The Mad Hatter is my newsletter on Substack, where I post one essay a week on family, friendship, pretences, and other absurdities of modern adulthood.
Poems and After the Credits arrive between the essays.
On children who refuse to leave the nest, and the parents underwriting the scam.
A rescue dog, an Instagram fantasy, and a trainer's final verdict.
On paying to be stalked in the name of wellness.
My educational and children's books are available online. Here is a selection by series.
The award-winning school mathematics series, Classes 1 to 5. Amity University Press.
Five modules that turn handwriting into a craft, not a chore. Frank EMU Books.
First books of English, numbers and the world around, for the very young.
Save Planet Earth, the Endangered series, Green Genius and 101 Facts. Climate literacy before it was a curriculum.
Grammar taught the way language is actually used.
My areas of expertise are communication, storytelling and technology (from a safety and policy lens). I also design and conduct result-oriented sessions for people and institutions in these core areas.
The objective of my programme is to teach what kind of leadership survives ambiguity, how experience transforms into coherent narration, and what skills are quintessential in an AI era. The toolkit emerges from lived intelligence: the ability to read a room, a moment, a system, and oneself with accuracy.
Tell me the room, the audience and the date. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right voice for it.
Or write directly to madhusinghsirohi@gmail.com, or find me on LinkedIn. Rights and publishing enquiries about the novel: [agent details when signed].
I was born in western UP, into a family with deep landowning roots and a future that had been largely written before I could read.
My mother-in-law came to see me at eighteen. I was married seven days after my twentieth birthday. In Hisar, as a young army wife, I began writing educational books at the dining table because Indian children deserved better than tracing grey dots under armed maternal supervision. Over seventy books and educational titles followed.
At thirty-three, I got my first desk, salary, and title. Publishing, environment, telecom, setting up a foundation, and eventually Meta followed. Somewhere along the way, I also learnt that being publicly wrong is excellent preparation for work, marriage, motherhood, power, and middle age.
Now I write every day. The novel took fourteen years and is finally done. Essays arrive weekly, poems when they insist, and a book of nonfiction is quietly assembling itself in the background.
I spent half a life helping corporations and institutions say things carefully. I intend to spend the rest saying things plainly.
Madhu Singh Sirohi is a writer, speaker, facilitator, and public policy leader who has spent three decades building work at the intersection of publishing, technology, inclusion, and public life in India.
She began as an author, writing over seventy educational books and titles, including the award-winning Grow with Numbers series, used by more than three lakh schoolchildren across India. As Chief Editor at Brijbasi Art Press, she founded the children's imprint Hello Friend. She later headed TERI Press at The Energy and Resources Institute, where she was Managing Editor of Terragreen, Founding Editor of Solar Quarterly, and founder of the children's imprint Terrapin. Its sixty-book series on climate change was later acquired by Pearson Education.
A decade in telecom followed. At Telenor, she created Mera Mobile Mera Saathi and the Hand-in-Hand Citizen Centre Project, the only Indian initiative selected for the GSMA mWomen programme launched by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. She then founded and led Vodafone Foundation India. There, she co-led the global Connected Women Programme, whose 2014 report was launched by Malala Yousafzai in London and Cherie Blair in India. She also delivered Rudi Sandesh Vyavahar with SEWA, winner of the GSMA Mobile World Congress Award 2014 for Best Service for Women in Emerging Markets. Her work at the Foundation became an Oxford Saïd Business School case study, published by Stanford University Press.
In 2016, under the mentorship of Ela Bhatt, the Gandhian institution builder, founder of SEWA, and member of The Elders, Madhu founded Anubandh Trust. Anubandh is a development organisation built around the ideas of 100 Mile Communities and Deliberate Leaders.
Most recently, she served as Meta's Head of Policy Programs, Politics and Government in India, where she represented the company before Parliament, ministries, regulators, and civil society on digital governance, platform integrity, online safety, elections, misinformation, and technology's role in public life.
She has conducted a Rural Leadership Programme at IIM Ahmedabad and taught as a practitioner in the executive leadership programme at the Indian School of Business. She holds a philosophy degree from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, trained at the Stanford Publishing Course, and has served on the advisory board of the Digital Empowerment Foundation and the advisory group of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute.
She also trained in improv comedy in New York and performed twice in Brooklyn, which she maintains was harder than appearing before Parliament.
Madhu now writes full time. She publishes weekly essays through The Mad Hatter, her newsletter on modern adulthood, Indian drawing rooms, ambition, gender, respectability, and the things polite people prefer not to mention. She has recently completed her debut novel.