Sidharth Bhatia

Founding Editor, The Wire · Author · Host, The Wire Talks · Associate Press Fellow, Wolfson College Cambridge

Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

The Wire (Founding Editor)

DNA Mumbai (Founding Team)

Wolfson College Cambridge (Associate Press Fellow)

The Wire Talks (Podcast Host)

Biography

Sidharth Bhatia is a Mumbai-born journalist, author, and cultural historian with more than four decades in Indian print and electronic media, and one of the three co-founders of The Wire, India's most prominent independent digital news platform. Within the Wire's founding team — alongside Siddharth Varadarajan, who leads editorial and constitutional affairs reporting, and M. K. Venu, who anchors economic and political economy journalism — Bhatia is the cultural voice: the founder most preoccupied with Bombay, popular culture, music, cinema, and the texture of Indian urban life. He holds an equal one-third share in the Foundation for Independent Journalism that owns The Wire, is listed on his public profiles as "Troll intolerant," and describes his areas as "Politics, culture and beloved Bombay." He is an Associate Press Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge University. His journalism has appeared in the Times of India, Asian Age, Hindustan Times, Deccan Chronicle, Outlook, and Scroll.in, among other publications. He hosts The Wire Talks, the publication's podcast. His fourth book, Mumbai: A Million Islands, was published by HarperCollins India in 2025.

Career in Indian Journalism

Bhatia has been in journalism — print and electronic — for more than forty years, a career that spans the full transformation of Indian media from the licence-raj press environment of the 1980s through the digital disruption of the 2010s. He has worked as a journalist, television anchor, teacher, and commentator in India and abroad, and has contributed columns and commentary on current affairs and popular culture to some of India's most widely read national publications over several decades. His particular domain has been the intersection of politics and culture — the way in which popular cinema, music, and urban experience both reflect and shape political life — a preoccupation that runs through all four of his books and much of his journalism at The Wire.

An important chapter in his pre-Wire career was his role in the founding of DNA (Daily News and Analysis), the Mumbai-based English daily newspaper launched in 2005 by the Zee Media/Dainik Bhaskar consortium. Bhatia was part of the original editorial team that launched DNA, serving as editor of its opinion pages through the end of 2009 — a period that coincided with the paper's early establishment of a distinctive editorial voice in a crowded Mumbai English-language press market. DNA's launch was itself a significant event in Indian media history: a bold attempt by two major Indian media groups to challenge the dominance of the Times of India in Mumbai, featuring aggressive hiring of talent from across the Indian press. Bhatia's role in shaping its opinion journalism gave him substantial experience in running the editorial agenda of a major daily during its critical formative years.

Co-Founding The Wire

When Siddharth Varadarajan resigned from The Hindu in October 2013, Bhatia was among those who coalesced around the idea of building something new. The Wire launched on 11 May 2015 as a publication run by the Foundation for Independent Journalism, a non-profit in which Varadarajan, Bhatia, and Venu each hold an equal one-third share. Bhatia and Venu are documented as having contributed initial funding to establish the operation before it could attract broader support from the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation and other donors. The Wire's founding premise — as Bhatia has articulated it in interviews — was straightforward: to do "real, independent journalism as it should be practiced," without the commercial and political pressures that he and his colleagues believed had come to constrain journalism at most Indian legacy media organizations.

Bhatia's editorial voice at The Wire is distinctive from those of his co-founders. Where Varadarajan brings a foreign affairs, nuclear policy, and constitutional focus, and Venu brings political economy and fiscal analysis, Bhatia writes with a Mumbaikar's intimate knowledge of the city and its contradictions, combined with a cultural historian's eye for the popular. He has covered Indian politics and democratic backsliding, the Modi government's handling of civil liberties and press freedom, media accountability, and Bombay's social fabric — the communities, cultures, and institutions that define the city's character — with equal fluency. At The Wire he has also been a consistent voice for media solidarity, speaking up for press freedom in India and for the rights of journalists facing legal harassment. He was among those whose house was raided by Delhi Police crime branch in October 2022 in connection with the investigation into The Wire's coverage of Meta and the BJP's IT cell — one of the most contested episodes in the publication's history.

The Wire Talks and Public Presence

Bhatia hosts The Wire Talks, The Wire's podcast, in which he interviews journalists, scholars, activists, politicians, and cultural figures on the major issues of Indian public life. The podcast has been a significant part of The Wire's audience development and has given Bhatia a platform for the kind of sustained, conversational journalism that print and digital formats do not always accommodate. His interviewees have included activist Harsh Mander (on hate speech and attacks on artists such as A. R. Rahman), Sravya Tadepalli of Hindus for Human Rights (on Indian Americans' experience of the Trump-era immigration enforcement environment), and numerous journalists, lawyers, and academics navigating India's increasingly hostile environment for independent voices. He describes himself on X as "@bombaywallah" — Bombay person — a self-designation that is both affectionate and pointed, distinguishing him from the Delhi political class that dominates national Indian journalism.

Books

Bhatia has developed a parallel career as a cultural historian, building a body of work on Bombay's popular culture — its cinema, its music, its urban life — that stands distinctively alongside his journalism. The four books form a coherent arc: beginning with the Bollywood studio system of the 1950s and 1960s (Navketan, Manmohan Desai), moving to the rock and pop counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and arriving at the present-day city whose physical and social transformation is the subject of his most recent and most urgent work.

• Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story2011 · A history of Navketan Films, the production company founded by actor-producer Dev Anand, and its role in shaping the aesthetic and cultural character of Hindi cinema's modernist moment in the 1950s and 1960s — when Bombay cinema was at its most cosmopolitan, most confident, and most in dialogue with global popular culture

• Amar Akbar Anthony: Masala, Madness, Manmohan Desai2013 · A study of Manmohan Desai, the director who defined the masala film — the exuberantly multi-genre Bollywood blockbuster of the 1970s — through an analysis of his most celebrated films and the cultural and political conditions that made them resonate with mass Indian audiences

• India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation2014 · A history of the rock and pop music scene in India in the 1960s and 1970s — the generation of young, post-independence Indians, "midnight's children," who grew their hair, picked up guitars, and asserted an identity shaped by the Beatles and the global counterculture. Described as the never-before-told story of the Indian rock revolution, framed as both cultural history and generational self-portrait

• Mumbai: A Million IslandsHarperCollins India, 2025 · Bhatia's most recent and most urgent book: a journalistic investigation into Mumbai's rapid contemporary transformation — the erasure of working-class communities, the displacement of the poor to the city's margins, the conversion of slums into luxury towers, and the fracturing of a city that once prided itself on its pluralism and its spirit. The title takes the original history of the city — seven islands merged into Bombay by the East India Company — and turns it into a metaphor for a present in which social, spatial, and economic divisions are multiplying into "a million islands, each more isolated than the other." Launched at the Nehru Centre in Worli, Mumbai, February 2025

Current Activities

Bhatia continues as a founding editor of The Wire, writing regularly on Indian politics, democracy, media freedom, and Mumbai. He hosts The Wire Talks podcast. He contributes columns to Scroll.in and other publications. He spoke at the 2026 ULI India Annual Conference on cities and Mumbai's lived realities — drawing on Mumbai: A Million Islands — and continues to be active at the intersection of journalism, cultural commentary, and urban advocacy. He remains on X/Twitter as @bombaywallah, where he comments on Indian politics, media, and his city with a directness — and a Bombay sensibility — that distinguishes him from much of the Delhi-centric national press commentary. His Twitter bio captures the essential Bhatia: "Founder Editor, The Wire; Podcast, The Wire Talks; Author (Mumbai A Million Islands, India Psychedelic). Politics, culture and beloved Bombay. Troll intolerant."

Sidharth Bhatia
Founding Editor, The Wire
Foundation for Independent Journalism
Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

Co-founders: Siddharth Varadarajan (editorial/constitutional) · M. K. Venu (political economy)

The Wire: thewire.in  |  Author page: thewire.in/author/sidharthbhatia

HarperCollins author page: harpercollins.co.in/author-details/sidharth-bhatia