Rahul Jacob is a Mint columnist who writes about the global economy in his column “World Apart”. He is a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and was its Hong Kong and southern China bureau chief. He was part of a team that was runner-up for the Human Rights reporting category of the Society of Publishers in Asia awards in 2012. He was also travel, food and drink editor of the FT in London between 2003 and 2010 and is the author of a collection of travel essays, “Right of Passage”, published by Picador in 2008. Earlier, Jacob was a business writer for Time magazine during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and covered the handover of Hong Kong to China that year.

He started his career at Fortune magazine in New York, where he wrote about management and covered the huge growth in East Asian economies. He was the author of a path-breaking cover story for the foreign media that used NCAER data to contextualise the Indian middle class in 1992 for Fortune. He is a tennis obsessive and has covered Wimbledon for more than 20 years, including several times for Mint Lounge. He has written several articles on Roger Federer, who he interviewed at the peak of his career, for Mint Lounge. He is a regular contributor to Mint's weekend paper on travel, books and men's clothing.