Biographical Data of Vir Sanghvi
Sanghvi is among India's leading print and TV journalists.
Currently, he is Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times.
Sanghvi was brought up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and London and educated
at Mayo College, Ajmer, and Mill Hill School, London. He won an open
scholarship to read politics, philosophy and economics at Brasenose
College, Oxford.
His journalistic career began in his gap year before Oxford when he
started contributing to India Today. He continued writing for the
magazine during his vacations and in 1978, the publishers of India
Today asked him to start Bombay, India's first city magazine. At that
stage, Sanghvi was 22, making him the youngest editor in the history
of Indian journalism.
The first issue of Bombay appeared in 1979 and though the magazine was
an instant success, heralding the start of India's magazine boom,
Sanghvi left it in 1981 to live in London for a year. Awarded a
travelling fellowship by the Inlaks Foundation, he visited newspapers
in the US and the UK for a project on how the western media looked at
India.
In 1982, he returned to India as editorial director of Business Press,
India's largest publisher of trade magazines. While at Business Press,
he revamped and reformatted Imprint, one of India's oldest magazines
and turned it into a leading features magazine of the 1980s.
In 1986, he was appointed editor of Sunday, a newsmagazine brought out
by the ABP group. By 1989, Sunday had become India's largest-selling
weekly newsmagazine.
In 1994, Sanghvi became consulting editor of the ABP group, whose
portfolio included -- other than magazines like Sunday and
Businessworld -- the two largest papers in eastern India, The
Telegraph in English and Ananda Bazar Patrika in Bengali.
In 1999, he became editor of the Hindustan Times, the largest-selling
English newspaper in Delhi and, over the next two years, launched new
editions in Chandigarh, Calcutta, Ranchi, Bhopal and other north
Indian cities.
At the end of 2003, Sanghvi was appointed editorial director of HT
Media Limited, the holding company of Hindustan Times, and it was in
this capacity that he launched the paper's stunningly successful
Bombay edition in July 2005.
His column, Counterpoint, which he began in Sunday, now appears in the
Sunday Hindustan Times, and is possibly the most influential political
column in the country. He also writes Pursuits -- a column that
appears in the weekend section of Mint, the business paper brought out
by HT Media.
These apart, Sanghvi is a foodie, writing the inimitable -- and hugely
popular -- Rude Food column in Brunch, Hindustan Times' Sunday
magazine. A collection of these columns was published by Penguin in
2004 (Rude Food). The book won the international food world's
equivalent of the Oscar -- the Cointreau Award for Best Food
Literature Book in the world the following year. Alongside, Sanghvi
also won the Best Food Critic award from the Indian Culinary
Foundation. He did a television version of Rude Food for the Discovery
Travel & Living channel called A Matter of Taste which was a huge
ratings success in India and South East Asia.
Sanghvi's TV career began in 1994 on Doordarshan, the state-owned
broadcaster. Starting 1996, he hosted a number of programmes for the
STAR Network. Among his successes are shows like A Question of
Answers, Cover Story and Star Talk. In 2006-07, he anchored two shows
for NDTV, India's leading English news channel -- Face the Music and
One on One. He has won innumerable TV awards for his presenting skills
at many national and international forums including the Asian
Television Awards in Singapore.
In 1993, Sanghvi was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow at the World
Economic Forum in Davos and he is a member of several important
advisory bodies attached to the Indian government, including the
prestigious National Integration Council. In 2008, he also received
the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi Journalism Award, at a nationally
televised ceremony.
His published books include Rude Food, India – Then and Now and Men of
Steel (a collection of profiles of India's leading businessmen) which
has been translated into 10 other languages and is a huge
best-seller. Penguin will publish his biography of Madhavrao Scindia
this winter.
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