Mahesh Shantaram

Over a two-decade career as a creative professional, I produced long-form photo essays for international audiences — commissioned by or featured in legacy media such as The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Bloomberg Businessweek, BBC Culture, The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Vanity Fair to name a few. That background shaped how I think about the tension between evidence and narrative, fact and the visual, and the people who have to make sense of it all.

Since 2024, I've extended that practice into data — using Python, SQL, statistical tools, machine learning, and a modern web stack to build open datasets, reproducible pipelines, analytical tools, and immersive data stories. Recent work spans visualisation of Bengaluru's traffic and metro ridership patterns, live Indian election results, complex network relationships, digitally-signed content credentials and solar flare emissions from ISRO's Aditya-L1 observatory.

– Mahesh Shantaram, ms@thecontrarian.in