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Vir Sanghvi
Advisory Editorial Director,
HT Media Ltd.

Vir Sanghvi is probably the best-known Indian journalist of his generation.

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 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.

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.

Sanghvi is a television star as well. His 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.