29 Facts About Anand Gandhi

1.

Anand Gandhi is the co-creator of ElseVR, India's first virtual reality platform aiming to bring "extraordinary and urgent stories" to the digital mainstream.

2.

Anand Gandhi delivered his INK Talk at the annual INK conference in 2013 where he enumerated his motivations behind making films while expounding on the role of memes in choice-creation.

3.

Anand Gandhi was a mentor at the Xprize Visioneers 2016 Summit, an annual gathering of the Xprize enterprise, a leading global non-profit dedicated to encouraging "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" through incentivized prize competitions.

4.

Anand Gandhi unveiled a poster of his next project, Emergence, on the seventh anniversary of his film Ship of Theseus on Sunday.

5.

Anand Gandhi was fascinated by the idea of using neuroscience and evolutionary biology to answer deep and persistent questions of philosophy.

6.

Anand Gandhi has cited Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams as early influences.

7.

In 1996, Anand Gandhi pursued a program in graphic design and started a studio called Ciceros Graphics.

8.

Anand Gandhi taught Adobe Photoshop and other digital tools, new at the time, to traditional graphic designers.

9.

At 16, Anand Gandhi assisted activist and polemist Abhay Mehta with the maintenance of a whistleblowing website.

10.

Anand Gandhi's writing career began in 2000 when he wrote dialogue for the first eighty-two episodes of popular daily soap opera Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and screenplay for Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii, both of which became the longest running shows on Indian Television.

11.

Anand Gandhi made his film directorial debut with Right Here, Right Now, a critically acclaimed 30-minute short film that dealt with the idea of cyclic causality and was shot in two continuous takes.

12.

Anand Gandhi's second film Continuum, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, was a montage of simple stories from everyday life, popular culture and folklore that explore "the continuum of life and death, of love and paranoia, of trade and value, of need and invention, of hunger and enlightenment".

13.

Post Ship of Theseus, Anand Gandhi distributed Nishtha Jain's documentary film Gulabi Gang under his then-company Recyclewala Films, making it one of the first theatrical distributions for a documentary film in India.

14.

From November 2014 to May 2015, Anand Gandhi was busy shooting for Tumbad, an unreleased fantasy-epic set in the India of 1940s.

15.

Anand Gandhi is credited as the co-writer, executive producer and creative director of Tumbad.

16.

Towards the end of 2015, Anand Gandhi founded Memesys Culture Lab with Zain Memon, Khushboo Ranka, Vinay Shukla, Neil Pagedar and Pooja Shetty.

17.

Anand Gandhi has called himself an admirer of Kajol's work and said that he loved "talking and discussing ideas with her".

18.

In 2013, Anand Gandhi was awarded the "Contribution to Jain Philosophy prize" by Mumbai University.

19.

Anand Gandhi was selected for the INK Fellowship which comprised "around 25 young change-makers from across disciplines like art, science, social concerns, sport and technology, who they believe will be game-changers in their respective fields".

20.

Anand Gandhi delivered his Ink Talk at the INK2013 conference in Kochi where he spoke at length about his motivations as a filmmaker while "gexploring the ideas, metaphors, memes, and the information packaged in those memes that influence our choices profoundly".

21.

Anand Gandhi was a speaker at the Singularity University Forum in India, where he shared his ideas on using insights from cognitive science in narrative structures.

22.

Anand Gandhi is the recipient of the Rajeev Circle Fellowship, designed to "identify and empower young entrepreneurs".

23.

Anand Gandhi delivered a talk on the evolutionary function of awe at the launch of the first DAQRI AR helmet.

24.

Anand Gandhi was a mentor at the Xprize Visioneers 2016 Summit to vote on solutions that needed to be incentivised and accelerated by the prize.

25.

Anand Gandhi moderated a masterclass at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017 on the future of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

26.

Anand Gandhi delivered a masterclass on VR as the new medium to "preserve records and memories for posterity".

27.

Anand Gandhi was born into a Vaishnav Gujarati family and spoke Gujarati for the first ten years of his life, and his surname was Modi.

28.

Anand Gandhi has always identified himself as thoroughly non-religious and atheistic.

29.

Anand Gandhi loves Gujarati poetry, including that of Ramesh Parekh, Mareez, and Shekhadam Abuwala.