Karmanye Thadani

Karmanye Thadani is an Indian writer residing in New Delhi, the capital of India. He did his schooling (the pre-college phase of education) from Modern School Vasant Vihar in the same city and went on to pursue an five-year integrated BA, LLB (Hons.) programme from Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), a National Law School (the National Law Schools are premier law colleges in India, each of which is designated as a university in itself), which was till his 4th year in Gandhinagar, the capital of the Indian province of Gujarat, and in his 5th year, shifted to the nearby town of Koba in the same province.

In his final year of law school, he attended a one-month summer course on International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. He has several articles in journals (such as the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights, abbreviated as JIPR, which is the most prestigious journal on the subject in India) and paper presentations in conferences (including one organized by LSE, London) to his credit. He has interned in the Legal Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India; the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA); Child Rights and You (CRY); Action for Ability Development and Inclusion (AADI), formerly known as the Spastic Society of Northern India (SSNI), and Oxfam, besides the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and Central Information Commission (CIC).

After having graduated, he is currently working as a research associate in the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), a public policy think-tank based in New Delhi.

He wrote a critique of the famous play '1947-Live', on the theme of the independence and partition of India, scripted and directed by the famous Indian theatre personality, Amir Raza Hussain. This critique of the play written by Karmanye was published in a supplement to The Hindu, which is one of the leading national dailies in India. Karmanye also frequently writes articles on diverse topics for the online portal 'Youth ki Awaaz - Mouthpiece for the Youth', which can be accessed using the following link (copy and paste the same in the address bar in a new tab)-

http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/topic/karmanyethadani/

Karmanye is an avid reader of non-fiction books, especially those related to history, polity, theology and socio-political issues superficially linked with issues of religion or other identity issues, and he also enjoys fiction writers like Dan Brown and Bob Shepherd, whose books have a non-fiction core or at least seemingly so, as also writers like Chetan Bhagat. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, an Indian historical figure who formed an army to overthrow British imperialism, is a role model and source of inspiration for him, and at the same time, he deeply respects and greatly admires Gandhi. Shashi Tharoor, MJ Akbar, Rafiq Zakaria, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, William Dalrymple, Khushwant Singh, Gurcharan Das, Ramachandra Guha and Swapan Dasgupta are among his favourite public intellectuals in India, and he is also a great admirer of prominent public intellectuals in Pakistan who are liberal or left-liberal by outlook, such as Hasan Nisar, Najam Sethi, Irfan Husain, Nadeem Paracha and Marvi Sarmad.

He is a patriotic Indian but not a jingoistic Indian nationalist, and likewise, has a broad cultural identification with his faith Hinduism and is even proud of it for its open and heterodox character and he does believe in the Almighty but is not really very religious, at least in the conventional sense of the term, and despises religious extremists engaging in moral policing and communal rioting or even blind jingoistic assertions of the superiority of one's faith, often based on presenting a false or half-true image of other religions for the sake of ridiculing them. He is particularly passionate about dispelling prejudices about Islam as a religion (though he's not an uncritical admirer of any religion, including his own) and Muslims as a community (though that doesn't imply extending purblind sympathy to that community).

He enjoys watching Hollywood and Bollywood movies of diverse genres (Bollywood is the film industry based in Mumbai, India, which produces films predominantly in the language Hindi, an Indian language), besides some well-known Iranian and Pakistani movies. He likes listening to contemporary Bollywood music and also playing table-tennis and engaging in adventure sports. He enjoys traveling and has visited about a score of countries either purely for tourism or for some professional reason as well (Istanbul in Turkey being his favourite among the cities he has been to so far), besides doing the same extensively within India (Guwahati being the favourite Indian city he has visited so far).