Asian Power Couples
Azeem Azhar & Shernaz Suterwalla Azhar
Azeem Azhar is founder of PeerIndex, a social influence company, which closed a $3m Series
A round of funding from a group of high profile angel and private equity investors in 2012.
Previously he worked with, started, advised or invested in startups like Seedcamp, Dopplr,
Powerset, New Energy Finance, Zygo, TrueKnowledge, Mondus.com, PlanetOut, esouk and AMI
Software. Prior to that he was Head of Innovation at Reuters; and had stints at the BBC, The
Economist and The Guardian. He has a Masters degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics
from the University of Oxford.
Azeem Azhar
Shehnaz Suterwalla Azhar is a fashion theorist, design historian, writer and lecturer. Shehnaz
worked for more that ten years as a journalist in news and current affairs before returning to
academic work. She started her career at Vogue before moving to Newsweek and then most
recently The Economist. She has a Master’s in History of International Relations from the London
School of Economics and a Bachelors Degree in French Literature from Kings College, London.
She is a member of the Suterwalla family that founded the TRS Cash & Carry business in the UK
more than fifty years ago.
Apurva & Alka Bagri
Apurv Bagri is the Managing Director of the Metdist Ltd group of mining companies. He is the
son of Rajkumar Bagri, former Chairman of the London Metal Exchange, who renounced his
House of Lords Peerage in 2010. Apurva is an Honours Graduate in Business Administration
from the City University Business School in London and an Alumnus of the Wharton Business
School. He holds a number of senior board level positions including being Deputy Chairman of
the Governing Body of London Business School.
Alka Bagri is a Trustee of The Bagri Foundation, whose principal activities relate to education,
South Asian cultural heritage, and relief work primarily across the Indian subcontinent and a
committee member of The Lily Foundation alongside Lady Mohini Kent Noon. Alka has started
an organisation called SAAR with the primary objective of doing research on the real essence
of Indian music gharanas.
Saumya Balsari & Sudhanshu Palsule
Saumya Balsari is a British Indian author. Born born in Mumbai, India, she has a PhD and
received Double Masters degrees in English and German Literature from St. Xavier’s College
and the University of Bombay. After relocating to the UK in 1996, she worked in London as a
freelance journalist before launching her first book ‘The Cambridge Curry Club’ in 2004. Her
second book Summer of Blue was launched in June 2013. Saumya lives in Cambridge, UK with
her husband Sudhanshu Palsule.
Sudhanshu Palsule is an award winning educator, author of several books and a leading thinker
in the field of transformative leadership. Trained as a physicist, he uses principles of quantum
mechanics in his work on building effective 21st century organizations and teams. He teaches
at Duke Corporate Education, in the Advanced Management Program at INSEAD, and at other
business schools globally.
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