Raja Choudhury (born Ranjit Choudhury, 11 June 1964) is a

National Film Award The National Film Awards are awards for artistic and technical merit given for "Excellence within the Cinema of India, Indian film industry". Established in 1954, it has been administered, along with the International Film Festival of India ...

(

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

) winning documentary film maker, architect, public speaker, spiritual teacher on The Shift Network, and designer of multimedia installations and events and Web sites, some of which have received

Webby Award The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts a ...

s. He produces international documentary films on Indian wisdom, history and consciousness. Films he has made include Spirituality in the Modern World, I Believe: Universal Values for a Global Society, The Modern Mystic, The Quantum Indians, Yoga: Aligning to the Source, and most recently India's official global film celebrating the International Day of Yoga entitled Yoga Harmony with Nature which was released on 21 June 2015. His most recent film with WTTW Chicago PBS is called America's First Guru on Swami Vivekananda and the arrival of Yoga and Hinduism into the popular American conversation in 1893 and airs on Public Television from May 2024. Raja is on the faculty of The Shift Network online, teaching subjects on Indian Wisdom. Raja is also a teacher at A Thousand Suns Academy teaching advanced programs and workshops in Indian wisdom and meditation.

Early life

Raja Choudhury was born in

Ibadan, Nigeria Ibadan (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Oyo State, in Nigeria. It is the third-largest city by population in Nigeria after Lagos and Kano, with a total population of 3,649,000 as of 2021, and nearly 4 million within its metr ...

to Indian parents Sukumar and Manjusri Choudhury on 11 June 1964. His father was a UN expert on deputation to the WHO from India. He grew up in

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

and then Freetown,

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered to the southeast by Liberia and by Guinea to the north. Sierra Leone's land area is . It has a tropical climate and envi ...

where he attended the Sierra Leone Grammar School. At 16 he moved to

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

and studied at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

. He went on to study architecture at the AA School of Architecture in 1984 in London, UK where he graduated in 1992. At the AA he started the Computer Graphics Unit before graduating bringing CAD and 3D modelling to the school for the first time. At the AA he studied with architects

Ron Herron Ronald James Herron () was an English architect and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his work with the seminal experimental architecture collective Archigram, which was formed in London in the early 1960s. Herron was the creator of one of ...

and Ranulph Glanville and

cybernetics Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...

expert

Gordon Pask Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask (28 June 1928 – 29 March 1996) was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, applied epistemology, chemical comp ...

Early Career in Digital Media

In 1993 Choudhury, Mudimo Okondo, and Emma Westecott founded Zone UK, a digital design company in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Choudhury designed the VID Zone Kiosk Network at Tower Records and HMV stores in London. The kiosk was described as "The Best Public Demo of Multimedia Ever" by Design Technology Magazine. In 1995 the team at Zone launched the UK's first CDROM Music & Lifestyle Magazine UnZip with

IPC Magazines TI Media Ltd. (formerly International Publishing Company, IPC Magazines Ltd, IPC Media and Time Inc. UK) was a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year. Most of it ...

which was awarded a Milia D’Or at Mipcom in

Cannes Cannes (, ; , ; ) is a city located on the French Riviera. It is a communes of France, commune located in the Alpes-Maritimes departments of France, department, and host city of the annual Cannes Film Festival, Midem, and Cannes Lions Internatio ...

in 1996. Zone was the first company in the UK to introduce kiosk and the Internet into music stores, night clubs and university bars. In 1997 Zone installed multimedia kiosks in 10 London universities, providing the MeTV Network for students. Choudhury moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

in 1998 and designed the FastTake Video Kiosk Network, the online launches of

Softbank is a Japanese multinational Investment company, investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, that focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services ...

, NetValue and BT Conferencing, and became creative director for agencies Cohn & Wolfe and Converseon. In 2007 he designed Websites Webby Honorees in 2008: OurWeddingDay.com and CBCWorldwide.com. In 2008 he produced India's first multimedia broadband kiosk entertainment network for

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a cola soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. In 2013, Coke products were sold in over 200 countries and territories worldwide, with consumers drinking more than 1.8 billion company beverage servings ...

called the Dilli Dil Se Network in time for the 2009

Indian Premier League The Indian Premier League (IPL) is a professional Twenty20 (T20) cricket league in India, organised by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Founded in 2007, it features ten city-based Professional sports league organization, fr ...

offering videos, video chat, facts, results, games, social networking and mobile downloads. The touch-screen kiosks were available at 30 locations across New Delhi. Since 2009, Raja has continued to work in the digital space advising large brands and non-profit organizations including tGELF, Alchemist Group and The Shift Network.

Documentary films

Choudhury's first documentary film as a co-producer and art director was "Desi: South Asians of New York" for

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

Channel Thirteen in 2000 with Glazer Creative in New York. He then started publishing a newsletter entitled Universal Quest with A.T. Mann. He went on to produce numerous videos for the

American India Foundation The American India Foundation (AIF, founded 2001) is a nonprofit American organization working in India. It is one of the largest secular, non-partisan American organizations supporting development work in India. It also runs the ServiceCorps Fel ...

, the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center and others. In 2006 he produced his first documentary film "Spirituality in the Modern World" which captured a dialogue between

Ken Wilber Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience. Starting publishing ...

and Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche. The DVD was released in 2007. Raja Choudhury Film Montage

In 2010 Raja produced his second documentary film "I Believe: Universal Values for a Global Society" on the beliefs of

Karan Singh Karan Singh (born 9 March 1931) is an Indian politician and philosopher. He is the titular Maharaja of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. From 1952 to 1965 he was the '' Sadr-i-Riyasat'' (President) of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. ...

. The film was launched by India's Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh Manmohan Singh (26 September 1932 – 26 December 2024) was an Indian economist, bureaucrat, academician, and statesman, who served as the prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014. He was the fourth longest-serving prime minister after Jaw ...

in March 2011, and was shown on India's national public TV network

Doordarshan Doordarshan (), abbreviated as DD, is India's State-owned enterprise, state-owned public broadcasting, public television broadcaster. Established by the Government of India on 15 September 1959, it is owned by the Ministry of Information and B ...

. In 2011 he produced the film "The Modern Mystic" on the spiritual teacher Sri M of Madanapalle. The DVD was launched in Bangalore India in October 2011. Both films were selected for the Spirit Enlightened Film Festival at CultureUnplugged.com. In 2012 he produced "The 21st Century Indian" profiling S. M. Krishna, India's Minister of External Affairs. In August 2013 Choudhury launched the film The Quantum Indians about the great Indian scientists Satyendranath Bose,

CV Raman Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman ( ; ; 7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered th ...

and

Meghnad Saha Meghnad Saha (6 October 1893 – 16 February 1956) was an Indian astrophysicist and politician who helped devise the theory of Thermal ionization, thermal ionisation. His Saha ionization equation, Saha ionisation equation allowed astronomers to ...

for the Public Service Broadcasting Trust of India (PSBT) and the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs of India. This film won the

National Film Award for Best Educational/Motivational/Instructional Film The National Film Award for Best Educational/Motivational/Instructional Film was one of the National Film Awards presented annually by the Directorate of Film Festivals, the organisation set up by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India. ...

of 2013 and also the prestigious Golden Beaver Award given by the Indian Department of Science and Technology, Vigyan Prasar, as the Best Public Science Film of 2013. He also produced 2 acclaimed films on Yoga Yoga: Aligning to the Source on the origins, mythology, practice, and history of Yoga was launched on 26 November 2013 and includes appearances by BKS Iyengar,

and

Devdutt Pattanaik Devdutt Pattanaik is a mythologist and writer from Orissa, India whose parents had migrated to Mumbai before his birth. He writes on mythology, the study of cultural truths revealed through stories, symbols and rituals. He lectures on the releva ...

and India's official film celebrating the International Day of Yoga entitled Yoga Harmony with Nature which was released on 21 June 2015. In 2024, Raja completed the production of a film for Public Television in the US called America's First Guru, which tells the story of Swami Vivekananda and how his arrival in Chicago in 1893 led to a spiritual revolution in American culture, words, and consciousness. The film is presented by WTTW Chicago and distributed by NETA.

Public Speaking, Awards & Acclaim

Raja has received numerous awards and media coverage for his work in films and digital media including The 2014

(

) for 2013, The 2014 Golden Beaver Award for Best Indian Public Science Film from Vigyan Prashar, 2 Webby Awards in 2008, an Adobe Site of the Day and the Milia D’Or at MipCom. In May 2012, Raja presented a talk at the

TED conference TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything" (previously "Ideas Worth Sprea ...

TED@Bangalore on "Indian Wisdom in Today's World". Raja gave a TEDx Talk on "Yoga 3.0" in New Delhi on 21 June 2015 to celebrate the first International Day of Yoga. He also gave the keynote address at the 2015 Porter Prize in New Delhi on "Rewiring the Brain." From 2016 onwards, Raja has given a series of public lectures called Universal Quest with Dr. Karan Singh at the India International Center in New Delhi, India on Kundalini, Soma, Shiva, The Art and Science of Meditation, Hacking Your Consciousness.

Spiritual Teacher

In 2015, Raja started leading talks and workshops in New Delhi under the Universal Quest banner and they were made available on YouTube attracting thousands of views. As a result, in 2018, he was asked to develop a course on the ancient Indian system of

Kundalini In Hinduism, kundalini (, ) is a form of divine feminine energy (or ''Shakti'') believed to be located at the base of the spine, in the '' muladhara''. It is an important concept in Śhaiva Tantra, where it is believed to be a force or power ...

for the popular US online platform The Shift Network. His first course Awakening Your Kundalini premiered in March 2018 and since then Raja has taught 11 courses with over 4,000 students and is considered a popular teacher on the network. In 2019, Raja started teaching an Advanced Program on Indian Wisdom on a new online school A Thousand Suns Academy that represents him in the US.

Personal life

Raja married designer Jagriti Chadha in 2005, and they have a daughter and live in the United States.

Filmography

Major Web and Multimedia Projects

References

External links

*
Raja Choudhury's Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Choudhury, Raja 1964 births Living people Filmmakers from Ibadan Film directors from Delhi Indian filmmakers Indian documentary filmmakers Indian documentary film directors Indian expatriates in Nigeria Indian expatriates in the United Kingdom Indian expatriates in the United States University of Waterloo alumni Alumni of the Architectural Association School of Architecture