Sidharth Bhatia

Founding editor, The Wire

Sidharth Bhatia is a Bombay-born journalist and author with a career spanning four decades across print and electronic media. He has worked in multiple newsrooms in India and abroad, including stints outside the country that have informed his writing on politics, public life, and culture.

Bhatia is best known today as a founding editor of The Wire, the Indian nonprofit news and opinion platform launched in May 2015 to build a space for independent, public-interest journalism. Along with fellow founding editors, M.K. Venu and Siddharth Varadarajan, he has helped shape the publication’s editorial voice.

Before The Wire, Bhatia was part of the original team that launched the Bombay-based English daily DNA in 2005, and he served as editor of its opinion pages through 2009. The experience of working at the intersection of news, argument, and public reasoning has remained a defining element of his career.

In addition to journalism, Bhatia has built a substantial body of book-length nonfiction, often returning to the cultural history of modern India. His books include Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story (2011), Amar Akbar Anthony: Masala, Madness, Manmohan Desai (2013), India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation (2014), and Mumbai: A Million Islands (2025).