Briefs and Book Matters.
WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, & WHY
Suresh Ramalingam, executive director of Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute, is among 10 Indian Americans on the TIME100 list of the 100 most influential health leaders in 2025. His work has been crucial for the treatment of lung cancer patients. The others are Sumbul Desai, Samarth Kulkarni, Ronita Nath, Vas Narasimhan, Jay Bhattacharya, Reshma Kewalramani, Shiv Rao, Anish Bhatnagar, and Vinod Balachandran.
Rahul Sharma won the 2025 Roger Schenke Award from the American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL). It recognizes physicians who made outstanding contributions to leadership education, telemedicine, and healthcare innovation. Dr. Sharma, a professor and chair of emergency medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, founded the Center for Virtual Care. Modern Healthcare has named him a Top 25 innovator.
Bijal Trivedi, the only non-academic among four Indian American winners of the Guggenheim Fellowship this year, is an author and a senior editor at National Geographic magazine. The other winners are Swarat Chaudhuri, a computer science professor at UT Austin; Tulasi Srinivas, an anthropology and religion professor at Emerson College; and Saurabh Jha, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University.
Azam Ahmed, the son of Pakistani immigrants, is one of three South Asian American winners of the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes. Along with two other reporters, Ahmed, an international investigative correspondent for The New York Times, won in the Explanatory Reporting category. They focused on Afghanistan. The other winners include Kavitha Surana (ProPublica, Public Service) and Raj Mankad (Houston Chronicle, Editorial writing).
Shantanu Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Mati Carbon, which won the $50 million Grand Prize in the XPRIZE Carbon Removal contest. About 1,300 teams from 112 nations competed to find scalable solutions for removing at least 1,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Houston-based Mati Carbon, which works with farmers in India and Africa, uses a cost-effective ERW (Enhanced Rock Weathering) technology.
Gayatri Spivak, a humanities professor at Columbia University, won the 2025 Holberg Prize, which is awarded every year for outstanding research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. This Norwegian Prize, funded by the government, is worth roughly $540,000. The author of nine books and numerous papers, Spivak focuses on postcolonial studies, comparative literature, feminist theory, and political philosophy.
Anjali Joseph, a professor of architecture, was named senior researcher of the year at Clemson University, SC, where she holds an endowed chair. She was honored for designing healthcare environments that boost patient safety and provider efficiency. Sruthi Narayanan, an associate professor of plant and environmental sciences at Clemson, was named junior researcher for her work in improving crop resilience.
Anu Kandikuppa was awarded $500 by Veliz Books, which also published her debut book, titled The Confines: Stories. Her fiction and essays have appeared in leading journals. Kandikuppa—who worked as an engineer, a software developer, and an economic consultant—has a PhD in finance and an MFA in creative writing. Kandikuppa “observes detail with precision and with a sly ironic wit,” novelist David Haynes notes.
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BOOK MATTERS
Fitting Indian: A Graphic Novel (HarperAlley), by Jyoti Chand (author) and Tara Anand (illustrator). Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina and Mira Jacob’s Good Talk are two graphic books that made asplash when they came out. Unlike in this case, Chanani and Jacob wrote as well as illustrated their books. YA graphic books like Pashmina continue to be written—and in fact, Chanani herself has published other Asian American-themed titles, including Juke Box, which was inspired by her husband’s collection of almost 2,000 vinyl records. Chand, known as Mamajotes on social media, focuses on comedy and mental health, and she draws on her own challenges in Fitting Indian. Anand is a Mumbai-born illustrator based in New York. In this frank exploration, an Indian American teen named Nitasha tries to balance the competing (and contrasting) demands at home and school.
The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (Basic Books), by Amitav Acharya. Deglobalization and Trump 2.0’s “America First” approach have been lamented. But not everybody is unhappy with the West’s retreat. In fact, people like the author of this book, whose subtitle says it all, seem to celebrate it. Acharya is a distinguished professor of international affairs at, ironically enough, American University. The West, after dominating the world in the 20th century, has seen the steady rise of the Rest, especially China, in the last quarter-century. More recently, we’ve seen political turmoil and economic stagnation in parts of the West. With a look back at 5,000 years of history, Acharya argues that the past can shed light on how the West and the Rest, rather than being locked in competition, can cooperate to bring about a prosperous and more equitable world. Acharya “reminds us that the unfolding multipolar, multi-civilizational world order is the historical norm,” author and global strategist Parag Khanna notes.
Sakina’s Kiss: A Novel (McNally Editions), by Vivek Shanbhag. Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur. The perennial tussle between modernity and tradition is at the heart of this novel set in Bengaluru. It’s the second novel by Shanbhag to be published in the U.S. His Ghachar Ghochar was also ably translated by Perur, the author of an engaging travelogue called If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai. In Sakina’s Kiss, a middle-aged couple named Venkat and Viji are leading a cosmopolitan life in the city, though their roots in rural India remain strong. While Rekha, their daughter and a college student, is visiting relatives in a village, two menacing young men come to her parents’ house and demand to see her, triggering an unsettling sequence of events and memories. The story, which also touches on patriarchy, convention, and intergenerational drama, unfolds over four days. “We feel we know the middle-class family he describes; their joy, tensions, and contradictions are specific to them and yet are universal,” says Abraham Verghese.
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion (Ballantine), by Vaishnavi Patel. In Kaikeyi and Goddess of the River, Patel, who trained as a lawyer, reimagined stories from India’s grand epics and legends. She brings the same creative flair to her new novel, except that now Patel reimagines 1960s India, where the hopes and dreams that followed independence were still alive. But this is speculative fiction, and the country she depicts is in dire straits. Bombay is gone. The British are still around in India, and the city they built is called Kingston, where Kalki Divekar grows up and becomes a rebel. Although she and the other rebels work for the British, they’re secretly planning to overthrow them. The title refers to the ten avatars of Vishnu, and Patel’s tale, stretching over a decade, unfolds as ten episodes in Kalki’s life. The novel can be read as a highly inventive retelling and reinterpretation of India’s independence movement.
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