PERSON: Anand Giridharadas

New York Times

Columnist/Autrhor

Anand Giridharadas is an author and New York Times columnist. He writes the “Admit One” column for The Times’s arts pages, and the “Letter from America” for its global edition. He is the author, most recently, of “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Texas’s Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him. In 2011 he published “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,” about returning to the India his parents left.<br> <br> His datelines include Italy, India, China, Dubai, Norway, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Uruguay, and the United States. He has written occasional pieces for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and elsewhere. (To join Anand’s mailing list for new columns, sign up at Google Groups.)<br> <br> Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford and Harvard. He is a former consultant for McKinsey & Company and later reported from Bombay for the Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. He wrote about India’s transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing, poverty and democracy. He was appointed a columnist in 2008, writing the “Letter from India” series, then the “Currents” column from 2009 to 2014, before starting the “Letter from America.”<br> <br> He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics under the tutelage of Jill Abramson. He moved to Bombay after college, in 2003, to work as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he served on projects advising the local government on urban development, a pharmaceutical company on organizational redesign and leadership development, and Indian and Chinese businesses on their internationalization strategies.<br> <br> He has appeared regularly on television and the radio in the United States and internationally, including on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, “The Daily Show” and beyond. He has lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Sydney Opera House, the United Nations, the Asia Society, PopTech and Google. He has received awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the South Asian Journalists Association, and the Indo-American Society, and has been a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale.<br> <br> In 2011, he was named a Henry Crown fellow of the Aspen Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker.<br> <br> — anand.ly