Bio
Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s father the first Indian owner of The Times Of India was the renowned Marwari industrialist, Ramkrishna Dalmia who had six wives and eighteen children. Her mother, his sixth and youngest wife Dinesh Nandini Dalmia, was from Udaipur. She was an eminent Hindi poetess and novelist and a Padma Bhushan awardee who had to totally reinvent herself to deal with the challenges of the unorthodoxy of her marriage to a staunchly orthodox man. Neelima grew up in an atypical Marwari home with six siblings, three older and three younger, in New Delhi.
She completed her Senior Cambridge from The Convent of Jesus and Mary, before attaining her Bachelor's degree in Home Science from Lady Irwin College; and a Master's in Psychology from the Delhi University with a specialization in Personality. She taught Psychology for a short while at the same university to undergraduate students.
Neelima has been inculcated profusely by her mother with a passion for both the spoken and written word and divides her time between writing and pursuing her interest in poetry, philosophy and the paranormal.
Her writings have earned for her the tag of agent provocateur and perhaps, one of India's most fearless authors.
When she wrote her first book, Father Dearest: The Life and Times of R. K. Dalmia in 2003, it scaled the bestseller list and she was labeled a daredevil ‘family chronicler’ who had exposed some fiercely guarded secrets.
Her second book, a novel, Merchants of Death was published in 2007, which also received wide critical acclaim. It is a story that exposes the underbelly and duplicity of the perceived-to-be chaste, highly religious and overtly orthodox Marwari society. In a sense she had violated the sacred omerta and shattered that bastion of secrecy of her clan, by telling the world what everyone knows, but no one ever speaks about.
The Secret Diary of Kasturba is her third book that promises a fly-on-the-wall peep into the life of the wife of the Mahatma. It was launched in New York in October 2016 year and in Delhi later that year.
A passionate ‘people-watcher’, she is drawn to oddities and thrives on writing about personalities and human behavior, from the quirky to the mysterious, to the bizarre, a subject that she does chillingly close to the bone.