About me

Anand Giridharadas is a columnist for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune. On September 12, he will publish the first installment of a new column, called “Currents,” that will explore a new and intriguing idea every other week.

He recently completed a four-and-a-half-year tour of duty in India for both newspapers, first as a South Asia correspondent and then as the writer of a twice-a-month “Letter from India” column. Based in Mumbai and for a time in Goa, he wrote about India’s economic and social transformation, Bollywood, mergers and acquisitions, terrorism, outsourcing, U.S.-India relations, poverty and democracy. He has visited a majority of India’s states and interviewed its leading figures, from its president to its industrialists, actors and activists.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to parents from Mumbai, he has also lived in Paris, France, and on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where his family still lives. He studied the history of political thought at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University. He speaks basic French and Hindi.

Giridharadas first interned for The New York Times as a 17-year-old high-school student. He later covered Washington for several New York Times-owned papers in the American South and has also written for The New Republic magazine in Washington.

In 2003, he moved to Mumbai to work as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He worked on projects advising the city government on urban development, a pharmaceutical firm on organizational redesign, and Indian and Chinese companies on their internationalization strategies.

In early 2005, Giridharadas left McKinsey to become one of the youngest foreign correspondents in the International Herald Tribune’s history, and the first permanent presence of The New York Times Company in Mumbai in the modern era.

He has made media appearances on CNN, NPR, CBC, TVO and NDTV, and spoken publicly to groups at Google, the International Development Research Centre, the Young Presidents’ Organization, the Kennedy School at Harvard University and the Herald Tribune’s global luxury conference. He is the winner of awards for excellence in opinion writing from the Society of Publishers in Asia; for business reportage from the South Asian Journalists Association; and for promoting cross-cultural understanding from the Indo-American Society.

His first book, a work of nonfiction reportage on India’s social revolutions, will be published in the middle of next year.

He is presently in transition from Bombay to Boston, where in the autumn he will begin doctoral study in the subject of politics at Harvard.