Gerson da Cunha
Encyclopedia
Gerson da Cunha is an India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n stage and film actor, social worker, and author. Former advertising man, he has acted in numerous plays and movies such as Electric Moon
Electric Moon
Electric Moon is a 1992 Indian film directed by Pradip Krishen and written by Arundhati Roy. The film was produced by Grapevine Media for Channel 4 Television and Bobby Bedi's Kaleidoscope Entertainment and was reviewed at the International Film Festival of India and the 36th London Film Festival...

(1992), Cotton Mary
Cotton Mary
Cotton Mary is a 1999 film directed by Ismail Merchant, best known as the producer half of Merchant Ivory and Madhur Jaffrey, actress and author of cookery books. It was filmed in India.-Plot:...

(1999), Asoka (2001), Water (2005), among others.

Career

A science graduate from the University of Bombay, he spent five years as a journalist in the Press Trust of India
Press Trust of India
Press Trust of India is the largest news agency in India. It is headquartered in Delhi and is a nonprofit cooperative among more than 450 Indian newspapers and has a staff of about 2,000 writers spread across 150 offices nationwide...

Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

 and 25 years in Lintas and Hindustan Lever. The last 10 of the 25 was as head of Lintas. He then moved on to work with the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

 and New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. Gerson has functioned in an honorary capacity as advisor in various union ministries and the National Technology Missions under the Cabinet Secretariat.

He is the Chief Executive of Bombay First and is now involved in various NGOs and citizen groups in Mumbai. He is a trustee of NAGAR and convenor of AGNI (Action for Good Governance and Networking for India).

Family

He hails from Arpora
Arpora
Arpora is a village close to the North Goa beach belt, in India's tourism-destination state....

, Bardez
Bardez
Bardez is the name of a region and taluka in North Goa. The name is credited to the Brahmin immigrants who migrated to the Konkan via Magadha in Gangetic India from Aryavarta, in the north-western part of the Indian sub-continent. Bardez or more properly Bara desh means "twelve countries"...

 taluka in Goa
Goa
Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...

. The Da Cunha family hails from Goa and claims descent from Saraswat Brahmin
Saraswat Brahmin
The Saraswats are a Brahmin caste of India.- History :According to the legend, Saraswat Brahmins are Brahmins who lived on the banks of the former Saraswati River that once flowed in northern India. Although it is said that at Prayag the three rivers meet or met.the fact is that the Saraswati never...

s who converted to Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

 in the 16th century. One of his relatives, José Gerson da Cunha
José Gerson da Cunha
José Gerson da Cunha was an Indo-Portuguese physician who achieved international renown as an orientalist, historian, linguist and numismatist.- Early life and medical career:...

was a noted historian, who wrote a history of early Mumbai, The Origin of Bombay (1900).

In the present generation, Gerson da Cunha and his younger brother Sylvester da Cunha, both were involved in advertising and English theatre.

External links

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