Jaipur Photojournalism Seminar
Bandeep Singh
Born in Chandigarh in 1971, Singh is a self-taught photographer. He is currently working as the India photo editor of Fortune Magazine. He is a reputed editorial photographer and his images have been published in India Today, Time, New York Times, Business Week, Business Today, and numerous other publications.
Singh’s personal photographic work is more conceptual and exploratory. He works in diverse genres ranging from documentary photography, landscape and nature studies to portraiture and eroticism. His work is deeply influenced by his cultural leanings and his deep interest in mysticism, Sufi poetry and music. Singh’s solo shows include ‘Beloved Pangi’, Gaiety Theatre, Shimla, 1994; ‘When Seeing Stops’, Visual Arts Gallery, New Delhi, 2002; and ‘Sa: The Feminine’, MDG Fine Arts Gallery, London, 2005. He has participated in numerous group shows, the most recent being ‘Jaisalmer Yellow’, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2007; ‘Lo Real Maravilliso; Marvelous Reality’, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2009; and ‘India Awakens Under the Banyan Tree’, Essl Museum, Vienna, 2010. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award in photography and he has been on the jury of the India Habitat Centre grant for Photography since 2005. His images were displayed at the 2007 SAARC Summit in New Delhi. His works are in the permanent collection of Essl Museum, Vienna; Nirankari Museum of Faith, New Delhi; and Luxembourg Embassy, New Delhi, as well as in several private collections in India and abroad. Singh lives and works in New Delhi.Bandeep will spearhead the photo exhibitions for the “Haathi Mere Saathi campaign”. He lives and works in New Delhi.
Vipul Mudgal
Vipul Mudgal is the Director, Publics and Policies Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, where he is also heading the Inclusive Media for Change, a Ford Foundation funded project, which works to build bridges between mainstream media and rural India’s multiple crises.He has earlier held senior editorial positions at the Hindustan Times, India Today, BBC World Service and Asia Times in India, U.K., and Thailand. He has edited Lucknow and Jaipur editions of the Hindustan Times and headed the paper’s Research and Insight team for several years. As a political commentator he specialised on political and social violence and issues of democracy and sustainable development. He has extensively covered issues of marginalized communities in rural areas and India’s agrarian crises.
He has conducted extensive media research and over a dozen nationwide surveys to determine how people make sense of political, cultural and social processes around them. Vipul Mudgal was awarded doctorate in Media Sociology by Leicester University, U.K., in 1995 on media and political violence. He was also awarded the Nehru Centenary British Fellowship in 1991 and US Govt’s Jefferson Fellowship by the East-West Centre, Hawaii, in May 2003. He has presented academic seminars at the universities of Oxford (Queen Elizabeth Hall), Cambridge (Trinity College), Leicester (CMCR), and Hawaii (East-West Centre) among many other places. He is frequently invited for lectures, particularly on democratic responses to terrorism, at the Administrative Staff Colleges, communication courses for senior Armed Forces Officers and at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad. The Publics and Policies Programme focuses on issues of participatory democracy and mobilises academic knowledge and research for policy making. As the director of the programme Vipul also works on issues of development alternatives, food security, land and displacement, and transparency in legislative processes.
Arijit Banerjee
Mr. Arijit Banerjee is a Principle OSD to Chief Minister, Rajasthan. He belong to the Indian Forest Service. His cadre is Rajasthan. He is a Botanist by education and a Forester by training and also have a great knowledge of Photography. Birding is a hobby – it transcends his education and training. Arijit Banerjee, a Kolkata-based Indian Forest Service officer, invariably brightens up Facebook homepage with his fabulous photographs of wildlife and nature. Skinks and crocodiles, butterflies and birds, beautiful close-ups of flowers….clearly he is one government official who truly loves his job.
Rohit Parihar
Rohit Parihar is the Assistant Editor of India Today. After graduating in Physics (Honours), he studied Mass Communications at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He is in journalism for 23 years. He has covered Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. He joined India Today in 1996 and is based in Jaipur since 1997. He is an alumni of two prestigious international programmes, Chevening (UK) and International Visitors Leadership Programme (US).
He has won many honours and awards through his career in media. He has been awarded the Chevening Fellowship at University of Westmin st re, London in the year 2000. He was nominated and selected for the International Visitors Leadership Programme in Human Trafficking in US in 2006
and has also been awarded the Sawai Madho Singh Award for Investigative Journalism in the year 2006.
Narendra Bisht
Bisht is an accredited photojournalist and currently holds the position of photo editor at the Outlook Magazine. He specialises in editorial, reportage and documentary photography.
The son of a photography instructor, he picked his first camera when he was nine years old and much to the dismay of his parents, began working as a photographer at the age of 18. He has qualifies as a Bachelor of Arts and has been associated with publications such as Inddia Today, The Times of India, The Economic Times, Dainik Jagran, and several other international Journals.
He has been awarded with the Redink award for ‘Excellence in Journalism’ for his reportage on rape victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2014. He has also been awarded by the Vice President of India in 1998 for his photograph on literacy and received the instant photography award in 1991 by the Education department, Govt of Delhi.He has had the opportunity to cover the Iraq war and Kashmir along with Illegal Diamond mining in Chattisgarh, the poisoned land of UP, Illegal
sterilisation in Madhya Pradesh, Kashmiri women divorce seekers and the post Tsunami scenario in Sri Lanka and South of India.
His has also authored a book on flora and fauna of the Rashtrapati Bhwan gardens under the name, “First Garden Of the Republic” which features a wide range of insects, snakes, reptiles and trees.
Siddharth Varadarajan is a journalist and senior fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, New Delhi. He was until October 2013 the Editor of The Hindu. An economist by training, he studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and taught at New York University before returning to India to work as a journalist. He has been a visiting lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.He has reported on the NATO war againstYugoslavia, the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas by the Taliban regime inAfghanistan, the war in Iraq and the crisis in Kashmir.Varadarajan has edited a book titled Gujarat:The Making of a Tragedy which is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.
After studying economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, Varadarajan taught at New York University for several years before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995. In 2004, he joined The Hindu, as deputy editor. He worked as the Hindu’s Chief of National Bureau, succeeding Harish Khare, who was named as then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s media adviser, in June 2009. In May 2011, the shareholders of Kasturi and Sons Ltd. held an extraordinary general meeting and voted to appoint Varadarajan as The Hindu’s editor on the recommendation of the company’s board, thus making Varadarajan the first professional editor of the newspaper in its 150 year history. Prior to his appointment, The Hindu’s editors were drawn from the family of the company’s owners. On Oct 21, 2013, Varadarajan publicly announced via Twitter, his resignation from The Hindu, citing a change in policy by the owners of the newspaper to go back to being a family run and edited newspaper.
IPS M.N Dinesh
IPS Shri MN Dinesh was born in Karnataka on 6th September 1971. He is currently on the post of Inspector General of Police, S.O.G., JAIPUR. Qualified as a BE Electronics and Tel. Communications, IPS MN Dinesh has been the most brave and fearless personnel from the police fraternity that the nation has ever witnessed. An honest officer, IPS MN Dinesh has unleashed many cases of bribes and extortions to ensure smooth functioning and transparency in the Indian Economy. A major setback in his much eventful personal life, has not deterred this Inspector General of Police to pull him in the dark. Instead, he has battled every bit and has risen as a phoenix from the ashes.
IPS MN Dinesh is currently the IPS with the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) and has been posted as ASP Gandhi Nagar Jaipur in March 1999 to May 2000. He has been posted at other locations such as Udaipur, Alwar, Sawai Madhopur, Karauli etc under various designations. In the year 2014 he was appointed as the Managing Director of Rajasthan Small
Industries Corporation (RAJSICO), Jaipur.
MS. Dharmendar Kanwar
Dharmendar Kanwar is a much awarded travel writer who began writing professionally soon after her graduation. She has written scripts for television documentaries and contributed stories and photographs to almost all the major magazines and
newspapers in the country.
Writing is a full-time activity for Dharmendar Kanwar, she has been equally involved with heritage conservations. She
has worked extensively with Rajasthan Tourism, for whom she has produced several award-winning brochures and
books. In an illustrious 25-year career, her contribution to the promotion of Rajasthan’s art and architectural heritage was recognized in no small measure by the grant of the Maharaja Vishan Singh Award for her contribution to the field of Travel & Tourism (2012). She was also awarded as the Best Travel Writer (English) in 1993-94 by the Government of Rajasthan.
Dharmendar was closely associated with Rajmata Gayatri Devi and among her many publications are two biographies of the celebrated Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur – Enduring Grace and The Last Queen of Jaipur. She is also the Managing Trustee of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh Benevolent Trust, a charitable Trust started by the late Rajmata. She is also Convenor of the Jaipur Chapter of INTACH. Dharmendra is also the author of the Times of India Jaipur Food Guide since 2012. Her reviews can also be read on http://timescity.com/critic-Dharmendar.Kanwar.
Amongst the other most south after literature titles which have also been published are – Rajasthan Simply Colourful, Welcome to Rajasthan, The Jewel of Rajasthan, Delhi-Agra-Jaipur, Colourful Rajasthan, Jaipur: 10 Easy Walks, Temples of Jaipur, Palace on Wheels, Royal Rajasthan on Wheels, Hadauti: The Unexplored Rajasthan, Chittorgarh: The Braveheart of
Rajputana and Rambagh Palace and many more.
Dharmendra has also designed several brochures, cards, booklets, souvenirs, t-shirts, posters and annual reports.
Umesh Gogna
Umesh Gogna hails from a business family. While writing his thesis and shortlisting some photographs clicked by him, he realized that photography was his passion and soon decided to consider it as a full time profession. His work mostly comprises in the field of Handicrafts, Jewellery and the Hospitality Industry. A traveller at heart, Umesh Gogna loves to capture nature through his camera lens. Over the years he has spent a lot of time documenting the cultural architectural and natural heritage of Rajasthan and the Himalayas. The wilderness and the open paces of the desert and the mountains attract
and inspire him. His work has been published in several books on these subjects.
In order to help the young and amateur photographers, Gogna conducts workshops on subjects related to Portraiture, Photographing Jewelry, Fashion Photography, Digital Photography and Digital Post Production. He has conducted workshops for Canon India Ltd., Allahabad University, BITS Pilani Photography Club, Women’s Polytechnic College, Jaipur, Camarena (Multi Brand Stores in India), Central University of Bihar, Patna. Gogna is also a member of DPA (India’s Largest Stock Photo Agency) Dinodia Picture Agency, Mumbai. Gogna is also from March 2015 became Sony Alpha Mentor and Brand Ambassador and Conducted 150 plus Photography workshops allover India.
Tashi Tobgyal
Mr. Tashi Tobgyal is a photojournalist with the Indian Express newspaper and has been covering assignments of all nature for over a decade at the prestigious daily. Apart from daily news and political reportage, he covers rural India, education, environment, wildlife, health, development and social issues. Over the years he has reported major events such as the tragedy of Uttarakhand, Kashmir floods, the rat hole coal mining in Meghalaya for which he won the most prestigious Media
Foundation of India (MFI) award for photojournalism and most recently the Nepal earthquake. A graduate in Commerce and Social work from the Aligarh Muslim University, is also a keen writer and curates his photojournalism blog ‘The Shutter speed Journal’. Currently he is pursuing video documentaries and multimedia visual story telling. In 2008 he was a nominee for the National Geographic All roads photography. In 2015, he received both the National Award and the Ramnath Goenka journalism award for his work on the Kedarnath tragedy and the Kashmir floods.
B V Rao
Journalist, editor, commentator, news and communications professional and currently Editor of Firstpost, India’s first and largest digital-only newspaper.
B V Rao’s professional career took off in June 1984 at Newstoday, a Chennai afternoon newspaper.
More than 32 of his 55 years, Rao has spent in newsrooms of organizations big and small. He has worked in very senior positions in print, broadcast and digital newsrooms. He has done the monthlies, the weeklies, the dailies and the tabloids. He has worked and edited national papers in more cities than some editors would have cared to visit (Chennai, Bangalore, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Delhi). And has enriched content and enhanced circulation figures of more publications and channels than I can recount in one breath (News Today, Electronics For You, Mid-Day, Sunday Observer, Delhi Mid-Day, The Indian Express, Free Press Journal, Times of India, Today, DNA, Star News and Zee News, Governance Now, Samay Network and now Firstpost)