Tavleen Singh

Biography

Singh was born in Mussoorie in 1950 in a Sikh family. She studied at the Welham Girls School. She did a short-term Journalism course from the New Delhi Polytechnic in 1969. She graduated from St. Bede's College, Shimla.

She completed her education in India and started her career with a reporting job at the Evening Mail, Slough (England), where she worked and trained for two and a half years under the Westminster Press/Thompson training scheme.

Singh returned to India in 1974 to work with The Statesman as a reporter. She joined The Telegraph as a Special Correspondent in 1982. In 1985 and also in 1987 she became the South Asia correspondent of the Sunday Times, London.

Subsequently she became a freelancer and started writing for India Today and The Indian Express.

In 1990 she began her stint with television by heading Plus Channel's Delhi bureau. Singh presented two video magazines called People Plus and Business Plus. She has done Ek Din Ek Jeevan, a Hindi weekly programme for STAR Plus., she is with The Indian Express and The Hitavada. She writes a weekly column for them, on Sundays.

Personal life

Tavleen was briefly married to the late Pakistani politician Salman Taseer. The marriage, which lasted for only a few months in 1979-80, produced a son, the writer Aatish Taseer. Thereafter, Tavleen remained single for several years and raised her son single-handedly at her ancestral home in Delhi. In the late 1980s, she came in contact with Ajit Gulabchand, CEO of Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) and a scion of the Walchand Hirachand family, one of the oldest business families in India. Because she was the only parent of her son (Salman Taseer having never visited India after 1980), and was deeply committed to giving him a secure and nurturing environment, Tavleen declined to marry Gulabchand. However, she moved to Mumbai in 1994 to be closer to Gulabchand, renting a spacious sea-facing apartment in the building where Ajit Gulabchand already lived, located on Marine Drive, the most expensive neighbourhood in India. Tavleen and Gulabchand remain in a relationship, but have never married, since by the time Aatish grew up, there seemed no point in marriage.

Works