Diksha Basu

Diksha Basu was born in Delhi,[5] to the sociologist Alaka Malwade Basu and economist Kaushik Basu,[2] who later became the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India and then the Chief Economist at the World Bank.[2][6] She grew up in Delhi during the 1990s till the age of 10.[7] She moved to Ithaca, New York in 1994,[8] as a teenager with her family.[1] Basu states that after moving to upstate New York, she would keep visiting Delhi every 4 to 6 months.[9] She eventually graduated from the University of Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts in economics,[1] and in the French language as part of a double major.[6]

Basu joined the Columbia University School of the Arts to attain a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, from where she graduated in 2014.[3][10] She also featured in the memory film A Million Rivers (2017).[11] In the meantime, she married the music producer Mikey McCleary and gave birth to her daughter in 2017.[12] Her novel The Windfall was also published and launched in the same year,[7] it was a humourous fiction marketed as a debut novel and depicted the life of a middle class Indian man who had suddenly encountered wealth.[13] It received positive critical acclaim and was signed in for a deal to be adapted into a television series.[9][3] According to ELLE magazine, it broke stereotypes of exoticism surrounding India while according to The Wire, it was a "shrewd and unstintingly funny story about the neuroses of New Delhi’s 1%".[1][8] The Hindu gave it a mixed review objecting at its lack of nuance and inaccuracies in social and cultural depictions.[13]