Vikram Sarabhai: A Life

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–71), the renaissance man of Indian science, visualized the impossible and often made it happen. Founder of India’s space programme, Sarabhai dreamed of communication satellites that would educate people at a time when even a modest rocket programme seemed daring; of huge agricultural complexes serviced by atomic power and desalinated seawater. He envisioned research technology that would free Indian industry from foreign dependence and of a world-class management college that would train managers for the public sector. Amrita Shah, author of Vikram Sarabhai: A Life delves into the life and mind of this dynamic visionary. 

About the Speaker:
Amrita Shah is the author of the award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (Bloomsbury, 2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (Penguin, 2007) and Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (Sage-Yoda, 2019). She has worked for the Time-Life News Service, been a Contributing Editor with the Indian Express newspaper, launch Editor for Elle (India) and Editor, Debonair magazine. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, a New India Foundation Fellowship and a Homi Bhabha Fellowship and has been a Fellow at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Nantes and Johannesburg and The Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.