Briefs and Book Matters
WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, & WHY
Agastya Goel, who ranked fourth overall at the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), won a gold medal in the programming contest. This was the California teen’s second gold medal at the IOI. His score: 438.97 out of 600 points. Among this year’s 34 medalists, one was Kshitij Sodani of India. Asgastya’s father, Ashish Goel, who teaches at Stanford, was ranked number one in the 1990 IIT joint entrance exam.
Keya Jha is not the only 10-year-old girl who recently captured the chess world’s
imagination. The other 10-year-old prodigy is Bodhana Sivanandan. In the Joe Yun Memorial tournament, Keya won first place and became the youngest American girl to beat a grandmaster. Bodhana, who won the Woman International Master (WIM) title, became the youngest girl to beat a grandmaster in the British Chess Championship.
Megha Ganne, a 21-year-old golfer who is studying at Stanford, has won the 125th U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship. The New Jersey-raised golfer received the Robert Cox Trophy after she defeated Brooke Biermann of Michigan State at the Brandon Dune Gold Resort in Oregon. Ganne, who has been playing golf since the age of 12, was 17 when she qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open in 2021. Her sister is also a golfer.
Vignesh Kasinath is one of 22 early-career researchers selected for the 2025 Pew Scholars Program in biomedical sciences. The program was launched four decades ago. Kasinath, who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, focuses on epigenetics, chromatin biology, gene regulation, and structural biology. He studies how cells disrupt normal gene functions. Kasinath, an IIT Bombay alum, earned his PhD from UPenn.
Shailesh Jejurikar will take over as CEO of Proctor & Gamble (P&G), the Cincinnatibased multinational consumer goods company with an annual revenue exceeding $84 billion. Jejurikar, who earned his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, has been with P&G since 1989, and is currently its chief operating officer. Like CEO Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Jejurikar played cricket when he was in boarding school in Hyderabad.
Nikhil Ravishankar, Air New Zealand’s chief digital officer, is taking over as its CEO. After joining the airline in 2021, he overhauled the airline’s technology infrastructure, loyalty program, and customer platforms. Ravishankar received his undergraduate education at the University of Auckland. He was chief digital officer at Vector New Zealand, and he also worked at Accenture in Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand.
Divya Deshmukh is another chess grandmaster who made the news. The 19-yearold chess player from Nagpur beat Koneru Humpy to win the 2025 FIDE Women’s Chess Olympiad. She picked up two gold medals and a bronze medal. Deshmukh, the daughter of two doctors, is competing in the open section of the FIDE Grand Swiss this year, and she has qualified to compete in the Women’s Candidates Tournament in 2026.
Mansi Shah is the author of Saving Face (Park Row), a new novel set in Singapore. Ami, the founder of a skin-care empire called Amala, has been nominated for a Global Changemakers Award. But who is Ami, really, and can she prevent the truth from coming out? Shah, an Indian American entertainment attorney who became a novelist, is also the author of The Taste of Ginger, A Good Indian Girl, and The Direction of the Wind.
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BOOK MATTERS
A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult), by Aatish Taseer. This book by a British-born, India-raised, and U.S.-based author is a collection of travel essays that first appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The introduction is new. Born to an Indian journalist mother and a Pakistani politician father (now deceased), Taseer made a splash with his debut memoir, Stranger to History, which was followed by novels and another nonfiction book. But it was a 2019 cover story (“India’s Divider in Chief”) he wrote for Time that got him into trouble with the Modi government, which revoked his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) that year. The government’s response that he’d concealed his Pakistani parentage seemed unconvincing. Taseer began reexamining his identity and the idea of home. In these ruminative dispatches, which take him to several places—Turkey, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Iraq, Bolivia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Morocco—“he makes unexpected connections between cultures and countries, histories and absences, belonging and exile,” says the author Darryl Pinckney.
Stories of the True (FSG Originals), by Jeyamohan. Originally published in Tamil, this collection was translated into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar. In these dozen stories, a leading writer (Jeyamohan is also a notable literary critic) “takes us through the underbelly of mofussil India,” as the Kannada novelist Vivek Shanbhag puts it. The term, which has colonial roots, refers to provincial or small-town India. It may seem distant from the big metro centers and the elites who dominate there, but for people in mofussil India, their world is central rather than peripheral to their lives, as these stories show. The setting ranges from contemporary India to the years before and shortly after independence. Characters such as the caring vet (in “Elephant Doctor”) and the conflicted Dalit bureaucrat (in “A Hundred Armchairs”) take readers into what’s also the heart of India.
Ten Indian Classics (Harvard University Press). Published this year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Murthy Classical Library of India (MCLI), this handy anthology presents 10 extracts from Indian literary texts across 2,500 years. The selections, translated by scholars, are ‘Arjuna the Hunter,’ ‘Life of Harishchandra,’ ‘Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib,’ ‘The Story of Manu,’ ‘Sur’s Ocean,’ ‘Selected Ghazals and Other Poems,’ ‘Therīgāthā,’ ‘The History of Akbar,’ ‘Sufi Lyrics,’ and ‘The Epic of Ram.’ They’re from various MCLI volumes, which now total 49. The languages included are Pali, Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Urdu, Kannada, and Persian. Poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote wrote the long foreword. So, what makes these accessible excerpts timely? “They educate us in an actively cosmopolitan sensibility, as a community of readers unconstrained by narrow definitions of identity and belonging, as participants in a Weltliteratur that does not subordinate the world’s literatures to a dominant model but builds into a polyphonic, kaleidoscopic assembly of them all,” Hoskote points out.
Wish I Was a Baller (Graphix), by Amar Shah. This graphic memoir by a multiple Emmy-winning sports journalist and producer is nicely enhanced by Rashad Doucet’s illustrations. While the suggested reading age is 8-12 years, this book will appeal to other sports lovers as well, especially if they’re basketball fans. In the mid-1990s, when Shah was just 14, he covered the Orlando Magic team—and not long afterwards, to the envy of his schoolmates, he met star players like Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal) and Michael Jordan. As Newbery awardee Jerry Craft notes, “Baller soars and scores.” Another graphic novel is Tall Water (HarperAlley), written by S.J. Sindu and illustrated by Dion MBD. Inspired by the 2004 tsunami, the story focuses on a teen girl who returns to Sri Lanka to reconnect with her long-lost mother.
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