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Karan Bajaj is an Indian American entrepreneur and bestselling author. He is the founder and CEO of Edtech startup WhiteHat Jr. which acquired by BYJU'S for $300 million in a landmark all-cash deal in 2020 within 18 months of founding.

Bajaj is also the author of three contemporary Indian novels, Keep Off the Grass (2008), Johnny Gone Down (2010), and The Seeker (2015). Bajaj's first novel, Keep Off the Grass, which became a bestseller with more than 70,000 copies sold in the year of release, was a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and was long listed for the India plaza Golden QuillAward. Together his novels have sold more than 200,000 copies in India.

Early Life and Education
Born in 1979 into an Indian Army family, Karan studied in various schools in Delhi, Shimla, Ranchi, Jabalpur, Lucknow and Assam. He is an alumni of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra.

Career
Bajaj had a long corporate career initially at marquee companies. During which time he took breaks from his career for backpacking, practicing yoga, learning meditation and writing his three books.

He joined Proctor & Gamble in 2002 in India and was soon posted to Manila. As a brand manager with Proctor & Gamble he lived and worked in Manila, Singapore and the US. Bajaj was nominated as a 'Top 40 under 40 marketer in the U.S.' by Advertising Age in 2007. He worked at BCG as a management consultant and Kraft Foods as a marketing director. In 2016, he moved to Mumbai as CEO of Discovery Networks in South Asia, leading Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and Discovery Kids.

In 2018, he founded WhiteHat Jr to teach coding skills to kids between ages 6 and 18. The company secured funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and Owl Ventures. Byju’s acquired WhiteHat Jr in 2020, and the all-cash deal makes the 18-month-old company the largest and fastest exit story at this size in the Indian startup ecosystem, and the biggest deal in the edtech space.

Keep Off The Grass
Keep Off The Grass was Bajaj's first venture into writing. The story is about a psychedelic road trip of a 25-year-old Yale graduate through the length and breadth of India. The journey is made by a brilliant youngster named Samrat, born to immigrant parents in the U.S. who decides to go out in search of his roots. Along the way Samrat, the protagonist, ends up in prison for possession of marijuana, develops a drug addiction, meditates in the foothills of the Himalayas, has a one-night stand with a hippie in Dharamsala and meets flesh-eating Aghoree saints on the banks of Varanasi.

Future film
Kunal Kohli Productions, UTV Productions, and Mosaic Media Group bid for the film rights of the book. They were eventually sold to Mosaic Media Group. Ben Rekhi has been signed up as director. The director has stated that the film will be "like an Indian version of The Motorcycle Diaries".

Johnny Gone Down
Bajaj's second novel, Johnny Gone Down, is a thriller published by HarperCollins-India in 2010. Bajaj described the novel as focusing on the "bizarre, almost surreal series of events that transform an MIT graduate into first a genocide survivor, then a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software mogul, and a deadly game fighter over a period of twenty years."

Feature film
Ronnie Screwvala and Ashi Dua are signed on as co-producers for the screen adaptation of Johnny Gone Down.

The Seeker
Bajaj's third novel, The Seeker, was published by Penguin Random House India in June 2015. The novel is about an investment banker in New York who embarks on a quest to become a yogi in the Himalayas. It was inspired by Bajaj's one-year sabbatical traveling from Europe to India, learning Hath yoga in an ashram in India, and practicing meditation in the Himalayas. The book opened to strong reviews in India and was a bestseller at launch with several reviewers comparing it to Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (novel). The Statesman called it "engaging, convincing, realistic and highly readable", noting that The Seeker was released five years after Johny Gone Down in 2010 and the author took this break to refine his writing which is truly reflected in The Seeker.

The Yoga of Max's Discontent
The Yoga of Max's Discontent (published in India as The Seeker) was published the Riverhead Books imprint of Penguin Random House in May 2016. This is Bajaj's first international release. The novel is about an investment banker in New York who embarks on a quest to become a yogi in the Himalayas.

Personal Life
Karan is married to Kerry Bajaj, author of Sleep, Baby, Sleep (HarperCollins India) and has 2 children.

He is also a yogi, having trained with Sivananda Ashram in Madurai. He has spoken widely about the influence of travel, backpacking and sabbaticals on his boundaryless view of the world and on his career, writing and personal life.