Login

Jury Members

View All
awardsJury

Girish
Karkera

Editor-in-Chief, car&bike

Girish has been a journalist for over 25 years, most of it spent covering the automotive industry and reviewing cars and bikes. His long career trajectory includes some of India’s well-known media titles including Indian Express, Autocar India, BBC TopGear India and Times Auto. He took over the leadership role as Editor-in-Chief at car&bike in February 2023. A resident of Mumbai, he has also been featured in India Book of Records, twice. Apart from these, he is also a jury member for World Car Awards.

awardsJury

Shams
Raza Naqvi

Senior Editor, car&bike

Shams has been an automotive journalist for more than a decade and a half, working at several leading news networks in India to create automotive features. He has been a part of the car&bike family for the last 3 years. He thrives on audience interaction & always yearns to simplify complex automotive things for his viewers.

 

awardsJury

Seshan
Vijayraghavan

Assistant Editor, car&bike

Seshan has been a key member of the car&bike’s editorial team for the past seven years. He’s one of those people who chose to be an automotive journalist just for the pleasure of getting their hands on all the new four- and two-wheeled machines in the market. Over the years he’s gained expertise covering stories on different aspects of the Indian automotive industry.

 

awardsJury

Bilal
Firfiray

Assistant Editor, car&bike

With little over 8 years of experience in the Automotive Journalism, Bilal Firfiray’s connection with cars began a decade before he stepped in the professional field. Carrying forward an in-depth experience of comprehensive and consistent testing of cars – be it fuel efficiency, performance testing or even measurements, Bilal has done it all. Behind the screen time, you’d find him researching, reading, rendering, rambling, rummaging, and recommending cars. He can also talk about EVs for hours to an end.

awardsJury

Preetam
Bora

Senior Editor, car&bike

Preetam is a seasoned motoring journalist with a specialisation & passion for two-wheelers. He has been riding motorcycles since the 1990s and has been heading all two-wheeler content at car&bike for over 9 years. He helps provide a key perspective to all two-wheeler industry and product-related stories and has also played a leadership role in mentoring others in the car&bike team along the way.

awardsJury

Janak
Sorap

Assistant Editor, car&bike

Janak’s passion for automobiles was instilled at an early age, sketching car and motorcycle designs in his classwork books. He’s currently an assistant editor at car&bike, where he can be spotted doing what he loves the most - riding, writing and reviewing motorcycles and anything that has an engine strapped to it.

Prior to his journalism career, Janak worked at a car performance and modification shop and contributed to wrenching on cars and motorcycles. In his free time, he enjoys keeping his riding gear clean, building scale models of boats, and of course, riding and driving his motorcycles and cars.

awardsJury

Sagar
Sheldekar

Two-Wheeler Expert & Content Creator

Sagar is a former California Superbike School coach and the founder of Living It Up - an automotive publication specialising in motorcycle video content. He is also an ex-racer and was the head of motorcycle content at PowerDrift for eight years.

awardsJury

Ashok
George

Head of Business, BigRock Dirt Park

Ashok has been involved with two-wheelers in one way or another since he first started riding over 20 years ago. As his last editorial role, he was the Road Test Editor at BBC Top Gear India where he was responsible for performance testing two-wheelers. He has also worked with publications like OVERDRIVE and Motoring World - riding, testing and writing about all kinds of motorcycles. He currently heads the business at Big Rock Dirt Park, India’s finest off-road training facility. He is also one of the only four internationally certified coaches for the Harley-Davidson Riding Academy in India and occasionally takes on the role of riding coach.

awardsJury

Aashish
B. Chaudhary

Co-Founder, Studio34 Designart

Aashish is an experienced professional with about 16 years of industry experience. He acquired his Master's degree from Istituto Europeo di Design in 2007, after which he joined the Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Pvt design team. Ltd from 2008 to 2011.

From Honda, he moved to Maruti Suzuki India Limited as Deputy Manager for the vehicle exterior styling department, assisting the brand. After his tenure at Maruti Suzuki, he joined Hero MotoCorp Ltd as a senior designer. In 2017, Aashish co-founded Studio34 Designart. It is an industrial design studio that works closely with automotive OEMs.

Throughout his professional tenure, he has worked on various products with different development cycles and change contents. Some of them made it through to production, becoming the stars in his work portfolio.

 

awardsJury

Punit
Chaphekar

Owner, C Design

Punit Chaphekar is a product designer from IDC, IIT Bombay (1998-2000 Batch). Since childhood, he has been passionate about automobiles. After IDC, he joined Bajaj Auto Ltd; where he mainly worked on three-wheeler design, bike decals and two-wheeler concepts.

In 2002, he started C DESIGN STUDIO (CDS), his own design firm in Mumbai, to cater to the automotive and product design needs of the industry. He has worked on a number of Luxury Bus, City Bus & Speciality Vehicle design assignments for Automotive OEM’s and Coach Builders.

Of all the projects, the most notable being the design and Interior execution of a VIP Bus for Bharat Coach Builders (BCB) in 2015.  BCB produced the bus for Ashok Leyland, who gifted the same to the President of Tanzania.

Punit Chaphekar is the winner of the Autocar, Lego & Mahindra & Mahindra sponsored “Build A Scorpio” contest held in the year 2005. He has also received an Honorable Mention for the redesign of the Fiat Millecento, Motor Trend International Design Contest, 2002.  

He passionately works towards the ingenious integration of style and function to come up with designs relevant to the context. Over the years, neat lines, attention to detail & immaculate execution have become his hallmarks and he is known in the industry for his effective conversion of concepts into reality.

awardsJury

Thomas
Dal

Director & Dean, Strate School of Design Bangalore

Thomas, director and Dean of Strate School of Design Bangalore, is a trained transportation designer from Institut Superieur de Design ISD, France where he graduated best overall in 1999. Thomas is also a master graduate from Ecole d'architecture de Paris La Villette, specialisation Naval architecture in 2006 in Paris France.
Thomas worked 10 years as a design manager in the car industry, developing projects for nearly all European car makers, and taking part in the development of the first BMW Mini, the First Mercedes Maybach, the all PEUGEOT, RENAULT and Citroen launched from 2002 to 2012.
Thomas re-oriented his career towards education by setting up the well-known DSK-Rubika school of design in Pune India in 2008, where he founded and led the successful Transportation design department from 2008 to 2012 .
In 2012, Thomas quit DSK-Rubika to go back to France and start working for Decathlon as Director of Design and Innovation. In 2017, Thomas was asked to open and head the Asian branch of Strate School of Design in Bangalore.
Driven by challenge and understanding that the future of our world depends on education, this international multiple design award winner, jumped on the occasion to come back to India and to the education field in order to be a "designer of designers" and to set up the best design school of India.
He continues to keep close ties to the industry by parallelly running his own design consultancy involved in most of the booming sectors (HMI & car interfaces, interior design for Autonomous vehicles, User experience, and immersive reality for fast and accurate design and CMF decision). The studio will soon proudly reveal in India, 2 Premium EV buses, one sport car, and a complete range of bicycles and EV-bikes.

About Awards

The car&bike Awards have become trendsetters in the automotive awards space, pioneering many categories that exclusively recognise efforts in communications, technology, design, and others. It has the distinction of having India's most voted award category for its Viewer's Choice categories - the c&b Viewers' Choice Car & Two-Wheeler of the Year are sought-after trophies at each year's event.