Gurcharan Das (Official Website)

About Gurcharan Das

Gurcharan Das is an author, management guru and public intellectual. He is the author of The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (Penguin 2009) which interrogates the epic, Mahabharata, in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’ His international bestseller, India Unbound, is a narrative account of India from Independence to the global information age, and has been published in 17 languages and filmed by BBC..

He writes a regular column on Sundays for the Times of India, Dainik Bhaskar, Eenadu, Sakal and other papers and periodic guest columns for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek.

Gurcharan Das graduated with honors from Harvard University in Philosophy, and wrote his thesis under John Rawls.  He also studied Politics and Sanskrit. He later attended Harvard Business School (AMP), where he is featured in three case studies. He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and later Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning). In 1995, he took early retirement to become a full time writer. He is currently on the boards of a number of companies and is a regular speaker to the top managements of the world’s largest corporations.

His other literary works include a novel, A Fine Family, a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three English Plays (Oxford), consisting of Larins Sahib, a prize-winning play about the British in India, which has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival; Mira,which was produced off-Broadway to critical acclaim from New York critics; and 9 Jakhoo Hill which has been performed in major Indian cities..

gurcharandas@vsnl.com

Read What Others Say about Gurcharan Das

• Amartya Sen, economist, philosopher, winner of the Nobel Prize
• Martha Nussbaum, philosopher
• Wendy Doniger, mythologist and Sanskritist
• Sheldon Pollock, Indologist
• David Shulman, professor of humanistic studies
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta, political scientist, philosopher
• Sudhir Kakar, author, psychoanalyst
• Fareed Zakaria, columnist, editor
• Thomas L. Friedman, columnist
• Narayana Murthy, mentor Infosys
• Patrick Olivelle, Sanskritist
• Nandan Nilekani, author of ‘Imagining India’
• Rajat Kanta Ray, historian
• Richard W. Lariviere, Sanskritist, provost
• Dr Ian Proudfoot, Sanskritist
• Matthew Kapstein, professor of Buddhist studies
• Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, professor of religion and philosophy
• Andre Beteille, sociologist, anthropologist
• Shashi Tharoor, author, M.P.
• Ian Jack, critic, editor
• Olivier Bernier, author
• Ashok Desai, economist, columnist
• Shunu Sen, business executive
• Sudhir Mulji, economist, columnist
• Bibek Debroy, economist, columnist
• The New York Times
• The Economist
• Financial Times
• Wall Street Journal
• Businessweek
• The Guardian
• The Washington Post
• The Hindu
• Indian Express