Briefs/ Book Matters.
WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, & WHY
Chandrika Krishnamoorthy Tandon, along with flautist Wouter Kellerman and cellist Eru Matsumotu, won the 2025 Grammy Award in the Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album category. Tandon is a vocalist, and their seven-track album is called Triveni. Nominated twice before in this category, Tandon was the first Indian woman to become a partner at McKinsey. She’s the elder sister of former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi.
Natasha Sarin, professor at Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management, is one of two Indian Americans included in The Washington Post’s inaugural Post Next 50. It honors rising changemakers shaping society. Sarin, co-founder of Yale’s Budget Lab, focuses on public and household finance, regulation, insurance, tax policy, and risk management. She worked for the federal government and was a professor at Wharton.
Vinod Dham, who helped to develop Intel’s Pentium processor and its first Flash memory technology (ETOX), is the only 2025 Indian American recipient of the Padma Bhushan. Indian American awardees of the Padma Shri: Nitin Nohria, who served as a dean at Harvard and is a professor of administration; Sethuraman Panchanathan, a STEM leader and educator; and Ajay Bhatt, known for the USB (Universal Serial Bus).
Vinod Balachandran is the other Indian American selected for The Washington Post’s inaugural Post Next 50. The list was culled from about 200 names. Balachandran was recognized for his pathbreaking work in the development of personalized messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for treating pancreatic cancer. He’s founding director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Gunjan Kedia is becoming U.S. Bancorp’s first female CEO. Kedia also held leadership roles at BNY Mellon, PwC, McKinsey, and State Street Financial. She earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering in Delhi, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon. Barron’s and American Banker publications have included her on their “influential women in finance” lists. The Minneapolis-based bank has $684 billion in assets and more than 70,000 employees.
Animashree Anandkumar, a professor of computer science and math at Caltech, is one of four winners of the 2025 TIME100 AI Impact Awards. Her AI work focuses on building faster prediction models, useful for extreme weather events and in the generation of sustainable energy. She was a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services and a senior director of AI research at Nvidia. She earned her MS and PhD from Cornell.
Arvind Krishna, CEO and chairman of IBM, is another winner of the 2025 TIME100 AI Impact Awards. IBM is focusing on specialized AI under his leadership and investing heavily in quantum computing. Unlike other large AI players, IBM is developing smaller AI tools that will allow customization by clients. Krishna, who earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, has been with IBM since 1990.
D. Nageshwara Reddy, a pioneering gastroenterologist, became the first Indian physician to receive the Padma Vibhushan (2025), the Padma Bhushan (2016), and the Padma Shri (2002). He won the highest endoscopy award. The other Padma Vibhushan winners, along with three posthumous awardees, are L. Subramaniam (violinist), Kumudini Rajnikant Lakhia (Kathak dancer), and Jagdish Singh Khehar (judge).
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BOOK MATTERS
Maya in Multicolor (Disney Hyperion), by Swati Teerdhala. In her new YA novel (grades 7-9), Holi takes center stage, although there’s a blending of traditions as the usual revelry involving colors and chaos is combined with electronic dance music. This being a rom com set on a college campus, there are naturally two people who have to navigate an obstacle course as they get to know each other. Maya is a freshman, and her co-planner on the Holi committee is none other than Nishant, an upperclassman she wanted to avoid. Also: Veera Hiranandani’s Many Things at Once (Random House Studio) is a picture book (4-8 years) about a girl of South Asian and Jewish descent. The girl’s father tells her about his mother’s life in the subcontinent, while the girl’s mother talks about her own mother’s immigrant life in New York. It draws on the author’s background as the daughter of an Indian father and a Jewish American mother. The illustrations are by Nadia Alam, a Bangladeshi Canadian.
Goddess Complex (Penguin), by Sanjena Sathian. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Sathian is currently a distinguished professor of English at Mercer University. Her debut novel, Gold Diggers, won the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and was picked as a top 10 book by The Washington Post in 2021. Goddess Complex, called a millennial mystery, introduces readers to Sanjana Satyanandais, whose husband, Killian Bane, is missing from a commune in India. Their marriage is on the rocks because of a conflict over having children. But when Sanjana, an anthropology PhD student who wants to give her dissertation another shot, is ready to initiate a divorce, she can’t locate him. Then she receives some strange texts, upending her life. In a surreal twist, a woman named Sanjena pops up and she seems to have a connection to Sanjana’s ex in India, where he is chasing a career in Bollywood. Whose child is Sanjena (not Sanjana) carrying? “An utterly contemporary psychological thriller about motherhood, identity, and doubles,” according to novelist Andrew Ridker.
The Legend of Meneka (Harper Voyager), by Kritika H. Rao. Billed as Book One of the Divine Dancers Duology, this novel by Rao is not just speculative fiction. It’s romantasy, the hottest trend in fiction going by book sales. Of course, romantic fantasy is nothing new to readers familiar with the Indian epics. So, appropriately, Rao, a science and children’s fiction author as well, writes about apsaras, celestial dancers known for their beauty. Meneka, an apsara, is also a trained warrior. When a sage named Kaushika alarms Lord Indra with his growing power, Meneka is asked to seduce the sage and neutralize the threat. Seeking her freedom, Meneka agrees to take on Kaushika as long as this is her last mission. Lord Indra agrees. Naturally, for the immortal apsara and the mortal sage, things don’t go according to plan. “The cliffhanger ending opens the way for chaos in the sequel,” notes Library Journal, adding, “A balanced blend of sensuous romance with deeply felt meditation on crises of faith.”
The World After Gaza: A History (Penguin), by Pankaj Mishra. The horror that Jews faced on October 7, 2023, and the horrors that Palestinians faced in response to the terrorism can be boiled down to one word: Gaza. It was a turning point for the Middle East, but the world also has to deal with the consequences. The divided reaction to Gaza became the starting point for Mishra’s book, which is an expanded version of an essay he wrote last year. The Global North, with its memory of the Holocaust, and the Global South, with its memory of colonialism, can have a hard time understanding each other. And given the rise of right-wing populism and nativism, finding solutions will be hard in the near future. “Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to... shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe,” Mishra writes in the London Review of Books.
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