Sangeeta Waddhwani was born in Hong Kong, went to an international school at the Taipei American School in Taiwan, and thereafter pursued a liberal arts degree at St Xavier’s College, followed by a Masters in Literature and a diploma in Social Media Communications. She also studied Creative Writing at the esteemed University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

A communicator who has traversed varied platforms in media, she has directed segments at the globally adored Amul India Show which aired on Star Plus in the 90s, which entailed working at several levels – research, location scouting, pinning down celebrities from actors to maharajas, and scripting and visual direction. While TV was a great learning curve, she found the writer in her happier in print, and has thus also been a writer with Magna’s Society magazine when it was at its peak of popularity, with personalities like the Dalai Lama and Shekhar Kapoor gracing its covers. She then migrated to international magazine brands after the Indian government liberalised media ownership and allowed for joint ventures. This part of her career started with ELLE magazine – which remained the only international magazine brand for five odd years, from 1997 to 2002. In 2000, she and her entire team at ELLE shifted to a colourful online enterprise known as mazaamedia.com, which operated out of the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers, the Ambassador hotel, and finally a heritage building at Ballad Estate, before collapsing rather indecorously. Fortunately by then, another magazine brand was looking to launch in India and the same team then became the founding members of the VOGUE of France – L’Officiel India. L’Officiel, where I was Executive Editor, ruled the market as India’s ONLY luxury bible for a full five years, before rivals showed up like VOGUE and HELLO! I was aggressively head-hunted by then for HELLO!, which was born as a joint venture between the Times Group and BBC World – a company called Worldwide Media.

At HELLO! we rose to being the country’s most dynamic and popular celebrity magazine, with fascinating brand extensions like the HELLO! HALL OF FAME, which are considered India’s only multi-disciplinary awards platform. We have honoured individuals ranging from corporate geniuses like Mukesh Ambani to cultural doyennes like Mallika Sarabhai, philanthropists like Sudha Murthy, and younger and more glamourous achievers like Ranveer SIngh, AR Rahman, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kulsum Shadab Wahab, among many others. The property marked its 10th anniversary in 2019.