C. Y. Gopinath

Chitoor Yegnanarayanan Gopinath is a 54-year-old Indian journalist, author, film director, and social communicator. He was born in Kottayam, India on May 30, 1952. He studied in St. Xavier's School, Delhi, and graduated with Economics as his main subject from the Shri Ram College of Commerce and Economics, Delhi University. He worked as Roving Reporter with the JS magazine, Calcutta, and joined Reader's Digest in Mumbai as Staff Writer after JS closed down. After a year there, he set up his own cooperative of young freelance journalists, called Sol Features.

In India, he is perhaps best remembered for his early first person investigative stories in which he would join different marginalized communities incognito and describe their privations by living among them. In 1972, at age 19, he lived among Delhi's street-living shoeshine boys and wrote about it. In subsequent years, he has worked as a clown in a three-ring circus, and a bell-hop. Dressed as an Arab in Bombay, he explored how much a person could get away with if people assumed he was very rich. 'Blinding' himself with cotton wads and black insulation tape, he spent days on Bombay's streets to understand what it felt like to be blind. Walking about the city with a fake HIV positive report, he wrote about how those with HIV are stigmatized and exploited. For stories like this, he was awarded the Rajika Kripalani Young Journalist Award for Best Indian Journalist Under 30 in 1976.

He has contributed new thinking and several innovations to the area of health and behavior change communications in his work in Nairobi with PATH, a US-based NGO. Among them are [http://www.path.org/projects/magnet_theater.php Magnet Theatre] , a form of community theatre based on a fixed location, regular shows and incomplete enactments that must be completed by members of the audience.

Another innovation is his work in understanding how individuals' questions change as their perception of HIV and AIDS risk deepens, written up as a paper on the [http://www.comminit.com/africa/strategicthinking/st2004/thinking-739.html "Continuum of Enquiry"] .

Working with Shilpa Patil with deaf Indian youth for three years under a [http://www.macfound.org.in/fld2002_2001.htm Macarthur Foundation fellowship] , he developed a non-verbal sexuality and reproductive health curriculum that uses methods like role play and mime to explain complex body functions such as menstruation.

In 1998, Gopinath wrote [http://www.monsoonmag.com/main.html "Travels with the Fish"] , a book about his globe-trotting adventures, published by Harper Collins, which became an Indian best-seller.