Siddharth Kara

Education and career

Kara was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA to an Indian father raised in South Africa and a Parsi (Persian) mother raised in India. He grew up between Memphis, Tennessee, where he attended Memphis University School, and Mumbai, India, where he spent most of his summers. Kara received a BA in English and Philosophy from Duke University (including one semester at Queen Mary College, University of London), as well as an MBA from Columbia University and a Law degree from the BPP Law School, London.

Kara worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York City for several years, during which time he was involved in some of the firm's largest M&A and equity financing transactions. Subsequently, he co-founded a media technology company and set up his own finance and M&A firm in Los Angeles, working and consulting for several corporations and non-profit organizations.

First encounters with the world of sex trafficking and slavery

In most media interviews Kara is asked what made him decide to end his career as a young, successful New York investment banker to focus on the investigation and eradication of modern slavery around the world. Kara attributes this decision to an experience in his college years that proved to be a pivotal point in his life. While an undergraduate at Duke University, Kara co-founded the "Duke Refugee Action Project", which was the precursor to the prestigious Hart Leadership Program at the Sanford School of Public Policy The project was set up to enable students to volunteer in Bosnian refugee camps in the former Yugoslavia. He and a few other students obtained a grant from the University, learned basic Bosnian, and procured placements from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to volunteer at camps in the region. That summer, he lived as the refugees, in wretched conditions with barely enough to eat. During this time, he heard countless tales of brutish atrocities, including tales of Serbian soldiers who would raid Bosnian villages, execute the men, then round up the women and young girls, rape them and traffic them to brothels across Europe.

During his subsequent years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York, Kara continued to be haunted by the tales of sex trafficking from the refugee camp. Subsequently, while a postgraduate at Columbia University, he became increasingly aware of the need for a more analytical finance and economics approach to understanding this unconscionable crime and eradicating this highly profitable global business. The summer he graduated from Columbia, he embarked on the very first of several long self-funded journeys across the world to research human trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery. He was struck more than ever by the insidious and pervasive nature of these human rights violations and so upon his return, decided not to resume his career in investment banking, in order to be able to continue his research and analysis of contemporary slavery. He moved to Los Angeles, where he worked and consulted by day, while continuing to make research trips around the world. During this time, he wrote a screenplay as well as his first non-fiction book based on his accumulating research. Subsequently, Kara obtained a law degree from London, England, all the while continuing to work, write, and travel extensively to advise on and advocate against modern day slavery.

During his extensive travels across six continents, Kara has witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over one thousand former and current slaves of all kinds, and confronted some of the individuals who trafficked and exploited them.

Writing

Kara has published the first two of his contemporary slavery book trilogy, three non-fiction books that provide his pioneering approach to all forms of contemporary slavery. The third and final book of the trilogy is due for publication in 2016. The three books are a culmination of over twelve years of research, during which time Kara traveled to thirty countries across six continents to investigate these vicious crimes. Most of the research for Kara's books has been self-funded, though he has also received research support from major charitable foundations such as Humanity United and Google.org.

Kara has also published several articles in legal and academic journals such as the Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights, Harvard International Review, Solutions Journal, and World Politics Review.

Film and TV

Kara has been a featured contributor on several other primetime programs, including CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight and CNBC's Crime Inc. He also appeared in 2010 as a panelist on the BBC News primetime current affairs program BBC World Debate, held in Luxor, Egypt.

Trafficked (2016)

Kara's screenplay, Trafficked, based on his research into sex trafficking worldwide, is being made into a film, directed by Will Wallace, and produced by Kara along with Will Wallace, Conroy Kanter and Alexandra Malick. The screenplay won the CineStory Screenwriting Award, and was shortlisted for the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. It stars Ashley Judd, Elisabeth Röhm, Anne Archer, Patrick Duffy, Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason London, Courtney Gains, Brian Thompson and Efren Ramirez.

The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern Day Slavery (2011–present)

Kara is a regular contributor to The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern Day Slavery, CNN's major year-long initiative, launched in 2011, to expose modern-day slavery around the world and highlight the efforts being made to eradicate it. His unique journey across South Asia to research for his second book on bonded labor was covered as a ten-week series in 2010 on the CNN International primetime news program Connect the World with Becky Anderson. The launch of his book was subsequently covered in a three part series on the same news program.

Academia

Kara currently teaches a course on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at both Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.

Harvard University

In the Fall of 2009, Kara became the first Fellow on Human Trafficking with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the Spring of 2012, Kara taught the first course on human trafficking at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also accepted a joint appointment as a Visiting Scientist on Forced Labor at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health. In the Spring of 2013, Kara became an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy to continue to teach the only course on slavery and trafficking at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also accepted an appointment as the Director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Kara also sits on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press book series Slavery Since Emancipation, which is sponsored by Historians Against Slavery.

University of California, Berkeley

In the Spring of 2016, Kara became a Lecturer in Global Poverty and Practice at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching the same course on slavery and trafficking that he teaches later in the year at Harvard University.

Consulting

Kara speaks and consults extensively on contemporary slavery and human rights around the world. He advises the United Nations, US government and several other governments on antislavery policy and law. He also advises several international and non-governmental organizations, including the Clinton Global Initiative and Humanity United. He has spoken at numerous conferences and institutions and has been interviewed on over fifty radio and television shows in the US, Europe, South Asia and East Asia.

Kara serves on the board of several antislavery organizations, and also serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying the US Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. He has testified several times in international forums as an expert on human trafficking, including in 2005, before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus of the United States Congress. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TEDIndia conference.

In September 2011, Kara was sent by the U.S. Department of State to discuss anti-trafficking initiatives with the governments of Singapore and Malaysia. The Singapore government subsequently invited Kara to be the guest speaker at the launch of the country’s first National Plan of Action on human trafficking in March 2012.

Personal

Kara spends his time between his homes in Los Angeles and Boston. He is married to award-winning neuroscientist Aditi Shankardass, daughter of celebrity lawyer Vijay Shankardass and granddaughter of Ambassador Shanti Swaroop Dhavan.