arnab Adak is a photographer living in Kolkata, India, working on socio- documentary projects. The primary focus of his photography is to delineate various cultural, social and environmental concerns that need attention and raise awareness among the masses. His works cover gender issues, climate issues, caste issues and religious or social events that impose threat to humanity in the social platform.  He has studied mathematics and computer applications and is currently associated with a management consulting firm professionally. His works can be viewed at: https://www.arnabadak.com 

Arti Jaiman: Arti is the station director of Gurgaon Ki Awaaz Samudayik Radio, a community radio that has been a broadcast platform for local villagers and migrant workers since 2009. A journalist by training, Arti graduated with an MA in journalism from Indiana Univeristy, Bloomington. Her current interests include arts in education, democracy and freedom of expression, and stories of migration.

Artika Raj: Living and loving in Delhi, she enjoys reading, eating, watching and playing hopscotch. With a Post-Graduate degree in English Literature from Miranda House Delhi University tucked under her pyjama strings, Artika earned her last salary as Associate Editor of First City magazine, an art and culture guide to Delhi.

Arpita Bohra: Is bringing Dance Movement Therapy sessions to more people and understanding the multiple ways that healing and recovery are possible. A writer and a dance movement therapist-in-training, who holds a Masters in Counselling from TISS, Mumbai. Read more of her writings.

Arpita Das: A feminist scholar-activist, she is pursuing her PhD in gender studies at the University of Sydney. Her doctoral research focuses on intersex people in India. Her academic interests include gender, sexuality, intersexuality, disability and biopolitics. She has worked in South and Southeast Asia on gender-based violence and sexuality rights. She holds a Masters in Social Work from India and a Masters in Women’s & Gender Studies from Europe.

Arvind Narrain: Arvind Narrain is currently the Geneva Director of Arc International, an NGO which works on advocacy on LGBT issues at the international level. Prior to this assignment Arvind co-founded and worked with the Alternative Law Forum for 15 years. He is the co-editor of Because I have a Voice, Law like Love, and Nothing to Fix. As part of the ALF, Arvind was a part of the team of lawyers who litigated the constitutionality of the anti-homosexuality law in India both at the High Court and at the Supreme Court.

Arzoo: Arzoo works as an Associate in Know Your Body Know Your Rights program at The YP Foundation. She works in imparting Comprehensive sex education to adolescents in school and out of school across different locations in Delhi- NCR. Prior to this, she has carried out an independent research on health related impacts of menstrual hygiene management in slums of Mumbai among adolescent girls.

Ashima Mittal: She has a Master’s Degree in Sociology and a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She has a keen interest in the relationship between science and culture.

Ashmeet K. Bilkhu: She is a research scholar at the Centre For Women’s Development Studies. Her research interests include gender dimensions of sexuality, violence and development. She writes on issues of culture and politics.

Asia Safe Abortion Partnership: This was formed in 2008 to advance women’s sexual and reproductive rights by reducing unsafe abortions. More information can be found here.

Asilata Karandikar: She is a researcher at the Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (CEHAT), Mumbai.

Asmi: Asmi is an active BDSM practitioner, lifestyle coach based in India, a writer and a vocal, empowering person, who experiments actively with BDSM, feminism, LGBT, sexuality and erotica. She is very active in several real-world BDSM communities and has close connections with a wide spectrum of other practitioners both in India and globally. She has authored a series of 3 books about various aspects of BDSM, available on kindle. She can be reached on Facebook or via email at: asmi.uniqus@gmail.com

Barbara Lotti: A Programme Officer for Money (Economic Justice) at Mama Cash. Prior to joining Mama Cash, she was a researcher on minority language communities in Europe, and studied Classics, Italian and text linguistics.

Bharti Kannan: A dance enthusiast who needs to resume dancing, a host to the travel bug that needs a bit of a hibernation, and a body and mind that has huge affinity for chocolates and anything sweet, Bharti survives and thrives in the hope of learning and healing from life experiences.

Bishakha Datta: An Indian filmmaker and activist and a former journalist. She runs Point of View, a Mumbai based non-profit and also supports and/or serves on the board of nonprofit organizations, such as CREA, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Breakthrough: A global human rights organization. Their mission is to prevent violence against women and girls by transforming the norms and cultures that enable it. They carry out this mission by building a critical mass of change agents worldwide – the Breakthrough Generation – whose bold collective action will deliver irreversible impact on the issues of our time. Working out of centers in India and the U.S., they create innovative, relevant multimedia tools and programs – from short animations to long-term leadership training – that reach individuals and institutions where they are, inspiring and equipping them to build a world in which all people enjoy their human rights.

Breton Lalama: Breton Lalama (they/he) is a queer, trans human who combines mediums to encourage sociopolitical dialogue and bring attention to the weird parts of everyday life. They really like tomato soup. In his work, they are currently excited by explorations of identity and multiplicity. You can find their work in Harlot X Trans Sex Workers Zine, Feels Zine, Open Heart Forgery, Crush Zine, Saved By Sex Ed, Toho Journal. Breton is grateful to be part of Nightwood Theatre’s Write From The Hip cohort, 2020-2021.

Brindaalakshmi. K: Brindaalakshmi. K is a researcher, writer, advocacy and training professional working at the intersection of human rights, identities and technology. They authored the study, ‘Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary’ for the Centre for Internet & Society, as part of the Big Data for Development Network, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. They also lead workshops on consent, intersectionality and digital security.

Chayanika Shah: An optimist activist at heart, a physicist by training and a teacher by choice. She has campaigned, researched, taught and written on politics of population control, communalism, feminist studies of science, and sexuality. She has been an active member of two autonomous voluntary collectives in Mumbai – Forum Against Oppression of Women and LABIA – A Queer Feminist LBT Collective. Her co-authored books include, ‘No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy’, ‘Bharat Ki Chaap’ (a companion book for the documentary of the same name), and ‘We and Our Fertility: The Politics of Technological Intervention’.

Chandrabarna Saha: Chandrabarna Saha is currently pursuing Asia Pacific Leadership Program with the East West Center. Her field project ‘Amplified Voices~Listening Tour for Inspirational Stories’ is to hear individual life stories of women across class, caste, religion, profession, age, educational qualification surviving, losing and winning everyday battles with gender biases and inequality in South East Asia.

Damini Kulkarni:   Has a Master’s degree in Communication and Journalism. Damini has conducted gender sensitization workshops for 14- to 16-year-olds on apprehending different forms of stereotypical gender portrayals in the media. She currently works as a News Curator for Scroll.in.

Dana Burton: She is an avid fiction reader and enjoys blues dancing. Above all, she loves drinking tea and getting into conversations about life and the intricacies of affect. At the moment, Dana finds herself in an Anthropology PhD program at George Washington University. She currently thinks a lot about microbes in space and likes to imagine what it would feel like to travel across the galaxy. She appreciates any thoughts or book suggestions.

Danish Sheikh: Danish Sheikh is an assistant professor and theater practitioner based at the Jindal Global Law School. His research and writing interests are located at the intersection of law, sexuality and the humanities.

Debanuj DasGupta:  Debanuj’s current activism and research travels take him through India, UK and the US focusing on issues of national security, migration, and embodied justice. A Doctoral Candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University Debanuj co-founded the first HIV and AIDS prevention project among men-who-have-sex-with-men and gay men in Kolkata in 1994. He is the recipient of the New Voices Fellowship (Ford Foundation and Academy for Educational Development), Association of American Geographers National Awards in Disability Studies, The Space, Sexuality, and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society/Institute of British Geographers International Travel Award, and has been one of the key members of the ‘Lift the Ban Coalition’ which effectively removed the HIV ban on travel and immigration to the US in 2010. He serves in advisory capacities for several philanthropic and research bodies, and for policy formations.

Debarati Sarkar: Debarati is a research scholar and hand-embroiderer. Her writings have appeared in Women’s Web, Feminism in India, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere.

Debolina Dutta: Debolina Dutta is currently pursuing a PhD at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School. She has co-directed the documentary film We are Foot Soldiers (2011) which tells a story of the activism of children of sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata. Some of her writings are available at https://unimelb.academia.edu/DebolinaDutta

Deepa Ranganathan: Deepa Ranganathan is a brown, feminist storyteller and mother to a feline and a human. She is based out of Bangalore and is passionate about reading, writing, and telling untold stories of young feminist activists from around the world. She has recently discovered the magical world of children’s literature, and has been spending most of her time immersed in it.

Di Sands: Di Sands (she/her) lives and loves in Oakland, California, a humble guest on occupied Ohlone indigenous land. She tries to cook yummy things, watch good films, finish puzzles, please her cat, swim in circles three times a week, destroy american hegemony, and honor her late mom’s hard work to raise her. She is and always will be a sucker for a small world story, ramen soup, and a rimshot. Do reach out if you want to be in community about anti-racism, Palestinian liberation/anti-Zionism, sex & gender in sports, prison abolition, and reparations for everything.

Dipika Srivastava:  Has a keen interest and experience in training and on reproductive and sexual health related issues.With a Post Graduate Diploma in Rural Development and Management from the Institute of Engineering and Rural Technology, Allahabad, she has worked in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights for over ten years.

Disha K R: Disha K R is a Research Scholar interested in the Intersectionality of caste and gender. She is currently working on Inter-caste families and has previously worked on Dalit women’s inter-caste marriages for her M. Phil. from Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Disha Luthra: A student of Political Science, she has interned at TARSHI.

Divya Swaminathan: A computational biophysicist currently working at the University of California, Irvine. She can’t help but notice that in ten years of her academic life she is yet to work with another woman. She aspires to write about her experiences as a scientist and an expat.

Dr Jai Ranjan Ram: As an adolescent, Dr Jai Ranjan Ram always wanted to be a food critic and a travel guide. Unfortunately, his dreams of eating exotic food from all over the planet while he traveled remained unfulfilled and he chose a far less interesting career of Medicine instead. However, as a Psychiatrist with special interest in children and young people, he gets to relive the dreams and aspirations of young minds and feels blessed that he has, in his own very small way, enabled some troubled minds to gain freedom and blossom.

Dr Swarupa N Kshirsagar : Dr Swarupa N Kshirsagar is currently working in the field of public health. While pursuing her master’s degree in public health she developed an interest around the gender and rights aspects of health. A strong advocate for mental health and sexual and reproductive health and rights, she believes that we need to build society to be a safe space for conversation around these issues.  She is a photography enthusiast and a half-baked writer. Also an avid reader and movie buff, she tries to read and watch everything she comes across through the perspective of gender and consciousness of social issues because art forms are heavily influenced by contemporary society and vice versa.

Dyuti: Dyuti is a socio-legal researcher with a background in working on women’s rights and access to justice. Currently she is working with NCDHR. For her boundaries are to be pushed—be it hers, movements, organisation or societies— and she tried to do just that, with mixed results. Till you won’t move them things won’t change. It’s about the small things for her always—books, coffee, rainy days, that ten-rupee note in the recently washed jean.

dyuti: dyuti is currently a PhD researcher, at the Department of Social Anthropology at University of Sussex. Prior to that she worked as a researcher and activist on a number of issues such as Dalit and Adivasi access to public entitlements, to access to justice and gender justice. She has previously done her MPhil from Delhi School of Economics, in Sociology. It’s about the small things for her always—books, coffee, rainy days, that ten-rupee note in the recently washed jean.

Edwina Pereira : Program Director – Training, at INSA-India. She believes that all children are born to be loved and to be made able to live life to their fullest potential.

Edward Kannyo: Ph.D., teaches International Relations, Comparative Politics and Human Rights, among other courses in the Department of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology (USA). He was born and got his early education in Uganda (East Africa). He got his doctorate in Political Science from Yale University (USA).

Ekta : Ekta is currently working as a Research Assistant on a project on political participation and social media. Over the last eight years she has worked as a school Counsellor and in the development sector on the issues of gender, sexuality, education and mental health with children and young people.

Ekta and Sonam : Ekta and Sonam are currently working with Nirantar on a research project with young people. This research has stemmed from Nirantar’s work on education with young girls in the resettlement colonies of Delhi. While Ekta has done her M.A. in Psychology, Sonam has done her M.A. in Sociology. This blend of knowledge provided a stimulating combination to work together.

Elsa Marie D’Silva: Elsa Marie D’Silva (www.elsamariedsilva.com) is Founder & CEO of Safecity (www.safecity.in) that crowdmaps sexual harassment in public spaces. She is a 2015 Aspen New Voices Fellow and recipient of the 2017 Vital Voices Global Leadership Award

Empower : A Thai organization promoting rights and opportunities for sex workers for the last 30 years. Over 50,000 women have been a part of Empower since it began.

Erik Heinonen: A journalist and aid worker, Erik currently conducts research on food security and health issues for the non-profit One Acre Fund in Burundi. He also co-directs a Kenyan non-profit, the Education and Social Empowerment Program, and has previously worked on development and health projects in Moldova, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Panama and the United States. He holds a MA in International Relations from Yale University.

EroTICs India: The EroTICs project explores the intersections between sexuality, gender and digital technologies and was initiated by the Association for Progressive Communications. Point of View is the India partner of EroTICs and runs the blog: www.eroticsindia.org

Faustina Johnson: Faustina Johnson is a freelance writer and editor interested in philosophy, porn, religion, and language. When she is not working, she is cooking elaborate meals and gardening.

Flavia Agnes: A legal scholar and women’s rights lawyer who has been able to combine her legal scholarship with active litigation support to victims of domestic and sexual violence. Her widely published writings have provided a vital context for feminist jurisprudence, human rights law and gender studies in india. She is the director of majlis legal centre that is committed to the protection and promotion of women’s legal rights.

Gayatri Mohan: Gayatri Mohan is 13 years old and lives in New Delhi. She attends DPS RK Puram and loves writing. She is a feminist.

Ghausia Rashid Salam: Ghausia Rashid Salam is a development professional and feminist researcher. Their passion for science-fiction and fantasy has convinced them that other worlds are possible, and they try to build better worlds through their work and activism. Their interests include sexual violence, sexuality, SRHR and more recently, decolonising academia and development. They are more interesting in person than in awkward 100 word bios. 

Geetanjali Misra: Geetanjali Misra is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of CREA. She has worked at the activist, grant-making, and policy levels on issues of sexuality, reproductive health, gender, human rights, and violence against women. She co-founded SAKHI for South Asian Women in New York in 1989, a non-profit organisation in New York, committed to ending violence against women of South Asian origin.

Gilles Chuyen: Gilles is a French born artist who has been dancing, acting, choreographing and directing in India for the last 20 years. Passionate about colour, he travels the five continents to share love and light.

Gokul KP: Gokul KP is a B.Tech graduate hailing from Kerala and is currently working in Bangalore. He is an aspiring journalist and constantly tries to spread awareness about LGBTQ rights, feminism, and climate change. He also often writes about politics, mental health, and mainstream media. As someone who identifies as Queer, he is constantly working towards sexuality and gender inclusivity in all communities, one step at a time.

Gowthaman Saroja Ranganathan: Gowthaman Saroja Ranganathan speaks Tamil and Gibberish to cats and dogs. He loves cycling and likes to be in a classroom as a facilitator or as a student. He holds an LLM from the University of Texas at Austin where he was a Fulbright scholar, an LLM from the Azim Premji University, and an undergraduate degree from the National Law School at Bengaluru.

Gram Vaani: Gram Vaani believes in using appropriate technology and people driven processes to build participatory media networks that can empower communities. Mobile Vaani is a platform developed by Gram Vaani that seeks to serve as a social media network for rural India, based on and IVR (interactive voice response) system.

Greeshma Gireesh : Currently pursuing her MPhil from JNU. She is constantly found staring into space ever since she lost the sea from her childhood to the city of Delhi. At other times, she will be found strolling through the city with a book and a cup of coffee in hand.

Grishma Trivedi: Grishma Trivedi has a masters in English literature and works at Ahmedabad University. Her research interests include Gender studies, intersectional studies and media studies.

Gunjan Chandak Khemka is a mental health professional dabbling in writing, photography and travel. She finds comfort in bursting bubble wrap, turning to chocolates and a book to retreat from her chaotic life, and constantly forging newer connections with the reality outside of her inner world.

Gurpreet Kaur: She lives in a dream called beauty. She waits for sunset and moonrise. She watches trees change colour and teach her lessons. She dreams of becoming a poetic writer and continues to learn to love. She is a researcher in Delhi and desires the mountains.

Harjant Gill is an associate professor of anthropology at Towson University. His research examines the intersections of masculinity, modernity, transnational migration and popular culture in India. Gill is also an award-winning filmmaker and has made several ethnographic films, including Mardistan/Macholand, that have screened at international film festivals and on television channels worldwide including BBC, Doordarshan (Indian National TV) and PBS. Funded by the Performing Arts fellowship by American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and the Fulbright-Nehru Research Award, Gill is currently living in New Delhi while developing an eight-part immersive virtual reality web-series on Indian masculinities titled “Tales from Macholand.” His website is HarjantGill.com.

Hira Nabi: Her research interests include history of South Asian cinema, sonic environments, media archaeology, queer subcultures, commute routes and public transportation for women, technology and colonialism. Her visual work has shown in Cuba, Mexico, Pakistan, and USA. An MA candidate in Media Studies at the New School, she graduated with a BA in Video, Gender Theory and Postcolonial Studies from Hampshire College.

Ina Goel: Ina Goel is the founder of The Hijra Project and is currently based at the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She may be contacted at inagoel@gmail.com

Indu Nepal: Indu Nepal (@inepal) is a media trainer, producer and researcher.

Ipsita: She has been working in the development sector for the past 7 years in the field of Child rights , Gender and Sexuality as a Counselor, Researcher and Facilitator. In the past she has been associated with organizations like Childline India Foundation, FACSE, URJA Trust, CEHAT, Tata Institute Of Social Sciences, UNICEF and Nirantar Trust,. She is currently exploring Rational Emotive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Buddhist Psychology and Psychotherapy, to strengthen her practice in the field of Mental Health.

Isha Vajpeyi: Isha completed her undergraduate studies in Political Science from Delhi University. She has over two years work experience with organisations working on issues of Gender and Sexuality. Through her active engagement with young people, artists and activists, she has found art to be a powerful tool for generating discourses and bringing social change. Isha currently works as a Programme Associate at TARSHI.

Ishan: Ishan works at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University. He occasionally writes on films, literature, sexuality, and masculinity

Ishani Dey: Ishani is a part-time researcher and full-time cinephile. She consumes media indiscriminately and calls it ‘research’ for her PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her current work is centered on cinema’s digital desires and its strive to escape somatic scrutiny. She has a knack for alliteration and harbours a special love for the “pool of movies your mama told you not to watch” (Joe Bob Briggs, 2008).

Jamal Siddiqui: Jamal is a transman who works in a corporate office in Gurugram. He is a member of Nazariya’s group called Soch and is passionate about transmen’s issues. In his free time, he loves to read spiritual books and watch sci-fi movies. He also loves playing with his and his partner’s cats.

James Scott Edwards: His works as an artist are the best representation of what he is all about. Heavily inspired by the ‘less explored’, he occasionally dabbles into the world around him, the tenets and bastions of  society, sometimes giving a new dimension to his favorite sentence — ‘always question!’

Janet Price: A disabled feminist who is based in Liverpool, UK, and Taranaki, New Zealand. She is actively involved in queercrip politics and is on the board of DaDaFest, a disability and Deaf arts organisation in Liverpool. She teaches at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, works with CREA, a feminist and sexuality rights organisation in Delhi, India, and with a coalition of groups working in disability, sexuality and justice across Africa.

Japleen Pasricha: Japleen smashes the patriarchy for a living! Founder & editor-in-chief of Feminism In India, she is a sex-positive intersectional feminist activist, educator, writer, campaigner and researcher. She is a solo traveller, former German lecturer and wishes to write feminist short stories for children and young adults. Tweets @japna_p

Jasmine George:  A feminist, artist, and an activist who believes in being actively involved with society. Her legal background has not yet stopped her from engaging with her first love: pleasure and sexuality.  She shares her thoughts and ramblings in her blog.

Jaya Sharma: A researcher and writer based in New Delhi, India. She has been working on issues of gender and education for over twenty years. She is founder member of Nirantar, a Centre for Gender and Education based in New Delhi. She has also co-founded queer activist forums based in Delhi. She has worked on issues of sexuality with a focus on building linkages between the queer movement and other movements such as the women’s movement. Jaya was actively engaged with issues related to Sexuality Education through research and advocacy. She was also intensively involved with NGOs working with rural women from marginalized communities, through workshops and educational material on sexuality. She seeks to draw upon her experiences and activism as a queer, kinky, feminist in her writing.

Jaya Tiwari: With a degree in human development from SNDT University and a BA in home science from Delhi University, Jaya has worked on HIV and sexuality issues for Naz Foundation and V.V. Giri National Labour Institute. From 2009-14, she worked as coordinator of Standard Chartered Bank’s initiative ‘Goal program’ (www.goal-girls.com) in Delhi. Since 2014, she is the Direct Implementation Manager, Goal Program, Delhi and Mumbai.

Jayaprakash Mishra: Jayaprakash Mishra is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad where his work focuses on gay men married to women (Cross-orientation marriage). His areas of interest are LGBTstudies, queer literature, popular culture, marriage, and kinship. He has presented his work at the University of Westminster, UK; Syracuse University, US, National University of Singapore, and Delhi University, India.

Jessica Chandras: Jessica Chandras received her PhD in Anthropology from the George Washington University in Washington, DC in 2019. She is particularly interested in intersections of language and identity and her research engages theories of language shift and language acquisition to analyze educational practices and socioeconomic class and caste in Maharashtra, India. From 2015-2017, Dr. Chandras was collecting data through observations and interviews with students, parents, and educators in Pre-K through graduate level classrooms in Pune and Mumbai for her PhD dissertation. Dr. Chandras is the founder of the blog Fieldworking.net, serves on the editorial board for the Footnotes Blog, and is also the web content editor for the journal Critical Asian Studies.

Jhilmil Breckenridge: Jhilmil Breckenridge is a poet, writer and activist. She is the founder of Bhor Foundation, an Indian charity, which is active in mental health advocacy, the trauma informed approach, and enabling other choices to heal apart from or in addition to the biomedical model. She advocates Poetry as Therapy and is working on a few initiatives, both in the UK and India, taking this into prisons and asylums. She is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing in the UK. For the last three years, she has also been leading an online poetry as therapy group for women recovering from domestic violence. Her debut poetry collection, Reclamation Song, was published in May 2018.

Jyoti Bajpai: ज्योति CREA के ‘इट्स माय बॉडी’ प्रोग्राम के अंतर्गत प्रोग्राम कोऑर्डिनेटर की भूमिका निभा रही हैं। इन्होंने २००८ में समाज कार्य में स्नातकोत्तर किया और लगभग पाँच साल से महिलाओं के स्वास्थ्य सम्बंधित मुद्दों पर काम कर रहीं हैं। (Jyoti works with CREA, a feminist and sexuality rights organization in Delhi, India, as a program coordinator for the ‘It’s my body’ program. She has been working on women’s health issues for over five years.)

Jyotsna Khatry: Jyotsna Khatry is an independent filmmaker and freelance videographer. She has worked on issues of minority and child rights, and her independent work is predominantly on child trafficking. She is currently working on a documentary film on child trafficking in Chhattisgarh, India. Jyotsna lives in New Delhi.

Johnson Thomas: Johnson is a social worker, film-critic, journalist, writer, biographer, Suicide, Depression and Substance abuse Counsellor, Hypnotherapst, Soft-Skills trainer based in Mumbai. He is the founder/director of AASRA , an NGO working in the field of suicide & depression for the past 14 years, and the co-ordinator of the NGO forum of Navi Mumbai consisting of 70 NGOs working in diverse fields of social welfare. He has worked as a freelance journalist and film critic for the past 17 years, writing for various Indian publications.

Juhi Sidharth: Juhi has engaged with issues of gender and sexuality in her academic and professional life for the past ten years. Her recently completed doctoral thesis from the University of Cambridge, UK focused on the everyday lived experiences of sexuality among adolescent girls in a slum community in Mumbai. She has a passion for photography, cinema and exploring new cities and cultures. At present, she works as a sexuality educator in the schools of Gujarat.

Kajol: Kajol is a Literature Major, often speechless; she finds written expression more comfortable and potent than the spoken one and navigates life through literature and rhyme. She is a firm believer in the power of fairly represented and unproblematic-ally located stories and accounts of individuals as political tools and emotionally relatable texts. An Intersectional Feminist, she aims at working on the narratives of women of color and gender as it operates in her part of the world.

Kalki: Kalki Subramaniam is a transgender rights activist, actress, entrepreneur and the founder of  ‘Sahodari Foundation’ an organization working for the social, economic and political empowerment of transgender persons in India.

Kamal Gautam: A graduate in Public Health is a SRHR activist. His professional experience includes working on issues of gender-based violence, young people’s SRHR and its advocacy. Mr. Gautam has been contributing to Comprehensive Sexuality Education and prepared a parallel curriculum, and has been training students, teachers and stakeholders across Kathmandu valley and many parts of Nepal. Currently, he is working with International Medical Corps as SRH Program officer, member in YUWA and with Visible Impact as an advisor. Earlier, he worked as Board Member and SRHR Program Coordinator at YUWA, Global Youth Ambassador at A world at School and a Council Member of Youth Activists Leadership Council.

Kaustav Bakshi: Specialising in postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality and popular culture, teaches at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He has published in international journals such as Postcolonial Text, South Asian History and Culture, South Asian Review, New Cinema: Journal of Contemporary Film, etc. His latest published book is Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, Art (Routledge, 2015), the first ever anthology showcasing original research papers on India’s most celebrated queer filmmaker. He is currently working on a volume on Queer Studies with Orient Blackswan and a co-edited anthology, Popular Cinema in Bengal: Stardom, Genre, Public Culture with Routledge.

Kavya Kartik: Currently a student at Jindal Global Law School. She has a degree in Physics and enjoys reading feminist theory, looking at photos of baby animals, and watching more TV shows than humanly possible. She’d love to get on one of those commercial flights into outer space! 🙂

Ketaki Chowkhani: Ketaki  is a PhD student in Women’s Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral research is on Adolescent Sexuality and Sexuality Education in contemporary urban India.

Khushi Pahuja: I am a third year economics student of Indraprastha College for Women. I have been working in the social development sector for the past 3 years. Everyday when I wake up, I look up to the infinite sky and feel blessed to be able to work for the cause I feel for. I am working for the sex workers of GB and in two slum areas in Delhi. Amidst working in such sensitive spaces, my mental health started getting impacted almost a year ago. And that’s when I explored writing. I seek strength in my words. I love being close to nature.

Kristin Francoueur:Proud feminist Kristin N. Francoeur is a PhD candidate focusing on reproductive justice issues in India and the U.S. When not advocating for safe abortion, food justice, and transnational feminism, she enjoys trail running and camping, enthusiastic cooking, and trying to speak comprehensible Hindi.

Kumam Davidson and Pavel Sagolsem: Kumam Davidson and Pavel Sagolsem: Davidson is an independent journalist and a social media advocate for gender justice, he tries to fuse liberal, feminist and queer thoughts in his writings. He is also writing a doctoral thesis on the intersection between violence and urbanistion in the case of Karachi. Pavel is from Imphal, Manipur and currently works as a consultant for youth engagement and networking in Breakthrough Trust, Delhi. He is a vagabond by heart and a queer feminist by practice.

Kumam Davidson: Kumam Davidson is a writer, educator and journalist. He is a Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grantee 2019, Likho Citizen Journalism Fellow 2019 and a PhD scholar at theCentre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He also co-founded The Chinky Homo Project and Queer Boys Collective Manipur. His writings have been published in Firstpost, Scroll, Homegrown,In Plainspeak, Indian Women Blog,Feminism in India, Gaysi, Thumb Print, Gaylaxy Magazine, and Yendai, among others. He is also a Lecturer in English Literature at The Diligent Public School,Moirang, his hometown in Manipur.

Lamia Bagasrawala: Lamia Bagasrawala is a practicing psychotherapist in Mumbai. She works extensively in the areas of child and adolescent mental health and sexuality education in schools. Her practices are driven by feminist, strengths based and arts based therapeutic perspectives.

Lean Deleon: He likes to decenter masculinity wherever he goes. Philippine-born, bay area-raised, Thailand residing, Lean likes to straddle in the margins of power and identity. He says, ‘If you are down with radical Marxist feminist queer 3^rd world hustling politics, let’s cuddle, read books and organize to smash systems of oppressions.’

Lekha Sharma:Pursuing her Master’s in Sociology at the SAARC-established South Asian University in New Delhi, and has an undergraduate degree in Elementary Education from Delhi University. Lekha is interested in issues related to women and society.

Lekha Sridhar: Lekha is a lawyer from Delhi and is currently living in Germany under the Humboldt International Climate Protection Fellowship. She blogs about movies in her free time at: www.reviewerswithoutborders.blogspot.com.

Liz Hilton: An Australian woman who has been living outside her land and language for more than 20 years. She is a part of Empower Foundation in Thailand. Empower has taught her the value of art as advocacy and the benefits of speaking and listening without words.

Lucie Bernroider: Lucie Bernroider is pursuing a PhD in Anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. Her work forms part of the EU-funded project SINGLE which looks at the experiences of single women in Delhi and Shanghai. Before coming to Heidelberg, she studied Anthropology and Political Science in Vienna. Her interests are located at the intersections of feminist critique, politics, urbanisation and collective memory. She is also an avid reader and is obsessively missing Indian food.

Madhu Kewalramani: Dr Madhu Kewalramani is a psychiatrist and psychodynamic psychotherapist. She works as a consultant psychiatrist in a Perinatal Psychiatry service in the UK, and is pursuing further training as a psychoanalyst. She has special interest in the psychosocial changes associated with pregnancy and postpartum period, with specific reference to their impact upon the mother-infant relationship. She also has extensive experience of working with people presenting with a range of physical health concerns and associated psychological/psychiatric difficulties, including medically unexplained symptoms and CFS/ME. She is actively involved in the training of postgraduate students of psychiatry, social work, and psychiatric nursing.

Madhavi Menon: Madhavi Menon is Director for the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, and the author, most recently, of Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.

Mahika Banerji: Mahika is an intersectional feminist, as well as a professional dog-petter, procrastinator, Netflix-binger – except she doesn’t get paid for any of these.

Mahesh Natarajan: Mahesh Natarajan is a counsellor at www.innersight.in, and an occasional writer, mostly of #veryshortstories on his Facebook page in addition to his book of short stories, Pink Sheep. He lives in Bangalore, India with his partner.

Malina Sulaiman: Malina is a contemporary Afghan artist. She is also a painter, sculptor, graffiti artist, teacher and a top notch creator.

Malini Chib: An Indian disability rights activist and author who has cerebral palsy. She currently works for Tata Consultancy Services, London. She wrote the book One Little Finger over the course of two years by typing with only one finger. In 2011, the Indian Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment awarded Malini the National Award for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in the category Role Model. She has a BA from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and a masters degree in Gender Studies from Institute of Education, University of London.

Malini Gopalakrishnan: Malini is a feminist, a lover of words, a poet, an educator, and a student of life. A Hyderabad-based development communication professional working in the areas of education, gender, and health, she is currently involved in developing adolescent empowerment programs that seek to provide adolescent girls from marginalized communities with the information they need to keep themselves healthy and safe; the tools to make informed choices for themselves and their futures; and skills to negotiate and advocate for themselves and others. Malini believes that engaging with the youth is crucial to building and equitable society for all.

Mamatha Karollil: Mamatha Karollil teaches at Ambedkar University Delhi. Which gives her some space and time to think and talk through, issues such as the above; she teaches things related to gender, sexuality, psychology/psychoanalysis. Among the few things she is grateful for.

Manak Matiyani: A freelance trainer and consultant, he has a Masters degree in Mass Communications from AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, and has worked on various independent documentary film projects on issues of gender and rights.

Manjima Bhattacharjya: Manjima Bhattacharjya is a sociologist and feminist activist based in Mumbai. This piece is adapted from her monograph ‘Sex Work Geographies’ (2012) as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Urban Aspirations Project, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Mansi Wadhwa: Due to the transferable nature of her parents’ jobs, Mansi has lived in many Indian cities and in that sense, can be described as a ‘migrant’ herself. This movement has helped her develop an ability to get a bird’s eye view of things which she hopes to use to her advantage in analysing public policies and systems. Mansi is a learner at heart, and loves to read and write poetry. She graduated from the University of Delhi with a degree in Political Science and is hoping to study and work in the area of public policy.

Maya Krishna Rao:  She creates her own performances, sometimes solo, other times collaboratively, with sound, space designers and film makers. She engages school children and teachers in the use of drama as a teaching device in the class room. Maya also performs stand up comedy.  Amongst her shows that have travelled different countries and have been received with acclaim are Khol Do, The Job, A Deeper Fried Jam (a theatre rock show), Heads Are Meant For Walking Into, The-4-Wheel – Drive – “Come – to – me – Mr. Sharma” – Bodyfat – Murdered – Show’… (Comedy in episodes), Ravanama (dance theatre) and her latest Walk made in response to the horrific gangrape and subsequent death of Jyoti Pande. Maya received the Sangeet Natak Award for Acting in 2010.

Medha Gandhi:Currently an Ipas Policy Advisor  where she focuses on advocating for increasing access to safe abortion services for women in India. Prior to joining Ipas, Medha was a Consultant Adolescent Health at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Medha also hosts radio shows on AIR FM Rainbow.

Meena Saraswathi Seshu and Aarthi Pai: Meena Saraswathi Seshu is the general secretary of Sampada Gramin Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM), an HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and support organisation working with marginalised people in Maharashtra. Aarthi Pai is a lawyer and currently working as the Director of the Centre for Advocacy on Stigma and Marginalisation (CASAM) in SANGRAM.

Micky Nair: I am Micky Nair, 26, an MBBS graduate studying to be a psychiatrist. I love English literature, enjoy painting occasionally, and have an obsession for house plants and gardening. I have a special admiration for Paulo Coelho, Cecelia Ahern and Dan Brown. I find honesty and mindful insight beautiful.

MEF: It produces and distributes video documentaries to encourage critical thinking and debate about the relationship between media ownership, commercial media content, and the democratic demand for free flows of information, diverse representations of ideas and people, and informed citizen participation.

Meghna Bohidar: A believer in naïve and irrational Bollywood love as a way-of-being, Meghna holds an incurably optimistic view of human beings. She is currently an M.Phil scholar at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) and is exploring the performances of love in urban public spaces.

Mona Mishra: Independent expert on development and social policy

Moulshri Mohan:Moulshri Mohan worked at TARSHI. She studied Psychology and English, and likes thinking about feminist culture and new media.

Mrinalini and Udita: Mrinalini Ravindranath is a legal researcher & Udita Chakrabarti is the Communications and Knowledge Officer at Partners for Law in Development (PLD India) .

Mukesh: A contributor to the Orinam blog, he loves being vegan and queer when he is not lost running the trails in a rain forest, biking between cities and hiking through the mountains. He understands geology and works in the construction industry.

Muskan Nagpal: It is difficult to say who Muskan is right now. Most likely, she is confused. In the past she studied Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi and later joined the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University.

Must Bol: An online youth volunteer led campaign that calls to young people to examine violence in their lives and speak out against it.. Follow them on: www.facebook.com/delhiyouth

Namrata Chatterjee: A student of class eleven and lives in Lucknow. She has a passion for psychology. She loves talking and has an ability to understand emotions easily.

Neha Naqvi: Has been working on human rights, sexuality and gender justice issues for the last eight years. She has a weakness for TARSHI and Alison Bechdel (in equal measure). Is a Bachelor of Laws from the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research and a Master of Laws from Columbia University.

Neetika Vishwanath:  A young feminist lawyer. She has directly intervened in cases of human rights violations and violence against women and children including sexual violence. Her areas of interest include gender studies, constitutional law, human rights law, access to justice.

Neel: Neel is a writer and activist. She is a postgraduate in Performance Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi, and has been an active part of non-governmental organisations and civil rights movements whose work revolves around issues of gender and sexuality.

Nhylar: Nhylar is a 24 year QPOC who currently resides in Toronto. She uses poetry as a creative outlet for her existential rage. She writes about queer representation, living away from home, intimacy and anything that intrigues her.

Nidhi Chaudhary: Nidhi Chaudhary completed her undergraduate degree in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. She completed her post-graduation in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and became interested in working in the domain of gender and sexuality. She is currently working with TARSHI as a Programme Associate.

Nidhi Goyal: Nidhi Goyal is a disabled feminist working on disability rights and gender justice. She is the founder and director of a Mumbai-based non-profit Rising Flame which works on rights of persons with disabilities with a focus on women and youth with disabilities. She is also the program director of sexuality and disability at Point of View and is the co-author of www.sexualityanddisability.org. As India’s first female disabled comedian, she uses humour to dispel myths on disability, gender and sexuality. Nidhi has been appointed to the prestigious civil society advisory group of UN women’s Executive Director, sits on the advisory board of “Voice” a grant making facility by the Dutch Ministry, and has been globally elected on the board of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) where she is currently the President Elect. You can follow Nidhi’s work @saysnidhigoyal

Nighat Gandhi: Nighat Gandhi is a writer and psychotherapist. Her most recent collection of short stories is :WAITING (Zubaan, Delhi, 2019).

Nikzad Zangeneh: A 26 year old feminist activist and a freelance researcher from Iran, her research focuses on women’s issues especially SRHR and violence against women.

Nilesh Mondal: Nilesh Mondal, 22, is an undergraduate in power engineering by day, and struggling poet by night.His works have been published in the Ghazal Page, Hans India, Cafe Dissensus, Textploit, etc. He works at Terribly Tiny Tales, an online storytelling platform.

Nirantar: Nirantar is a feminist organisation that works on issues of gender and education, promoting literacy and access to information and engendering the education process in diverse contexts. Through grassroots interventions, research, training, creating educational resources, advocacy and engagement with the women’s movement, the organisation brings issues of equity and gender centre stage in the arena of education.

Niyati Dave: A recent graduate of Smith College, where she majored in Art History and learned how to walk on ice without slipping. She currently lives in Mumbai, where she grew up, and is working on a personal, narrative project that examines gender in relation to public spaces and ideas of modernity and urbanity. She is interested in diaspora, migration and gender and sexuality studies and hopes to figure out how to be an adult soon.

Neel: Neel is a writer and activist. She is a postgraduate in Performance Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi, and has been an active part of non-governmental organisations and civil rights movements whose work revolves around issues of gender and sexuality.

Noopur Raval: Noopur Raval is a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine. She is passionate about technology, labour, gender and sexuality. When she is not researching sociotechnical phenomena, she loves eating, traveling and writing. She tweets @tetisheri.

Nupur Paliwal and Saloni Mishra: Nupur Paliwal and Saloni Mishra are students of law in O.P. Jindal Global University. They are interested in socialist politics and literature. They harbour a keen interest in browsing through old Soviet posters and can be found lurking in the corners of the bird app.

Oindrila DuttaGupta: Belonging to a bunch of young, concerned women and men who are ready to do whatever it takes to bring a positive change.

Oishik Sircar: Currently Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School. Oishik is the co-director of the documentary film ‘We are Foot Soldiers’ (PSBT, 2011), and is the co-editor of ‘New Intimacies/ Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times’ (Zubaan, 2017).

Oshin Siao Bhatt: Oshin studied Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics and is interested in Media studies, Urban studies and Performance Arts. She enjoys reading, discovering new places and experimenting with food.

Padmini Iyer: Padmini is currently in the final year of her PhD in International Education at the University of Sussex. Her PhD research explores young people’s experiences of Gender and Sexuality in Delhi secondary schools, and from 2013 – 2014, she spent nine months in Delhi carrying out research with Class 11 students in three co-educational secondary schools.

Pabitra Neupane: Pabitra Neupane is a child rights and gender activist. She is currently pursuing her Masters degree in Gender Studies, Tribhuvan University, Nepal.

Pallavi: A full-time nerd and a part time activist who passionately captures the world around, through her lenses! A postgraduate in Gender Studies, her work revolves around understanding the female gamer’s subjectivity in the recent video game debate (Feminist Frequency vs #gamergate), trying to open up the tricky terrains of sexuality, pleasure and violence through the feminist positions of the actors in the debate.

Pallavi: Pallavi likes to sleep, read, paint, cook and dance. Not in that particular order. She works to make comprehensive sexuality education accessible to young people because she believes that everyone has the right to get correct information about their bodies.’

Pallavi Barnwal: Pallavi Barnwal is a sexuality expressionist and founder of RedWomb; a platform on which she raises important yet uncomfortable questions and narratives on sexuality. She regularly writes in media on tabooed topics of sexuality and conducts offline event “Tongue Tied” that helps people to talk about their suppressed sexuality and come to peace with their sexuality.

Parigya Sharma: A Delhi based feminist researcher. Her interests include gender, sexuality and sexual health, feminist history and queer politics.

Paromita Vohra:  Afilmmaker and writer who works with fiction and non-fiction on themes of feminism, desire, urban life and popular culture. More at www.parodevipictures.com. Less @parodevi

Partners For Law in Development: PLD (pldindia.org) is a legal resource group committed to the realisation of social justice and equality for all women. We believe that the attainment of women’s equality is integral to the pursuit of social justice; and rights are necessary means by which discrimination and marginalisation be challenged, and equality facilitated.

Parvati Sharma: Author of ‘The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love’, ‘Close to Home’, and a book for children called ‘The Story of Babur’. She lives in New Delhi, and rarely goes to film festivals anymore, though she spends far more time than she should on Netflix.

Pattie Gonsalves:  She works in the area of health and arts. She heads research for Agenda 1 in New Delhi, a research project working to identify the root causes normalizing issues of abuse and violence against children and adolescents and leads Institutional Advancement at Global Music Institute (GMI). She is also the co-founder of Music Basti and has worked with organizations including UNICEF, Mirada Medical and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). She studied population health at the University of Oxford.

Pauline Gomes: Pauline Gomes works at Breakthrough, an organisation working to prevent discrimination and violence against women and girls. She has worked on sexuality, gender, disability and human rights. As a part of the curriculum and facilitation team she creates products and publications for training, and community action tools, and facilitates interactive sessions with adolescents, teachers, parents, development sector professionals, among others.

Pavel Sagolsem: Pavel is from Imphal, Manipur and currently works at Nazariya – A Queer Feminist Resource Group in New Delhi. A vagabond by heart and queer feminist by practice, Pavel has worked on issues of engaging men and boys for gender justice and creating safe and shared space for women and girls and is a co-founder of The Chinky Homo Project. Storytelling is his passion.

Pawan Dhall: Pawan has been engaged with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and other queer community mobilization in eastern and other parts of India since the early 1990s. He was a founder member of Counsel Club (1993-2002) and “Pravartak” (1991-92, 1993-2000), among the first queer support forums and publications in India. He has studied economics in college, and worked as a journalist, copywriter and social communicator in his early years as a professional. From 2002 to 2014, he was part of SAATHII, an HIV focussed capacity building NGO, at the top management level. He now leads Varta Trust, a Kolkata-based gender and sexuality publishing and advocacy non-profit agency (www.vartagensex.org), which affords him social research and “rainbow journalism” opportunities on queer health and development issues

Point of View: A Mumbai-based non-profit platform that brings the points of view of women into community, social, cultural and public domains through media, art and culture. For more, please visit their website: http://www.pointofview.org/

Pooja Badarinath: Working at CREA as a Programme Coordinator, Advocacy and Research, she is keenly interested in understanding the relationship between law and sexuality and the way they interact with each other.

Pooja Priyamvada: Pooja Priyamvada is an author, columnist, professional translator and Content and Social Media consultant. She is also a bi-lingual blogger. Both her blogs have been awarded several times consecutively at the Orange Flower Awards and she has been associated with reputed national and international online addresses. Her translation titled A Night in the Hills, a collection of short stories by Manav Kaul has been published by Westland Books recently. Her book Mental Health: A Primer is available on Amazon Kindle. Her areas of work are mental health, sexual wellness, gender and marginalization, and her favorite mediums remain poetry and theatre.

Pooja Paul: Pooja Paul works at TARSHI. She has a Master’s in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and her interests lie in working on issues of sexual and reproductive health and health disparities.

Pooja Singh and Ramneek Banga: Pooja and Ramneek are social development professionals. Pooja has been working on issues of bodily autonomy, gender equality and youth leadership. When not working, she is either busy reading or daydreaming about alternate realities of being an entrepreneur, gardener and feminist bookstore keeper, and bringing pieces of these alternatives into her current realities. Ramneek brings an inter-sectional feminist lens to her work towards creating an inclusive society. She has worked with adolescents, young people, youth-led and grassroots organisations across the country to build young people’s agency and enable an inside-out reflective and action-oriented change process.

Poorva Parashar: Poorva Parashar is a queer, cisgendered, occasionally anxious, South Asian woman. She often writes about realities she has grown up with, such as her grandmother’s village and that one spot in the park that always had the prettiest flowers. She is a graduate in Psychology and a student of Mental Health and is also passionate about yoga, paneer, and one day having her own Netflix account. Her work includes a focus on existentialism, humour, and feminist psychology. She also specialises in making great apricot-cherry smoothies.

Prachi Srivastava: A consultant psychologist, Social Skills Trainer and Behaviour Management Advisor. She has always believed in being the connecting link in the triad of educators, parents and the child (with/without special needs). She runs her independent setup for counseling children and adolescents, STAPOO which is based on the philosophy of ‘birds fly, fish swim and children play’.

Pramada Menon:  A stand up performance artist, her show Fat, Feminist and Free takes a tongue-in-cheek look at gender and sexuality issues. She has also made a documentary film And You Thought You Knew Me – a look at the lives of five People Assigned Gender Female at Birth.

Prarthana: Prarthana completed her MSW from Jamia MilliaIslamia University. She has been working in development sector for past 8 years on issues of quality education, curriculum development, teachers’ training, gender and sexuality. Before joining Nirantar in 2015, she has been associated with Bodh Shiksha Samiti, Jaipur and UNICEF Jharkhand. Currently Prarthana is leading Parvaaz Adolescent Centre For Education ( PACE) Project in Nirantar. She works closely with Delhi and UP based partner organizations to provide access to alternative quality education among out of school girls. She is actively involved in developing learning resource materials and curriculum, along with building capacities of the facilitators. Poetry and music has remained close to her heart.

Price of Silence: Price of Silence is a global grassroots performing arts collective that brings to life the global struggle for women’s rights to life on stage for audiences to live and breathe tragedy, action and resistance in action live to engender a culture of unity to dismantle all forms of violence against women structurally and physically.

P. V. Swati: Her research interests are around migration studies, sexuality and queer movements and she has worked with several organisations engaged with issues related to gender.. She is pursuing her Masters in Women’s Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is also a travel enthusiast, an experimental photographer and a keen lingerie collector.

Rachel Wotton: A migrant sex worker, living and working throughout Australia and overseas, for over two decades. She is a founding member of Touching Base and a co-facilitator for the workshops Touching Base delivers to both the sex worker and disability communities.
In 2011, she was featured in the documentary Scarlet Road and spoke further about this topic at TEDx Bunbury; “Open your mind to what goes on behind closed doors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYfz4svcvqE
She was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2016 https://www.churchilltrust.com.au/fellows/detail/4190/Rachel+Wotton and graduated in 2017 with her Masters by Research topic: Sex workers who provide services to clients with disability in New South Wales, Australia. [ Open Source: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/16875 ]

Radhika Chandiramani:Trained as a clinical psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Radhika founded TARSHI in 1996. She has co-edited ‘Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia’ (Sage, 2005) and authored the popular ‘Good Times for Everyone: Sexuality Questions, Feminist Answers’ (Women Unlimited, 2008).

Ragamalika Karthikeya: A journalist, writer, policy wonk and none of the above at the same time. After working with mainstream news channels for a few years, she decided to jump ship to the policy space with the LAMP Fellowship. Currently, she’s looking for inspiration while working with some Members of Parliament.

Rahul Sen: Rahul teaches critical writing, literature, gender and sexualities, and queer theory at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. He can be reached at carpenoctem989@gmail.com

Raili Roy: Raili Roy holds a PhD in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies from The Ohio State University. Her dissertation, entitled “Jagoron: Awakening to Gender in Non-Governmental Organizations in Contemporary Bengal,” explored the recent history of the role of Non Governmental Organizations in women’s movement in India. Roy served as the Associate Director and Lecturer of the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an Assistant Dean of global programs at New York University. Currently she teaches History and Gender Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson University and New Jersey City University and works with several Gender Rights organizations in India and US in transnational movement building and fund raising.

Rajashree Gandhi: Rajashree Gandhi is a writer, educator, pickle collector. She conducts writing and creativity workshops for school children. She is deeply in love with the idea of female friendships.

Raj Armani: Raj Armani is the co-founder & COO of India’s #1 Adult Store – IMbesharam.com. He is now going global and strongly believes in his larger goal of democratising ‘Sex & Pleasure’ for Indians worldwide. He can be reached on raj@imbesharam.com.

Ramya Anand: Ramya Anand works at TARSHI and also conducts sexuality education workshops for children and young people at her individual capacity. She has been working on issues related to sexuality, gender, reproductive health and rights, mental health and advocacy. An enthusiastic learner, she also constantly craves food and travel.

Rangana Rupavi Choudhuri: International author, speaker and trainer Dr. Rangana Rupavi Choudhuri (PhD) is a dynamic leader in the coaching and counseling field. She graduated from Oxford University, has led international businesses and now spearheads a global learning organisation, Vitality Living College, and delivers seminars and certification in emotional well-being, coaching and spirituality.

Rashmi Gopi: Rashmi Gopi teaches in the University of Delhi. Her special focus of investigation has been on the question of how masculinity and femininity are constructed in contexts, and how they are used as tools of both empowerment and oppression.

Rashi Kapoor: Rashi is a people’s person contrary to the image of psychoanalytically trained and informed psychotherapists. She is currently working as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with the Fortis Healthcare, New Delhi. She works with people across different age groups experiencing emotional conflicts, psychotic breakdowns and difficult states of mind. Working with women issues at the cusp of psychoanalysis and feminism is of key interest to her.

Ravindran Jegasothy: Ravindran Jegasothy is currently the Dean and Professor in Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the Faculty of Medicine, MAHSA University, Malaysia. He is a fervent advocate of patient rights and was awarded the Distinguished Community Service Award by FIGO (International Federation of Gynaecology & Obstetrics) for the reduction of maternal mortality.

Reena Khatoon:Reena works with The YP Foundation as Manager of the Know Your Body Know Your Rights Program. Reena comes with extensive experience in community mobilization, training, developing IEC materials in Hindi and supporting community groups to advocate and lobby for human rights issues, especially on women’s rights issues.

Richa Kaul Padte: Richa Kaul Padte is a writer and editor covering gender, sex, technology, popular culture and illness. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed nonfiction book Cyber Sexy: rethinking pornography (Penguin Random House India 2018) and the co-founder of Deep Dives, an award-winning digital imprint. You can read her work at richakaulpadte.com and follow her on Twitter @hirishitalkies

Rishita Nandagiri: Rishita Nandagiri is an SRHR policy wonk, writer, and researcher. An overly-opinionated feminist who talks too much, she hosts ‘The Quietude’ a (fledgling) feminist podcast; and tweets about nothing in particular on @rishie_

Rishit Wishit: Rishit Wishit is a student of Masters in Literary Art in Ambedkar University Delhi. Rishit Wishit is active in a range of land rights and environmental issues. Rishit Wishit sometimes addresses Rishit Wishit only in the third person.