Namit Arora is a writer, humanist, social critic, travel photographer and more. He grew up in Gwalior, known for its historic fort, the musician Tansen, and arguably the earliest epigraphic evidence of zero. This proximity to zero—or shunya, zilch, nada—delights him more than it ought to. After IIT Kharagpur in 1989 and a masters in computer engineering from Louisiana, he played a cog in the wheel of Internet technologies in Silicon Valley for two decades at three startups and three corporations. His seriocomic engagement with this subculture and its vanities later inspired him to write a novel set in that milieu.
Happily, his job paid well, enabling him to take social science courses of unclear practical value at Stanford—and to live, work or travel in scores of countries, with yearlong stints in London and Amsterdam. In 2013, it also allowed him to quit the profession at age 45 and return to India with his partner, Usha, for a life of reading, writing, and slow travel. He volunteered for two years with the Delhi govt. to tackle civic problems; he led the drafting of Delhi’s solar energy policy and a task force on air pollution, learning how godawful the air truly is and why—and the paradoxes and labyrinthine dysfunctions of governance in India.
Namit’s writing has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Wire, Scroll, Himal, The Caravan, The Baffler, The Humanist, The TLS, The Philosopher and several anthologies (see an archive of his articles and favorite books). He won the 3QD Arts & Literature Prize in 2011. Between 2004 and 2006, he backpacked across 20 Indian states and began a photojournal that‘s still growing. More than 15 museums, 40 academies and 60 publishers have licensed photos from his archive, featuring global culture, animals, our wild earth, historical sites, museum objects, etc. His videography includes River of Faith, a film on the 2013 Maha Kumbh Mela. He has led unorthodox workshops in Leadership and Innovation, spoken at Nirmukta Thinkfest 2015, TEDx 2016, and at other venues and interviews.
Namit has written four books: (1) Speaking of History: Conversation about Indian’s Past and Present (with Romila Thapar), (2) Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, (3) The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, and (4) the novel A California Story (US) / Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley (India). In 2024, he wrote and anchored Indians, a history web series in ten episodes.
In July 2025, Namit delivered the annual Foundation Day Lecture and keynote, ‘History and the Nation’, at IIM Udaipur. In a grim sign of the times, even his mainstream scholarly views caused a stir, prompting IIM’s leadership to swiftly delete the YouTube release of his lecture and all mentions of him from their social media accounts. Officials who had warmly interacted with him went stone silent. For a while, recalling Soviet-era purges of ‘inconvenient’ individuals from official records, he felt like he had truly arrived. By contrast, his April 2026 lecture at the School of Social Sciences, JNU, on caste and its evolution in the Indian subcontinent proved far more rewarding, reflecting JNU’s more sophisticated idea of education. He is on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Email.
