Abhay Deol

Actor

Indian film actor Abhay Deol, often hailed as a “thinking actor” in the Hindi movie circles, has appeared in popular films such as Dev D and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
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Adora Svitak

Child prodigy

Seeing Adora walk down the street, you might not think that the seemingly typical thirteen-year-old is a published author, activist, accomplished speaker and one of the world’s youngest teachers.
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Adrianna Svitak

Poet, Pianist

With a wide range of passions including music, poetry, and art, Adrianna Svitak studies piano and violin as well as singing. Her musical interests range from Michael Jackson to Mozart, Beethoven to Beyonce. Nine years of practice have led to awards from events, including the Seattle Young Artists’ Festival, the Performing Arts Festival of the Eastside, the Music Teachers’ National Association and the Bach Festival competition. In violin, her accomplishments include being named Concertmistress for the Redmond Junior High Honors Orchestra as well as the Junior All-State Orchestra.
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Aisha Chaudhary

INKyouth Fellow

Fifteen year-old Aisha Chaudhary was born with an immune deficiency disorder and overcame a predicted life expectancy of only one year to have become an accomplished artist today. Despite a serious lung disease called Pulmonary Fibrosis, her persistent optimism, extraordinary maturity in the face of impossible odds, and calm perspective on life’s challenges have been an inspiration to many.
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Alexander Tsiaras

Techno artist

Alexander is a renowned technologist, artist, journalist and author. As an artist and technologist, he has participated in developing scientific visualization software to enable him to “paint” the anatomy using volume data.
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Amar Sen

Shadowgrapher

Amar Sen's devotion to the arts has brought him fame for various specializations at different stages in his life; now the world knows him for a number of things including but not limited to singing, acting, magic, graphic arts, poetry and obviously his pet art, handShadowGraphy. The field of performance knows him better for his hardcore professionalism at whatever he does.
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Amish Tripathi

Author

Described as the ‘Paulo Coelho of the East’ by Business World and a ‘People’s author like Jeffrey Archer’ by The Telegraph, Amish’s unique combination of crackling story-telling, religious symbolism and profound philosophies have made him an overnight publishing phenomenon.
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Anand Agarawala

Interface designer

Anand Agarawala is an entrepreneur and product designer.
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Anand Kumar

Founder, Super 30

Anand Kumar is ushering in a revolution in the hinterlands of India by equipping youth to dream big through his education initiative ‘Super 30’ in Patna, Bihar.  In 1994, he was admitted to Cambridge University but was unable to afford it after his father, a low paid postal employee, passed away.  In the last eight years of ‘Super 30’, Kumar, now a noted mathematics teacher, has coached a phenomenal 212 students, most first generation learners from rural, poor backgrounds, to pass the joint entrance test of the Indian Institute of Technology.  Time Magazine selected ‘Super 30’ in the Best of Asia 2010, and Discovery Channel made a documentary film on ‘Super 30’.  
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Anil Ananthaswamy

Author, New Scientist journalist

Anil Ananthaswamy is a consultant for New Scientist in London. He has worked at the magazine in various capacities since 2000, most recently as deputy news editor. He has also contributed to National Geographic News and The Independent (UK). He studied electronics,electrical and computer engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Bachelor of Technology), and the University of Washington, Seattle (Master of Science), and worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley before training as a journalist at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Edge of Physics, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (published as The Edge of Reason by Penguin, India).
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Anu Aga

Director, Thermax Limited

Ms. Anu Aga is on the Board of Thermax Limited, the leading Indian player in energy and environment management. She retired as Chairperson of the company in October, 2004.
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Anusha Yadav

Photographer, Founder: Indian Memory Project

Anusha Yadav is a documentary photographer based in Mumbai. She is also the Founder of Indian Memory Project – an online project that traces a personal history of India through pictures found in family archives. It aims to become India's first open repository of a visual history made by its own people. 
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Arpit Mohan

Co-founder, Gharpay

It’s neither jamming on the flute nor building India’s first humanoid that truly defines Arpit Mohan; it’s the drive to solve hard real-world problems. Today, this recent graduate from BITS-Pilani spends his time as a co-founder at Gharpay, applying technology to transform the way people transact online.
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Arunachalam Muruganantham

Innovator, entrepreneur

Arunachalam Muruganantham of Jayaashree Industries designed, created, tested and implemented a sanitary napkin-making machine that operates on a small scale.
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Arvind Gupta

Toymaker, innovator, science educator

Science educator Arvind Gupta uses simple toys to teach. A graduate from IIT Kanpur (1975 batch), Arvind Kumar Gupta took a year’s study leave from TELCO (in 1978) to work with the grassroots village science teaching programme for children in the tribal district of Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh. While there, he developed many useful low-cost teaching/science teaching aids using locally available materials. The possibilities of using ordinary things for doing science and recycling modern junk into joyous products appealed immensely to children. Arvind Gupta’s first book, Matchstick Models and other Science Experiments, was translated into 12 Indian languages by various Popular Science groups and sold more than half a million copies. Gupta has conducted workshops in over 2000 schools and has won many national and international awards.
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Babar Ali

Youngest headmaster

He was called the “youngest headmaster in the world” by BBC in October 2009, at the age of 16. Babar Ali is an Indian student and teacher from Murshidabad, West Bengal. The school that he runs is an outdoor school and counts a total of 10 teachers - all of them students at nearby school or college - who volunteer to teach. There are no tuition fees, thus making it affordable for the poor in this economically deprived area and thereby helping increase literacy rate there. In 2009, Babar Ali won a prize from the program Real Heroes of the Indian English news channel CNN IBN for his work and was awarded the NDTV Indian of the year award. UNTOLD STORY: Babar Ali is now studying in his first year at Berhampur Krishnath College towards a BA (Honors in English). In the afternoons, he teaches students in the school he founded in his parents’ backyard in Murshidabad.
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C Mallesham

Inventor

Making the adage, 'necessity is the mother of all inventions', ring true is C Mallesham, who, moved by his mother's suffering, innovated an automatic loom, that is also reviving the dying tradition of the Pochampally silk sari weaving. Laxmi Mallesham is now perhaps the happiest mother in Sharjipet, a village of handloom weavers in Andhra Pradesh. She, and many women weavers, is now free from pain and stress that consumed her for hours on the manual loom.
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Charles Ma

Bharatnatyam dancer

Charles Ma was initiated into the sacred world of Bharatanatyam under Guru Smt.Vidya Shimladka. His dance stands out for its distinct individuality, personality and control. Charles is also a contemporary choreographer and teacher. He believes that dance is sacred and the essence of his dance is a deepened spirituality and respect for its tradition and aesthetics.
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dbi.young anitafrika

dubpoet. monodramatist. educator

d'bi.young anitafrika, affectionately know as d'bi. is an internationally celebrated Jamaican dubpoet, monodramatist and educator whose socially-conscious performance art works have made an indelible mark upon the global psyche. After moving from Kingston Jamaica in 1993, she exploded onto the Canadian theatre scene in 2001 as the unbelievable storyteller in 'da kink in my hair' which played at London’s Hackney Empire Theatre in 2006 and has toured globally.
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Deepak Chopra

NYT best selling wellness author

New York Times bestselling author Deepak Chopra is acknowledged as one of the world's greatest leaders in the field of mind body medicine.
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Deepak Ravindran

Entrepreneur

Deepak Ravindran is the founder and CEO of Innoz, which he started in his college dorm room in 2008 with 3 other college mates. Deepak left Kannur University,LBS College of Engineering,Kerala as a dropout with a novel idea of giving Internet to the offline world. Deepak was named one of the MIT Technology Review outstanding innovators under 35, for the year 2011. He is also an INK Fellow & TED Talent Search participant for 2011.
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Deepti Naval

Actress, activist, artist, poet

Deepti Naval is an artiste in the true sense of the word. Deepti is an acclaimed Indian actress who migrated to the US for university. She debuted in the Hindi movie, 'Ek Baar Phir' (1979), and has acted in over 60 films, including 'Mirch Masala', 'Main Zinda Hoon', and more recently, 'Leela'. She wrote and directed 'Thodasa Aasmaan', a TV serial about women, produced a travel show, and made her directorial debut with 'Do Paise Ki Dhoop, Chaar Aane Ki Baarish'. 'Lamha-Lamha' was her first poetry compilation, followed by 'Black Wind and Other Poems'. Coming up is a poetry collection from wanderings in Ladakh. She runs the Vinod Pandit Charitable Trust, in memory of her late companion, for the education of the girl child. Untold Story
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Derek Sivers

Entrepreneur, programmer, student of life.

Originally a professional musician and circus clown, Derek Sivers created CD Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100M in sales for 150,000 musicians. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22M, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. He is a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, with over 5 million views of his talks. In 2011, he published a book which shot to #1 on all of its Amazon categories. Derek Sivers lives in Singapore, where he is creating his next company.
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Dianna Cohen

Visual Artist. Creative Advocacy Director, PPC

Los Angeles-based multi-media visual artist, painter and curator Dianna Cohen is best known for her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works using recycled plastic bags – sewn together – ranging from small hanging pieces to room-sized installations. Since graduating from UCLA she has shown work in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums in the USA, Europe, Australia, and Africa. Dianna Cohen is Creative Director & co-founder of Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of individuals, organizations and businesses working together to stop plastic pollution and its toxic impacts on humans, animals and the environment.
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Dina Buchbinder Auron

Director, Deport-es para Compartir

Dina Buchbinder Auron has introduced an innovative, action-oriented education model, called Deport-es para Compartir, to a Mexican education system that has long struggled with passivity and rigidity. Deport-es para Compartir empowers teachers from a variety of school settings to foster social and environmental awareness while also teaching values such as teamwork and fair play.
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Elora Hardy

Creative Director at Ibuku

Having spent the first fourteen years of her life in Bali and the following fourteen in the United States, Elora left her position as the sole print designer at Donna Karan International in New York, returning to Bali to found Ibuku, an international design/build team providing fully functional homes and furniture made from natural substances allowing the occupants to live in an authentic relationship with nature. Her key realization was that with the right nurturing, Asia's creative minds, skilled hands,growing global perspective and unique natural materials will provide the force for positive change in our global future.
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Francesca Rosella

Chief Creative Director, CuteCircuit

Francesca Rosella is the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director of CuteCircuit, a fashion company based in London pioneer in the field of Wearable Technology. Founded in 2004, CuteCircuit has introduced many ground breaking ideas to the world of fashion by creating new beauty and functionality through the use of smart textiles and micro-electronics. Working alongside Ryan Genz, CEO of CuteCircuit, Francesca has built the first fashion company that creates haute couture with LED illumination worn by international stars on the red carpet and that has been also the first to sell illuminated fashion using LEDs in leading stores like Selfridges in London.
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Gayatri Ganjawalla

Singer, musician

Gayatri Ganjawalla is a classically trained vocalist both in Carnatic and Hindustani styles and is currently training under the tutelage of Pt. Shri Babanrao Haldankar. She was the first Indian woman to play the leading role in the London West End musical The Far Pavilions where her acting and singing abilities received critical acclaim. Gayatri has sung for several Bollywood films and in regional languages. She travels extensively, either as a solo performer or with her husband, multiple award winner Kunal Ganjawalla. UNTOLD STORY: In school, Gayatri wanted to be an astrophysicist. Her high point was when she won a book on how to make a telescope. She was also a national level volleyball player but didn’t grow tall enough to continue the game.
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George Mathew

Founder, Music for Life International, NYC

Singapore-born Indian conductor, George Mathew, founder and Artistic Director of MUSIC FOR LIFE INTERNATIONAL and UBUNTU-SHRUTI, has emerged as one of the leading forces in the classical music world bringing symphonic music to focus on global humanitarian issues and crises at the beginning of the 21st Century. In 2010-11 he made appearances in the US, India, Panama, Morocco and South Africa as conductor and ambassador for transformative action and awakening through music. www.music4lifeinternational.org He was a speaker at the inaugural INK Conference in 2010 and was thrilled by the array of inspiring, creative, humble, brilliant, warm, friendly people who are brought together at INK.
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Gurcharan Das

Author, commentator, public intellectual

Gurcharan Das is an Indian author, commentator and public intellectual. He is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the subtle art of dharma which interrogates the epic, Mahabharata and the international bestseller, India Unbound, a narrative account of India from Independence to the global information age.
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Harpal Singh

Healthcare revolutionary

The Mentor and Chairman Emeritus of one of India’s leading hospital chains, Fortis Healthcare, Harpal Singh is also the Founder Chairman of the Nanhi Chhaan Foundation, an initiative in support of the girl child and the environment. Harpal is also currently the Chairman of the Save the Children, India. He has chaired the second and third India Health Summit and delivered the prestigious ‘Friday Lecture’ at the Royal Institute of Great Britain on Integrating Global Healthcare.WEBSITEwww.nanhichhaan.com
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INKtalks

INK provides both a platform for a global dialogue to take place and a springboard to launch ideas into creative action. INK is part of a movement to change how young people view their world, goals, and ambitions. INK is particularly interested in including ideas from emerging economies in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, in this global conversation. Just as ink is an essential ingredient used to express thoughts, INK is a physical and digital platform for people to share ideas and drive them to action. INK's vision is one of global conversation and action among cultures ancient and new, economies established and developing, and great thinkers, expert and rising.
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Itay Talgam

Conductor

Itay Talgam worked as a conductor with some of the world’s best musical ensembles and orchestras and assisted great Maestri such as Leonard Bernstein and Claudio Abbado.
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James Cameron

Film maker, Inventor

James Cameron has many avatars that allow him to be a film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and inventor. His writing and directing work includes The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). In the time between making Titanic and his return to feature films with Avatar, Cameron spent some years creating documentary films and also co-developing the digital 3-D Fusion Camera System. Cameron has also worked extensively in deep ocean exploration, diving to extreme depths with his own submersibles, robotics and camera systems.FILMS: Avatar, Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, Titanic, Strange Days, True Lies, Terminator II: Judgment Day, The Abyss, Aliens, Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Terminator, Piranha II: The Spawning
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Jennifer Aaker

Professor

A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media, including The Economist, NYTimes, WSJ, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and Science. A sought-after teacher in the field of marketing, Professor Aaker teaches courses, including 'Designing Happiness', 'How to Tell a Story', 'Building Innovative Brands', and 'The Power of Social Technology'.
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John Frame

Sculptor, filmmaker, composer

John Frame has been making sculpture in the Southern California area of the United States since the early 1980s; his work has been exhibited extensively in the US as well as in Europe, Japan, and Taiwan. From the beginning of his career, he has undertaken an in-depth exploration of the human condition. Those who review Frame's work frequently suggest that its appeal lies in his propensity to probe the deep questions of life without arriving at easy answers. One critic captures this tension thus: “In Frame's work the meaning eludes us while the search for meaning captivates us.”John twice has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and received the New Talent Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1995 he was awarded the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Individual Artist Fellowship. He received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle in 2009.
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John Hardy

Designer, educator

Jewelry designer John Hardy co-founded the extraordinary Green School in Bali, where kids get a holistic and green education. At the Green School, students learn in open-air classrooms surrounded by acres of gardens that they tend; they learn to build with bamboo; and meanwhile they're being prepared for traditional British school exams. The centerpiece of the campus is the spiraling Heart of School, which may be called Asia's largest bamboo building.WEBSITEwww.greenschool.org
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John-Henry Harris

Lego creative designer

John-Henry Harris is a British creative designer who has been living and working in Denmark for the past three years. His thought-provoking environmental and social design philosophies, displayed at the 2008 New Designers exhibition in London, won him a dream job innovating toys at LEGO, where his passion now lies in spreading the essence of Play worldwide. At a recent TED event in New York, John-Henry's motto "Play Hard, Work Better!" challenged corporate responsibility and social attitudes towards play at work, and he now hopes to broaden the way businesses think about innovation culture globally. UNTOLD STORY: John-Henry loves building ferocious creatures with big teeth and sharp claws and his 'Fiery Legend' Dragon set contains three models that can be built from the same set of bricks. This, along with some designer web-tips, aims to inspire children into believing that they really can create anything out of one selection of bricks.
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Joi Barua

musician

Joi Barua grew up in a sleepy town called Jorhat in Assam, the North East of India. He was gifted a violin by his father when he was four, and he fell in love with Music. The only music he has access to those days was a 30 minute friday slot on radio. His town had one piano, and no teachers, and his father had to cross the border and get him a keyboard from Bhutan. He has no formal training in singing, and is now making waves in the advertising, music, and film circuit in Mumbai.
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Joichi Ito

director, MIT Media Lab

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is the Chair of Creative Commons, on the Board of The New York Times Company, on the Board of the MacArthur Foundation, on the Board of Trustees of The Knight Foundation, and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation and WITNESS. He is a member of the IT Strategic Headquarters of the Japanese Cabinet. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter, Path, Pinwheel and other Internet companies.
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Kalyan Varma

Wildlife photographer

Kalyan Varma is a wildlife photographer and filmmaker specializing in environmental issues in India. He is a freelancer with many of the world’s leading magazines and channels like National Geographic and BBC. Varma has co-founded India Nature Watch, the largest online community of wildlife photographers, and also shares his knowledge of photography and wildlife with people in various platforms.
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Kevin Kelly

Digital visionary

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. From 1984 to 1990, Kelly was publisher and Editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He is also a charter board member of the Long Now Foundation, which is building a monumental clock to tick for 10,000 years. He is currently Editor and Publisher of the popular websites Cool Tools and The Quantified Self. His newest book What Technology Wants was released in October, 2010. UNTOLD STORY: Kevin's first job as a kid was at the local library. It was the only job he should have been fired for; instead of working he would hide in the stacks reading old magazines.
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Krushnaa Patil

Mountain climber

In May 2009, Krushnaa Patil became the youngest Indian woman to successfully climb Mount Everest. Patil was also the first Indian woman to climb the highest peaks in Antarctica, South America and Europe, and has successfully climbed the highest peaks on six of the seven continents. Patil is currently pursuing her MA in Political Science from Pune University.
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Leonie Casanova

Singer & Lyricist

Leonie Casanova is a London-based singer and songwriter. Born and raised in Zambia to an Italian father and Zambian mother, and schooled in Swaziland, England and the USA where she studied Economics and French Literature, Leonie’s colourful and almost nomadic background has deeply informed her approach to songwriting and to the intrinsic and essential story-telling element of this process. Leonie crosses and fuses genres and musical textures fluidly which allows exploration of what she calls “an endless work playground”. UNTOLD STORY: Leonie thinks her obsession with mangoes and her ability to sit and “observe the world” may have something to do with days spent climbing and sitting on mango trees as a child in Zambia!
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Lisa Staprans

Designer

Lisa Staprans has practiced interior design and product design for 20 years. She travels the world for inspiration and to learn and study other cultures, art, architecture and lifestyles. The book she is currently writing, The Soul of Design, features art, interior design, architecture, gardens, and other soulful spaces around the world.Lisa earned a Bachelors degree in Fine Art from the University of California at Berkeley, and later studied at the School of Visual Arts and Parson’s School of Design, both located in New York City. Her career in design began in New York City working for large and small firms. In 1992 she and her husband founded the company, Lisa Staprans Interior Design, currently known as Staprans Design. Lisa’s clients have homes in Virginia, New York, Utah, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, and many places in California.
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Luis Dias

Founder of Child’s Play Foundation

Dr. Luis Dias is a physician, musician, and founder of Child’s Play, a charity which works to bring classical music to underprivileged children in India. Child’s Play is inspired by El Sistema, a Venezuelan initiative that promotes the collective practice of music and music education as a means of social change and empowerment. The creation of Child’s Play was triggered by the stupendous performances of two orchestras, both made up of underprivileged youth from separate corners of the globe, at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2007.
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Lynda Barry

Cartoonist

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. 
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Madhumita Halder

Madhumita Halder is the founder of MadRat Games, creators of the World’s first Indian Language word game – Aksharit (www.aksharit.com). She graduated in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and being an artist at heart, worked for a FX studio. However her creative energies not finding room for expression in the corporate world, she chose to work with children. She subsequently taught middle school children at an alternate education center for 4 years.
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Mami Varte

Singer

Mami is a well-known singer in Mizoram. Her debut album, Damlai Par, released in 2007, was rated as the top selling album of the year and led to a hat-trick of awards at the Mizoram Music Awards; Best Female Singer, Best Music Video and Song of the Year for the title track. Her following three singles reached the top 10 leading to another prestigious MMA in 2008. Mami recently released her new music video Hmangaihna Vanduai Maw with her second album to follow next year. UNTOLD STORY: I was recently invited to a school year function, I had a television appearance later on in the evening, so, feeling guilty, I made my excuses and left early, telling them to be sure to watch the telecast live on local cable that night. I got home, changed, did my make-up and waited to be collected, and waited, and waited... Eventually, I called them. The date was for the following week! I was totally embarrassed - the worst part is that when my mom got home - her advice was "Drink a glass of water and sleep on it!!"
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Mansukhbhai Prajapati

Inventor

Mansukhbhai R Prajapati was born in Nichimandal village in Gujarat in a family of potters and terracotta craftsmen. Being the eldest among four siblings, he became the helmsman of his family and its craft legacy. Despite financial constraints, Mansukhbhai's parents managed to educate him till high school. Mansukhbhai has developed an entire range of earthen products for daily use in the kitchen. These products include water filters, refrigerators, hot plates, cooker and other such items of daily use.
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Marc Koska

Inventor

The alarm bells first rang back in 1984 for Marc when he read a newspaper article predicting the spread of HIV through re-using medical syringes. Appalled at the prospect of such an avoidable catastrophe, Marc decided to do something about it. Some 26 years later his solution the K1, an Auto Disable (AD) syringe, not only physically prevents re-use, but can be manufactured inexpensively, by using existing machinery and is now under license to 14 global manufacturers. Conservative estimates credit Marc with more than five million lives saved and 10 million diseases prevented. In 2006, after realizing that simply manufacturing a safe product was not enough, he identified a gap in the market between producing a product that would save lives and a lack of knowledge of the benefits such a product can bring. He established The SafePoint Trust, a UK based not-for-profit, that produces hard-hitting, public information films. Marc now spends all his time working with SafePoint lobbying for legislation change at government level, spreading public awareness and ensuring adequate healthcare worker training is in force to complete the changeover to a safe healthcare system. WEBSITE: www.marckoska.com, www.safepointtrust.org
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Mussaret Zaidi

Public health expert, researcher

Dr. Mussaret Zaidi heads the research laboratory at the Hospital Regional de Alta Especialidad in Yucatan, Mexico. During the last decade, she has studied anti-microbial usage in animals and the human health impact of anti-microbial-resistant bacteria in the food chain and environment.
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Nam Do

Serial tech entrepreneur

Prior to forming Emotiv, Nam Do co-founded and ran SASme, a pioneer in providing SMPP platforms to telecommunication carriers and content aggregators in Australia and Asia. In 1995, Nam won one of Vietnam’s most prestigious study abroad scholarships. Nam came to Australia’s RMIT University under a full merit scholarship, and started his first technology company in his final year. A regular guest-lecturer at Harvard Business School, HAAS Business School and Stanford University, in 2007, Nam was voted as one of Australia’s Top 10 Digital Entrepreneurs. UNTOLD STORY: In 2003, Nam Do had dinner with Professor Allan Snyder FRS. They discussed at length about Allan’s work on non-conscious mind with autistic savants. At 4am, Nam told Allan, “you know what, the last 20 years have been the era for DSP (digital signal processing), the next 20 years will be the era for ESP (emotional signal processing)”. Allan loved it and that’s how Emotiv was formed.
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Nancy Duarte

CEO of Duarte Design, author

Since 1988, Nancy Duarte’s firm has created over a quarter of a million presentations. As one of the largest woman-owned businesses in Silicon Valley, her experience working with global companies and thought leaders has influenced the perception of some of the world’s most valuable brands and many of humanity’s common causes. Fascinated by presentations as the most powerful persuasive medium, Duarte determined to crack the code on why some presentations are riveting and others are unbearable. In Fall 2010 she released Resonate—Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences which identifies hidden story structures inherent in great communication.
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Nikhilesh Das

Rural innovator

Nikhilesh Das was awarded the fifth National Grassroots Innovation Award by the President of India, Smt Pratibha Patil, for his innovative research on controlling oil pollution in water. A student of Cotton College (BSc in Physics), Das aims to pursue a career in nuclear physics and bring the spirit of scientific innovation to students across India.
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Nitin Ron

Neonatologist, mountaineer

I am a neonatologist (baby doctor!) and love high altitude trekking and mountaineering. I am an associate professor of pediatrics at New York Methodist Hospital, and love to use innovative methods to teach medical students. I am constantly humbled and amazed by what love and compassion can do to heal little premature and sick babies! I have also been leading a research project in the Himalayas, including the Mt. Everest region, involving ultrasound of the eye(optic nerve) and the body, to predict mountain sickness, and have also looked at the effect of meditation in acclimatizing the body to high altitude. I constantly encourage my students to break the rules, rearrange the paradigms with which they run their lives, and therefore to re-invent themselves every moment! I also volunteer as an art guide at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City, and this is a reminder to me that medicine is so much of an art as well as a science!
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Prakash Amte

Social activist

Magsaysay Awardee Prakash Amte runs Lok Biradari Prakalp to provide community services to tribal people in rural Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Chhatisgarh. The project has grown into a hospital, residential school and an orphanage for injured wild animals.
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Raghava KK

Artist

Raghava KK, named by CNN as one of the 10 most fascinating people the world is yet to know of, is a multi-disciplinary artist, working in genres as disparate as painting, film, installation, multimedia, performance, and his own wedding.
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Raghu Dixit

Singer, composer

Raghu Dixit is a unique and popular composer, song-writer & singer from India. His music is a seamless amalgamation of ethnic music and styles from across the world. His lyrics, though intense, are simple and speak about every common man’s emotions and experiences. Inserting Indian ethnic folk, Sufi and classical music phrases cleverly into his songs, Raghu’s singing style can be described as unique. Being a completely self- taught guitarist and singer, his vocal range and versatility has been appreciated with awe and has become one of the most recognizable voices in the country! UNTOLD STORY: Raghu is a gold medalist in Masters in Microbiology from the prestigious University of Mysore and a professionally qualified Indian classical dancer.
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Rajika Puri

Danced storyteller, choreographer, writer

Rajika Puri is an exponent of two forms of Indian dance - Bharatanatyam and Odissi – which for several years she performed internationally in solo recital (including a command performance for the President of Mexico). After playing ‘Narrator/goddess Kali’ in The Transposed Heads directed by Julie Taymor (Lincoln Center Theater, ’86), she developed a form of danced storytelling in which she accompanies her dances with songs, chants, vocalized rhythmic syllables, and a narrative in English. An evening of such stories, commissioned by the Rubin Museum of Art, was also presented off-Broadway: Devi-Malika: a garland of danced stories on the feminine divine in India (Duke on 42nd, ’08).
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Ramachandra Budihal

Heritage Imagineer

A software architect at Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, with geek credentials going back two decades, Ramachandra Budihal drew from his work in digital image processing and multimedia to co-found the Mahabharata Samshodhana Pratishthanam (Mahabharata Research Foundation), a non-profit organisation on a mission to digitize and protect works of Indian heritage and make them relevant to the contemporary society. One of the foundation's projects focuses on the Mahabharata, India's most famous epic. Budihal is helping develop and compile an encyclopedia of the Mahabharata - 18 volumes - that's set to debut in 2012. With the foundation, he also devised and built Samanveshak, a digital document-scanning laboratory housed in a bus with state-of-the-art scanners, satcoms and telepresence. To date, the team has digitised and documented more than one million folios of ancient medical manuscripts from remote areas in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.Ramachandra is also recepient of a presidential honour, 'Maharishi Badrayan Vyas Samman' (2007), conferred by then President of India Dr Abdul Kalam, in recognition of his breakthrough work in the area of cultural heritage preservation and promotion using technology.
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Rick Smolan

Photojournalist, Producer

Rick is a former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer best known as the creator of the 'Day in the Life' book series. As CEO of Against All Odds Productions (which Fortune describes “One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America), Rick's global crowd-sourced photography projects (which also utilize the skills of hundreds of the world’s leading photographers), combine creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology. His projects each generate hundreds of millions of media impressions and have been featured on the covers of Fortune, Time, and Newsweek. Untold Story
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Rives

Poet, multi-media artist

Rives is a poet and multi-media artist from Los Angeles, who applies new technologies to ancient art forms. He has appeared on Romanian billboards, in Scottish pubs and inside a 1964 Cadillac with a supermodel for the Bravo TV special Ironic Iconic America. He is the co-host of the annual TEDActive conference and his hobby is rooftops. Offstage, Rives designs and writes pop-up books. He has appeared on multiple seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and was a member of the Def Poetry international tour group. Untold Story
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Robert Vijay Gupta

Musical activist, violinist

Violinist Robert Vijay Gupta joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic in June 2007 at the age of 19.
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Ruchi Sanghvi

Entrepreneur, technologist

Ruchi is the founder and CEO of Cove - a company she started with other early ex-Facebookers. Prior to starting her own company, Ruchi was the first female engineer at Facebook.
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Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Mystic

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is the founder of Isha Foundation, which runs yoga centres, charitable outreach and green initiatives around the world. Isha Foundation is a non-religious, non-profit organization that addresses all aspects of human well-being from yoga practice to social justice and the well being of the planet. Sadhguru has spoken at the World Economic Forum three times, most recently in 2007, addressing issues ranging from diplomacy to economic development, education and the environment. He has also served as a delegate to the United Nations Millennium Peace Summit and the World Peace Congress.
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Shamim Sarif

Filmmaker, author

Writer/director Shamim Sarif is an equally successful novelist (the Pendleton May First Novel Award, Betty Trask Award), screenwriter, and feature film director. Her two feature films have won over 30 international awards. She has published many short stories and has built a successful career in script editing and screenplay adaptation. An accomplished speaker who has spoken at TED events in London, Jerusalem and India, Shamim has also directed music videos and written lyrics for recorded songs. In 2008, Shamim received an AfterEllen Visibility Award as International Lesbian/Bi Woman of the Year. With her partner and producer on her films, Hanan Kattan, she runs the Enlightenment group of companies, based in London, and the Sarif-Kattan Foundation, focused on empowering and educating women and children.
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Shantanu Moitra

Music director, composer

Shantanu is a renowned Indian music composer. His father is an accomplished sarod player and his mother a talented artist, so creativity runs through his veins. He has worked across many landmark Bollywood films including 3 Idiots. Moitra recently had the honour of composing the Delhi Commonwealth Games closing ceremony song Bye Bye Shera. He believes the best way to "see" a country is by experiencing its music. He collects and restores folk music to preserve and protect a fast disappearing genre.
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Sheena Iyengar

Social psychologist, professor

Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)
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Shilo Shiv Suleman

Artist

Shilo Shiv Suleman is an Indian illustrator, animator and visual artist based in the city of Bangalore. Her primary area of interest is visual storytelling through multiple mediums. She illustrated her first book for children at the age of 16 and has illustrated eight others since with some of the most well known publishing houses in India. She has also been actively involved in setting up community art projects and collectives that get people to appreciate and create street art in their surroundings as well as use art and design to bring socially relevant issues in India to the forefront.
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Shirin Juwaley

Human rights activist

An acid attack survivor herself, Shirin started the Palash Foundation to address social reintegration and livelihoods for people with disfigurement. In 1998, her husband threw acid on her after she requested divorce.
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Simon Lewis

Film producer, author

Simon Lewis is a film and television producer and author. After earning law degrees from Christ’s College Cambridge and Boalt Hall, Berkeley, Lewis moved to Los Angeles where his Hollywood experience includes managing writers, directors and stars as well as producing Look Who’s Talking (1989), The Chocolate War (1988), the Emmy award-winning international co-production for HBO and ITV Central Age Old Friends/A Month of Sundays (1988), and variety specials starring Howie Mandel.
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Sophie Morgan

Designer & activist

Sophie Morgan was born in the south of England, then educated in Scotland, before she returned to study at the University in London, where she now lives and works managing her own company. She is a product designer, a television presenter, a model, a campaigner, an artist and, as a result of a car accident seven years ago, a paraplegic wheelchair bound for life. Her work is centered on changing how disability is perceived and considered within society.
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Sunitha Krishnan

Anti-trafficking crusader

Sunitha Krishnan, Founder and Director of Prajwala, or “an eternal flame”, is an eminent anti-trafficking activist internationally known for her fight against girl child trafficking for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation. A mental health professional, she has done extensive research and is essentially a field practitioner. Prajwala runs 17 schools throughout Andhra Pradesh, India, for 6,000 children and has rescued more than 4,200 women from prostitution, 2,100 of whom Krishnan personally liberated.
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Susan Lim

Pioneer liver transplant surgeon

Dr. Susan Lim performed the first successful cadaveric liver transplant for Singapore and Asia in 1990. She is also widely known as the ‘Spirit of the Century’, an Award conferred upon her by the Singapore public in a national contest held to identify the role model for the 21st century.  
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Talavya

Classical tabla ensemble

Globe-trotting percussion ensemble Talavya bring tabla to the center stage, distilling its age-old classical spirit and practice into a high-energy, highly accessible performance. Composed by music maestro Pandit Divyang Vakil, the quartet of Rushi Vakil, Kaumil Shah, Sahil Patel and Rahul Shrimali with accompaniment by Heena Patel moves between rousing peaks and smooth meditative passages, revealing the colours of tabla.
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Tom Wujec

Design innovator

Tom Wujec is a pioneer in business visualization, the emerging practice of using images, sketches and data-driven infographics to help teams solve complex problems. Tom’s work has been featured in many international conferences, such as TED, Pop!Tech and the Fortune Innovation Summit. Tom is also the author of three books on creative thinking and is a highly sought after international speaker, delivering visually rich innovation keynotes, workshops and knowledge maps. He has brought several software applications to market, including Autodesk SketchBook Pro, PortfolioWall, and Maya which won an Academy Award for its contribution to the film industry. Tom has worked as a creative director, writer and animator, has designed dozens of museum exhibits, and lives in Toronto with his wife and two children. BOOKS: Five Star Mind, Pumping Ions, Return on Imagination
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Ugesh Sarcar

Magician

Prof. Ugesh Sarcar is India's first and only contemporary and revered street magician. Ugesh trained in the art of magic under the stewardship of his father - the "Living Legend" Prof. M. C. Sarcar. Thereafter, "Ugesh Sarcar's 3rd Degree" being the first national TV appearance became an instant hit and the highest rated show for the channel for over 3 years. Ever since there has been no looking back and his performances have won him accolades world over.
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Vidya Shah

Musician, singer, composer, producer

Born into a family with a rich musical heritage, Vidya Shah is a vocalist who has trained in both North and South Indian musical traditions. Blessed with a rich and captivating voice, she has performed at national and international fora, including the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C, Asia Society in New York, Assilah Arts Festival in Morroco, The Kala Utsav in Singapore, the Humbolt Forum, Berlin, Germany and the Schaffhauser Jazz Festival, Switzerland. Vidya conducts workshops on music appreciation and spiritual traditions in Indian music.
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Vikram Bhaskaran

Co-founder, Samosapedia

Vikram Bhaskaran is the CEO and Co-Founder of Samosa Media whose flagship product is Samosapedia: The Definitive Guide to South Asian Lingo.
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Vikram Gandhi

Filmmaker

Vikram Gandhi is the award-winning director and star of Kumaré, a film in which he impersonates a wise guru from the East and starts a following of real people in the West. Kumaré won the Audience Award at SXSW Film Festival in 2011 and was released theatrically in North America in 2012. Vikram lives in New York and is developing his next feature film.
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Vineet Singal

Executive Director, 100KCheeks campaign

Named by The Huffington Post as one of the "Top 10 Changemakers Under 40", Vineet Singal is a senior at Stanford University and leads 100KCheeks, an initiative to register 100,000 new bone marrow donors using the power of personal stories and social media.In working closely with Professor Jennifer Aaker at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a team of 12 dedicated Stanford students, Vineet helped 100KCheeks reach its goal in 1 year. Vineet is currently leading efforts to register a million bone marrow donors worldwide in 2012 and jumpstart the creation of national marrow registries in countries like India and Indonesia. Vineet wants to use his skills as a social entrepreneur and future physician to fight for greater access to quality and affordable healthcare for the underserved. His resolve solidified in Galveston, TX during the fall of 2009, when he took a leave of absence from Stanford to volunteer full time at St. Vincent’s free clinic. Back at Stanford, Vineet co-founded Anjna, a national nonprofit organization that aims to utilize technology at free clinics. Vineet helped build a network of 250+ undergraduates, medical students and faculty and is leading efforts to create health education programs at free clinics in high need areas nationwide, in addition to conducting groundbreaking pilot studies on utilizing interactive, tablet based education and SMS technology at clinics in the bay area.
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Will Travis

Creative entrepreneur

Will Travis is a leader of infectious passion, drive and tremendous insight, gained from leading creative agency ATTIK, which he helped expand into London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney, and most recently with the US division of the world’s largest agency Dentsu, where he held the post of CEO of Dentsu America. A long-term creative entrepreneur, with a hell-bent focus on creating unique brand experiences with the energy to deliver.
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Yann Vasnier

Perfumer

Yann Vasnier was born in Brittany, France and from an early age he was drawn to appreciate the nuances of fragrances. He trained as a perfumer at ISIPCA, the prestigious Versailles perfumery school and he graduated Valedictorian in 1999. During his studies, Yann also worked as a trainee perfumer for Quest International in Paris. Upon graduating, he was offered a position as a junior perfumer with the Fine Fragrance team in Paris, trained by Francoise Caron. In 2001, Yann was the recipient of the International Young Perfumer Award. In July 2003, Yann joined the Quest New York as a perfumer and in 2007 joined Givaudan.
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