Pankaj Mishra Journalist and Co‑founder
Pankaj Mishra is a journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily, with a career spanning over two decades and multiple newsrooms, from The Economic Times and Mint to TechCrunch and Times of India. Pankaj sees, hears, and feels stories and then shares them in a way that creates a connection, whether with one person or a wider audience. For Pankaj, one attentive listener is not just a tick mark on the scale of readership but a meaningful connection. "Even one is an audience," he often says, a philosophy that has become the cornerstone of FactorDaily's approach to journalism. Pankaj takes storytelling into physical spaces, creating intimate environments where stories aren't just told; they're experienced. Whether it's a community meetup or a one-on-one session on a train journey, he finds fulfilment in these personal exchanges. His work isn't confined to the written word; it comes alive in sound, audio, and digital spaces, each format offering a different facet of the story.

Stories by
Pankaj Mishra

How India’s Librarians Are Turning Books into Social Change

20 February 2025
India’s librarians, often invisible heroes, are quietly turning humble libraries into engines of social change, challenging caste barriers, empowering girls, and rewriting futures—one book at a time.

India’s big data hunt for cures to its mental, ageing related diseases

05 August 2024
The 300 million Indians older than 60 years by 2050 will owe it big time to a team of scientists, psychiatrists, and local health professionals in Kolar today. It is prospecting for gold of a different kind: data on how Indians grow old. It’s a dry and nippy Monday morning in Dalasanur, a village in […]

From Loss to Liberation: How Dhiraj Rajaram Fought to Reclaim His Company and Himself

27 November 2023
As I sat across from Dhiraj, I couldn’t help but wonder about the duality of his public persona. To some, he’s an enigma—edgy, even a bit restless (a lot, at times). To others, he’s disarmingly simple and brutally honest. It’s a duality that doesn’t escape him, yet he seems largely indifferent. Depending on the person […]

Finding Shamnad Basheer

22 December 2022
You have hit on the perfect idea for a start-up, raised your seed round of funding, got it off the ground and watched it vault to the status of a unicorn.

Beware of Entrepreneurship

17 October 2022
Entrepreneurship is like a ghost fight. You are fighting with your own ghost every day. In this heartfelt account Sunny Ghosh talks about the struggles of entrepreneurship beyond the usual chase of unicorn statuses and success stories.

How the Phone You Chucked is Killing Seelampur

11 January 2021
The story of a teenage boy Aman is common among the 30,000 men, women and children who expose themselves to toxic fumes, acid splashes and lasting injuries in Seelampur, the town where all our old phones go to die.

Meet India’s women Open Source warriors

05 February 2018
“Shut the f**k up”“Feminism sucks” As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn’t know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of […]

Perpetrators, platforms, processes:The common enemies of the Indian online harassed

05 February 2018
As online harassment explodes in India, the world’s second largest market of internet users, local police and judiciary struggle with the new-age crime — even if it ends in a suicide Linkan Subudhi was on cloud nine on the morning of May 29, before her political career nosedived. It was the day after the state […]

Inside the making of Leh’s giant artificial glaciers with Sonam Wangchuk

04 July 2017
Innovator, education reformist and outlier Sonam Wangchuk is trying to turn the highest cold desert in the world — Ladakh — into a greenland. FactorDaily travelled to Pheyang village in Leh where Wangchuk is making artificial glaciers or ‘Ice Stupas‘. Watch this video to find out how he’s doing this. Listen in: Outliers 21: Sonam Wangchuk wishes people […]

The making of Girish Mathrubootham

17 April 2017
How he used lessons from his troubled childhood and early entrepreneurial failures to build Freshdesk, one of India’s fastest growing product startups. Can he make all this count? “Girish is like Shrek,” says Shoba Girish. “If you’re Prince Charming, everybody likes you upfront, but if you look like an ordinary man, especially like Shrek, nobody […]

Death of a startup founder

30 September 2016
Six days before he died of pancreatic cancer, Arvindkumar Alagarswamy knew his time was coming. “I fear I am going to die,” he told Lakshmi, his wife of 13 years. It was nearly midnight on April 13 and Lakshmi pleaded Arvind not to give up. Arvind, 36, just laid back, his frail frame sinking deeper […]

This is Seelampur: India’s Digital Underbelly Where Your Phones Go To Die

26 May 2016
Nearly a quarter of India’s three million tonnes of e-waste generated every year is dumped in Seelampur. If you live in north India, chances are high that the smartphone you bought last year and trashed because something better came along, went to die here.