Mahmood Farooqui is a Delhi-based historian, writer and performer. After graduating from the Universities of Oxford, U.K (‘96), and Cambridge, U.K (‘99), as a Rhodes scholar from India, he started his own theater group called Dastak. Over the last five years, he has been working to revive a lost form of storytelling in Urdu called Dastangoi. His first book, Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, will be out in May 2010 by Penguin India.