Akash Kapur

I’m a writer, born and brought up outside Pondicherry, in South India. My non-fiction book, India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India, was published in 2012 by Penguin. A French edition (entitled “L’Inde de Demain”) came out in 2014 from Albin Michel, and a Marathi edition is forthcoming. I’ve also written for The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Granta, The Hindu, The New York Times , The New Yorker, Outlook, and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. I used to write a fortnightly “Letter from India” column for the international edition of The New York Times. I’m also a Senior Fellow at New York University’s The GovLab, where I work on a range of issues, including open data and Internet governance. I got a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University (in Social Anthropology), and a DPhil (as a Rhodes Scholar) at Nuffield College, Oxford University. The DPhil was in the law faculty, and was on the use of technology in development and for the public good. I consult in this field, researching and writing reports for, among other places, UNDP, The GovLab (at New York University), The Markle Foundation, and Network Dynamics Associates. Some of this work is online (see, for example, a Primer on Internet Governance I prepared for UNDP).