Gangadharan Menon

Gangadharan Menon worked as a school teacher, journalist, theatre actor, theatre director, film actor and documentary film maker before joining advertising. He then worked as a Copywriter and Creative Director for 28 years in various agencies including Trikaya, Rediffusion, Ogilvy and Mather, Mudra and McCann Erickson. Won over 50 national and international awards, including Clio, New York Festivals and London International Awards. Quit the industry to take up teaching and travel. He has published a bestseller on Creative Thinking titled The Garden of Ideas, and one on proverbs collected from all over India titled Ocean without Shores. The one titled From the Lockdown Diary of a Grandfather contains all the art experiments he did with Arundhati, his five-year-old granddaughter, during the lockdown. A for Star is a compilation of all the ideas expressed by her from age 1 to age 6. He has been honoured by Sanctuary Asia in 2016 for the contribution in saving the last evergreen forest in India: Silent Valley in Kerala. Has given a TEDx talk on ‘Finding your Ikigai’ which is about finding the reason for your existence. In 2019 he was conferred the CAG Hall of Fame for his sterling contribution in the field of creative communication and art teaching. He has been teaching in leading art colleges since the year 2000, and is currently Professor Adjunct at VIVA Institute, Virar.

Over a 100 of his travel articles have been published in The Hindu, The Times of India, DNA, Hindustan Times, Mid-day, and in Hornbill, the journal of Bombay Natural History Society. Through his writings he encourages people to discover the joy of travelling in India, a country that is made up of many countries. The best of his travel articles, along with selected wildlife photographs, have been published by Partridge as two books: Evergreen Leaves and Tales of a Driftwood.

Contact: wildganges@gmail.com