About Avinash Kaul
At seventeen, Avinash Kaul lost his home. At thirty-six, he became a CEO. At fifty-three, he stepped away from the boardroom to tell the story of everything in between. That story became The Next Mountain: a deeply personal memoir about resilience, leadership and purpose for anyone still climbing their own mountain.He left Kashmir on the night of 19 January 1990. His father put him on a crowded bus out of the city, and he rode on the engine bonnet because there were no seats left, the metal burning through his clothes in the freezing night air. By dawn, he was a refugee. In Jammu, he slept in a neighbour's garage, stood in a refugee-registration line for his family's ration of rice and studied in a makeshift government school housed in tents.From there, he completed his engineering degree, graduating at the top of his class, before earning an MBA from Sydenham Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. Over the next three decades, he built a career across J. Walter Thompson (HTA), Discovery Communications, Star TV, NDTV, Times Television Network and Network18, serving as CEO for sixteen years in one of the world's most demanding news media environments. He most recently served as CEO, Network18 (Broadcast & Publishing) and as managing director, A+E Networks TV18.The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, written with Priya Kumar, is the story of that climb. The ideas in the book were not borrowed from theories or learned in classrooms. They began on school climbing camps in the mountains of Kashmir, where preparation mattered, teamwork mattered and ego did not. Life tested those lessons over the decades that followed.Today, Avinash writes and speaks on resilience, leadership and purpose. He lives in Mumbai with his family.
About Priya Kumar
Priya Kumar is an internationally acclaimed motivational speaker, with over thirty years of corporate training experience.She has worked with over 2,000 multinational corporates across fifty-one countries and has touched the lives of over 3 million people through her workshops and books.Priya has written eighteen inspirational books, which have won forty-six international book awards, making her the first Indian author to have done so.Priya has received several awards by The Times Group for being India's best inspirational author.She is India's first certified firewalk instructor and has conducted over 2,000 firewalks across the globe.With over 700 published columns for national and international publications, Priya's work has been extensively featured by the media in India and abroad, and she has been invited as a celebrity guest on several business, entertainment and reality shows.Known as the biography specialist, Priya has penned the biographies of leading industrialists, legendary businessmen and industry icons, such as those of Mr O.P. Munjal; Mr Pullela Gopichand, the chief national coach of the Indian badminton team; Mr A.M. Naik, the group chairman of Larsen & Toubro; Shri Shashi Ruia, owner of the Essar Group and many more lined up for release.Having turned filmmaker and screenwriter, Priya made her digital debut with the web series The Final Call, streaming on the OTT platform Zee5, based on her novel I Will Go with You.Priya is the founder and CEO of Firelight Films, a niche production house. She also runs Butterfly Media, a digital marketing company that helps authors and speakers build their brand and promote their work and business.Priya resides in Mumbai with her husband, Sandeep Mishra, her mother, Sona, and her three Yorkshire terriers, Chiki, Muffin and Cookie.
