According to Wikipedia, the city once known as Madras and now called Chennai is the cultural, economic and educational center of South India. The Quality of Living Survey compiled by the global consultancy firm Mercer rated Chennai as "the safest city in India." Chennai attracts 45 percent of health tourists visiting India, and 30 to 40 percent of domestic health tourists. As such, it is popularly termed "India's health capital." Tourism guide publisher Lonely Planet named Chennai as one of the top ten cities in the world to visit in 2015.

The plight of poor women in Chennai, however, paints a starkly different portrait. The Times of India estimates that 1 of 2 women in the slums of Chennai have been sexually abused or assaulted, with fewer than 1 in 10 of the victims reporting such crimes. This harsh sexual politics and the traditional cruelties of the Indian caste system are dramatically exposed in the creative nonfiction narrative of THE THOUSAND LIGHTS OF CHENNAI: the life of the hidden Indian woman, by journalist and acclaimed short-story author Sangeetha Shinde Tee. With an unadorned style that packs a powerful emotional punch, THOUSAND LIGHTS tells the true story of Madhuri, a native of Chennai who navigates parental abandonment, life in an unforgiving orphanage, and several terms of indentured servitude before making a dramatic, socially defiant choice for her personal power at the advanced age of 22.

Sangeetha Shinde's journalism career has included being Principal Correspondent with The Times of India and Contributing Editor of Living Well magazine, the largest English lifestyle magazine in the middle East for Arab women. She set up and ran the national cultural and tourism magazine for the Kingdom of Jordan, which was nominated for an international British Council Award. She established and managed a bilingual magazine for the Mayor of Amman, and founded and ran the flagship European magazine on innovation and entrepreneurship, The Business Innovator.

She has published four books: Amman: Story; A Moral Murder and Other Tales From The Blue Hills; The Book of Anglo Indian Tales; and most recently, The Naked Indian Woman. Her books have received excellent reviews in Femina, The Indian Express, The Week, The Hindu, BBC and The Tribune, UK. She was listed as number six on The Landmark List of top twenty new writers to look out for. Sangeetha was a highly read contributor to the the internationally acclaimed Teabox blog. Her 2017 manifesto 'I am an Indian woman' went viral on the Internet and was recently published by Vidura, the in-house magazine of The Press Institute of India, and by the online magazine Mind Journal.