Shashidhar Nanjundaiah’s writing is informed by his extensive academic and media practice. His recent book News Aesthetics and Myth: The Making of Media Illiteracy in India (2024) uses two studies of hypervisibilization and invisibilization from Hathras and Ahmedabad to evaluate how the enduring practices of “presentation” and “absentation” inform our world, resulting in an absurd situation of illiteracy in a media-saturated world. He is an educationist focused on bridging industry-academic gaps in private institutes of media and communication. He holds a PhD from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and currently serves as the founding Dean and Professor of the School of Digital Media and Communication at Mahindra University in Hyderabad.