About
Gouri Dange
I grew up in Mumbai (Bombay), Singapore, and Pune. (After my Masters, I did a one-year stint teaching English in Sophia College, Mumbai. I was more drawn to writing, and got a job on the editing desk of a premier magazine, Business India. Here, besides working with a team to edit the work of all the contributing writers every fortnight, I began to edit non-fiction books that came my way.
A senior editor, Carmen Kagal, was kind enough to show me the ropes and pass me some of her overflow work. The subjects that I worked with were broadly Art & Craft Histories, Biographies, Cooking Cultures, Human Behaviour, Environment, Family Histories, Hindustani Music, Sociology, Social Movements, Self-help, Travelogues, Wildlife; some fiction, like the first Meluha book by Amit Tripathi, Sudha Murthy’s early fiction. Over the years I have edited over 350 books, undertaken subtitling work for a few TV serials (Baywatch!), Govind Nihalani’s Drohkaal, and in recent times Chaitanya Tamhane’s award-winning The Disciple.
Books & Columns
I began to work on my own first novel during this time, which was published by Penguin India. More books of fiction and non-fiction followed. In the following years, 9 of my books were published to critical and reader acclaim.
At this time, my Short Stories began to appear in anthologies and in respected popular format magazines like Debonair, Verve, Sunday Magazine and Man’s World.
I had begun to write Opinion pieces, Social Satire, and other editorial features, music reviews, interviews for an increasing number of Indian publications at this time.
I then began to write regularly for The Hindu, Mint, Times of India, The Indian Express, Open, Man’s World and several leading publications, with some of the columns running for 8-9 years uninterrupted, weekly.
Readers responded to the humour, the satire, the social comment and the food-for-thought that these 1000-word pieces provided. They began to look forward to that dose of piquant writing.
The rigour, discipline and creativity required of me to write to deadlines over this extended period has served me well.
Counselling
15 years of private counselling online and offline
At this time I began to train in Personal Counselling and qualified in the field. One of my training counsellors, Dr Minnu Bhonsale, suggested that we work on structuring a workshop that uses creative writing as a tool to understand oneself better. We conducted many editions of this workshop, and I continue to offer this workshop, amongst the other Creative Writing Workshops that I have conducted over the last few years. The pandemic years saw a particular spurt in my online presence in this domain – conducting over 50 workshops over 2020-23
There are now 5 kinds of workshops that I offer. Participants are guided to synthesize and transform what they experience, perceive and imagine into writing. In recent months, I have had an online presence with GenSLife, a portal for Seniors, where I would do Q&As with Seniors who sent in questions about their own emotional dilemmas and well-being.
In my writing as well as counselling work, I am deeply empathic with ‘people who get their sums wrong’ – and the human struggle to fix the vexed arithmetic of our lives.
Growing up in Singapore (in the American School as well as in the Seventh Day Adventist School, Mumbai (St. Anthony’s) and Pune (Fergusson College and University of Pune), I have always been a people person, moving easily amongst a range of ages and backgrounds. I am comfortable working and conversing with people from all walks of life, different nationalities, ethnicities and gender orientation. I am particularly known for putting people at ease and drawing them into participative processes like writing, counselling, co-operating on projects.