Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai, India with his wife, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, in 2008. The company publishes translations of Indian-language pulp fiction, folklore, weird fiction, and graphic novels. Sometimes he edits mathematics textbooks. He is interested in marine invertebrates, percussion music, demonology, and topological graph theory.
