Lalit Shastri is an Indian journalist, columnist, wildlife film maker, birder, and environmentalist. He has headed the Madhya Pradesh Bureau of The Hindu and The Asian Age - two of India's leading English newspapers - for more than two decades. He quit a corporate job to investigate the causes leading to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and subsequently became a full-time journalist. He has extensively covered from ground zero for The Hindu, the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and repeated attacks by Naxalite-Maoists in the Central Indian States of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.