Name Nalin Mehta | Role Writer | |
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Books India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act | ||
Times Lit Fest Delhi Preview - Address by Nalin Mehta, Festival Co-Director
Nalin Mehta is a leading Indian social scientist, journalist and writer. He is Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University; Consulting Editor with The Times of India; and Founding Editor of the international journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) as well as the Routledge ‘South Asian History and Culture’ book series. He is also Co-Director of Times LitFest Delhi and has previously been Managing Editor of India's Today Group's English TV news channel, Adjunct Professor at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and held senior positions with the Global Fund in Geneva, Switzerland, and UNAIDS.
Contents
- Times Lit Fest Delhi Preview Address by Nalin Mehta Festival Co Director
- Early Life and education
- Career
- Awards and recognition
- Books
- References
Early Life and education
Mehta studied at the prestigious Scindia School, Gwalior, where he finished as School Captain and editor of the Scindia School Review. A Commonwealth-DFID scholar, he obtained an MA in International Relations from University of East Anglia and a Ph.D in political science from La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Career
Star TV CEO Uday Shankar has called Mehta "probably the best media academic in India" and the media guru Robin Jeffrey has described his work as "remarkable for being both a distinguished academic and an experienced journalist". Mehta's latest book Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India, long-listed for Business Book of the Year by Tata Literary Live 2015 is a highly acclaimed national non-fiction bestseller.
Mehta's first book India on Television, widely acclaimed as a seminal, "impeccably researched" and "authoritative scholarly study" of the politics and business of television in India, was awarded the Asian Publishing Convention Award for Best Book in 2009.
His social history of Indian sport, Olympics: The India Story co-authored with historian Boria Majumdar, was welcomed as a "pioneering, long awaited" work of history in the press and as a "triumph of Olympian proportions". India's most well known sociologist Ashis Nandy called it " the first comprehensive, scholarly and yet lively account of India's experiences with the Olympics".
Mehta and Majumdar joined together again to write Sellotape Legacy, a detailed account of the politics, economics and disaster of the Delhi Commonwealth Games in 2010. Former Indian sport minister Mani Shankar Aiyar called it a "blazing expose" and a "thorough, well-researched, sober and absorbingly well-written indictment of Everything You wanted to Know about CWG [Commonwealth Games] but were Afraid to Ask.".
Mehta's other major work includes Gujarat Beyond Gandhi, a jointly edited anthology of critical essays which looked at 60 years of politics and social change in Gujarat.
Mehta has been Managing Editor of India Today's English news channel (2013–14), Deputy News Editor and prime-time anchor with Times Now. and a political correspondent and anchor with NDTV. For NDTV, he covered the 2002 Gujarat violence and subsequent state assembly elections, the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the assassination of the royal family in Kathmandu and several Indian state elections including Chhattisgarh and Punjab.
Alongside leadership positions in the media industry and international development agencies, Mehta has held several visiting appointments at universities and institutions in Australia, Switzerland, Singapore and India. These include National University of Singapore, Australian National University, Canberra, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the International Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.