V S Naipaul

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, T.C. (born August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity and Bhumihar Brahmin heritage from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Naipaul lives now in Wiltshire, England.
Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. A scion of the politically powerful Capildeo family of Trinidad, Sir Vidia is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist.

Awards
Booker Prize - 1971
Jerusalem Prize - 1983
David Cohen British Literature Prize - 1993
Nobel Prize for Literature - 2001
1977 Declined to be Commander of the order of the British Empire (CBE)

His works

Fiction
The Mystic Masseur - (1957)
The Suffrage of Elvira - (1958)
Miguel Street - (1959)
A House for Mr Biswas - (1961)
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion - (1963)
A Flag on the Island - (1967)
The Mimic Men - (1967)
In a Free State - (1971)
Guerillas - (1975)
A Bend in the River - (1979)
Finding the Centre - (1984)
The Enigma of Arrival - (1987)
A Way in the World - (1994)
Half a Life - (2001)
Magic Seeds - (2004)

Non-fiction

The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)
An Area of Darkness (1964)
The Loss of El Dorado - (1969)
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)
India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)
A Congo Diary (1980)
The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)
Finding the Centre (1984)
Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000)
A Turn in the South (1989)
India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)
Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and S. Rushdie)
Bombay (1994, with Raghubir Singh)
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)
Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)
Literary Occasions: Essays (2003, by Pankaj Mishra)

Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata); his family lived in a number of cities including the Bata Shoe Company town of Batanagar, near Calcutta, Patna and London, though never Calcutta proper during his childhood, he himself spending extended periods away at boarding school from the age of five. His father, Prem, was an executive of the Bata India Limited shoe company who migrated to post-Partition India from West Punjab in Pakistan; he had unsuccessfully courted a Sikh girl before meeting Seth's mother, Leila; she had had a chaste premarital dalliance with an unsuitable Christian boy and was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court as well as the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court, at Simla. She studied law in London while pregnant with Seth's younger brother and came first in her Bar examinations conducted only weeks after she delivered her second child. That child, Vikram Seth's younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours; his younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, who worked on Deepa Mehta's Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh, Lata, Savita and two of the Chatterjee siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been unusually candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional personnel are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue"; Justice Leila Seth has said in her memoir On Balance that other characters in A Suitable Boy are composites but Haresh is a portrait of her husband Premo.) Having lived in London for many years he now maintains residences near Salisbury, England, where he is a notable participant in local literary and cultural events and in 2006 bought and renovated the house of the seventeenth century Anglican divine and metaphysical poet George Herbert and in Delhi, where he lives with his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.

Prizes and awards

1983 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) The Humble Administrator's Garden
1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Suitable Boy
1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Suitable Boy
1994 WH Smith Literary Award A Suitable Boy
2001 EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel An Equal Music
2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman

Published works

Novels
The Golden Gate (1986)
A Suitable Boy, (1993)
An Equal Music, (1999)

Poetry
Mappings (1980)
The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985)
All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)
Beastly Tales (1991)
Three Chinese Poets (1992)

Children's book
Beastly Tales (1991)

Libretto
Arion and the Dolphin (1994) for the English National Opera

Non-fiction
From Heaven Lake, (1983)
Two Lives, (2005)

Shiv Khera

SHIV KHERA is the founder of Qualified Learning Systems USA. An educator, Business Consultant, and a much sought-after speaker.
He has taken his dynamic personal message across the globe, from the U.S. to Singapore. His 25 years of research, understanding and experience has helped people on the path of personal growth and fulfilment.
He has been recognized as a "Louis Marchesi Fellow" by Round Table Foundation, an award given to, among others, Mother Teresa. Lions Club International has honored Mr. Khera with "Lifetime Achievement Award" for the cause of 'Humanitarian Service to the Society'. Rotary Club has honoured him with the "Centennial Vocational Award for Excellence."
Mr. Shiv Khera's client list includes, among others, Lufthansa German Airlines, Johnson & Johnson Ltd, Motorola, Nestle, Glaxo SmithKline Beecham, Tetrapak, Sanofi Torrent, Phillips, Gillette, Daimler Chrysler, HSBC Bank, Carrier, Deutsche Bank and General Motors. He has appeared on numerous radio and television shows.
He is also an author of the International Best Seller book "YOU CAN WIN", which has sold over One Million copies in 8 languages. His second book 'Living With Honour' is already on the best-seller list. His recent release 'Freedom Is Not Free' is propelling citizens and our Nation to success.
Over 20,000 people have attended his 3 days dynamic workshops internationally and approximately one million people have heard him as a Keynote Speaker. His Trade Mark is
" Winners don't do different things. They do things differently." ™ SHIVKHERA
Mr. Khera is the founder of " Country First Foundation", a Trust. The Vision of this organisation is "Respect & dignity for every Indian" and the Mission is "to bring freedom through education and justice"

Khushwant Singh

Khushwant Singh received his bachelor's degree from Government College, Lahore and qualified as a barrister from King's College, London. His father, Sir Sobha Singh, was a prominent builder in Lutyens' Delhi.

In August 1947, days before the partition of India and Pakistan, Singh, then a lawyer practicing in the High Court in Lahore, drove to his family's summer cottage at Kasauli in the foothills of the Himalayas. Continuing on to Delhi along 200 miles of strangely vacant road, he came upon a Jeep full of armed Sikhs who boasted that they had just massacred a village of Muslims.Such experiences were to be powerfully distilled in Singh's 1956 novel Train to Pakistan. (The 2006 edition of Train to Pakistan, published by Roli Books in New Delhi, also contains 66 photographs by Margaret Bourke-White that capture the partition's violent aftermath.)

Khushwant Singh has edited Yojana, an Indian government journal; The Illustrated Weekly of India, a newsweekly; and two major Indian newspapers, The National Herald and the Hindustan Times. During his tenure, The Illustrated Weekly became India's pre-eminent newsweekly.[citation needed] After Singh's departure, it suffered a huge drop in readership.

From 1980 through 1986, Singh was a member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament. Awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 for service to his country, in 1984 he returned the award in protest against the siege of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army. Undeterred, in 2007 the Indian government awarded Singh an even more prestigious honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

Honors and awards
Padma Bhushan, Government of India (1974)
Honest Man of the Year, Sulabh International (2000)
Punjab Rattan, Government of Panjab (2006)
Padma Vibhushan, Government of India (2007)

Books written by him
The Mark of Vishnu and Other Stories, 1950
The History of Sikhs, 1953
Train to Pakistan, 1956
The Voice of God and Other Stories, 1957
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, 1959
The Sikhs Today, 1959
The Fall of the Kingdom of the Punjab, 1962
A History of the Sikhs, 1963
Ranjit Singh: The Maharajah of the Punjab, 1963
Ghadar 1915: India's first armed revolution, 1966
A Bride for the Sahib and Other Stories, 1967
Black Jasmine, 1971
Tragedy of Punjab, 1984
Delhi: A Novel, 1990
Sex, Scotch and Scholarship: Selected Writings, 1992
Not a Nice Man to Know: The Best of Khushwant Singh, 1993
We Indians, 1993
Women and Men in My Life, 1995
Uncertain Liaisons; Sex, Strife and Togetherness in Urban India, 1995
The Company of Women, 1999
Truth, Love and a Little Malice(an autobiography), 2002
With Malice towards One and All
The End of India, 2003
Burial at the Sea, 2004
Paradise and Other Stories, 2004
Death at My Doorstep, 2005
The Illustrated History of the Sikhs, 2006

Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai was born in Chandigarh and spent her childhood in Pune and Mumbai where she went to the Cathedral and John Connon School. When she was about 8 or 9, the Desais moved to Delhi. She moved to England at the age of 14. One year later, the family relocated to the US, where Desai completed her schooling in the state of Massachusetts. She later attended Bennington College, Hollins University, and then Columbia University, where she took two years off to write her first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Awards and recognition
Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from such notable figures as Salman Rushdie.It went on to win the Betty Trask Award,a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.

Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, (2006) has been widely praised by critics throughout Asia, Europe and the United States and won the 2006 Man Booker Prize as well as the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.

Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra was born in New Delhi and educated in India. He completed his primary education at St. Columba's School in New Delhi and eventually graduated from the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1968. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1970, becoming board-certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, and after interning at a New Jersey hospital, trained for several more years at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts and at the University of Virginia Hospital. He taught at Tufts University and Boston University Schools of Medicine, became the chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital and established a large private practice. He became a leader in the Transcendental Meditation movement, but later branched off on his own to pursue broader aims in mind-body treatment.
Chopra is the co-founder of The Chopra Center, which he founded in 1996 in La Jolla with Dr. David Simon; in 2002 the Center moved its official headquarters to La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California with a branch in New York City and other centers opening soon.

Books by Deepak Chopra
1987 Creating Health ISBN 0-395-75515-8
1988 Return of the Rishi ISBN 0-395-57420-X
1989 Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine ISBN 0-553-34869-8
1991 Unconditional Life: Mastering the Forces That Shape Personal Reality
1991 Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide ISBN 0-517-58421-2
1993 Ageless Body, Timeless Mind : The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old ISBN 0-517-59257-6
1993 Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities
1994 The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfilment of Your Dreams
1995 The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons in Creating the Life You Want ISBN 0-517-70434-X
1995 The Return of Merlin: A Novel ISBN 0-449-91074-1
1995 The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing
1997 The Path to Love: Renewing the Power of Spirit in Your Life ISBN 0-517-70622-9
1999 Everyday Immortality: A Concise Course in Spiritual Transformation ISBN 0-609-60484-8
1999 Lords of Light: A Novel ISBN 0-312-96892-2
2000 The Angel is Near: A Novel ISBN 0-312-97024-2
2001 The Deeper Wound: Recovering the Soul from Fear and Suffering, 100 Days of Healing
2001 Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging ISBN 0-609-60079-6
2000 How to Know God : The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries ISBN 0-609-60078-8
2003 Golf for Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life
2003 The Spontaneous Fulfilment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence ISBN 0-609-60042-7
2003 Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles ISBN 1-84413-221-8
2004 The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life ISBN 0-517-70624-5
2004 Fire in the Heart: A Spiritual Guide for Teens ISBN 0-689-86216-4
2005 Peace Is the Way : Bringing War and Violence to an End ISBN 0-307-23607-2
2006 Ask The Kabala: Oracle Cards/Kabala Guidebook ISBN 978-1401910396
2006 Power Freedom and Grace: Living from the Source of Lasting Happiness ISBN 978-1-878424-81-5
2006 Life After Death: The Burden of Proof ISBN 0-307-34578-5
2006 Kama Sutra: Including the Seven Spiritual Laws of Love ISBN 978-1-852273-85-9
2007 Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment ISBN 978-0-06-087880-1

Robin Sharma