Sree Sreenivasan, Lavina Melwani, Preeti Natarajan and Siddhartha Mukhrejee — *Sree Sreenivasan, Lavina Melwani, Priya Natarajan and Siddhartha Mukherjee*
*photo:-Jay Mandal/On Assignment*

Little Black Book Events:

Meeting Pulitzer winner Siddhartha Mukherjee at Indiaspora

Photos by Jay Mandal/On Assignment

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou get to meet the most amazing people through Indiaspora, the dynamic organization which brings the Indian diaspora closer together. Last week it was author Siddhartha Mukherjee, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for Outlook when he had just published ‘The Emperor of all Maladies’ for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Since then he’s written ‘The Gene’ also a # 1 New York Times best-seller, and now ‘The Song of the Cell’. The awards keep piling up: he is the winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences, and ‘The Song of the Cell’ has been named a Best Book of the Year by everyone from The Economist to The New York Public Library to Oprah Daily.

*The Song of the Cell by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee*

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the Indiaspora event guests enjoyed cocktails and an intimate fireside chat between Mukherjee and the noted Prof. Priya Natarajan which took everyone on a journey of Mukherjee’s early days in America to how he writes to deeper issues of bio-ethics, palliative care, gene therapy and of course the magical cell. As Oprah Daily wrote, this book “blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner.”

For the guests, through dinner and Q and A, it was fascinating time travel to the past and the future.