Anand Giridharadas is a friend who is a brilliant thinker and writer for The New York Times. I have only just begun to get to know him, and the courage and wisdom he shares is daring. Anand is speaking this week at St. Thomas University’s annual event: The Forum of Workplace Inclusion (March 29th to 31st, 2016). It’s last minute, I realize, but go see him if you can!
At the very least, check out his biweekly column “Letter from America” or The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, a book about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him (optioned for movie adaption by the director Kathryn Bigelow).
Anand’s first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2011), about returning to the India his parents left is a worthwhile read, too. The Star Tribune reviewer called it “[a] beautifully written, intelligent look at the cultural history and changes of India . . . The book [is] worth reading because of [Giridharadas’s] skill as a writer . . . Giridharadas publishes sentences and paragraphs that are exquisitely worded, to the point of becoming downright memorable, and certainly quotable.”
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Anand was educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard. He worked briefly as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Mumbai before becoming a journalist in 2005, reporting from that city for the International Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. A columnist since 2008, Anand first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics under the tutelage of Jill Abramson.
He appears regularly on TV and the radio in the United States and globally, including on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, “Morning Joe,” and“The Daily Show.” He has given talks on the main stage of TED and at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Aspen Institute, Summit at Sea, the Sydney Opera House, the United Nations, the Asia Society, PopTech and Google. He has received honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He is also a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Anand lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and son, Orion.