… just another blahg …

Hello!

A little background: I was born and brought up in Bombay, India and then went on to spend several years in Austin, Texas getting a post-graduate degree. My area of study was persuasion studied through the lenses of Psychology and Marketing. I recently worked for a Consumer Insights firm in Los Angeles exploring a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, and am now back in Mumbai and Dubai, where much of my family resides.

I hope to build a career in brand strategy over the next few years and often find myself thinking about the what, when, where, why, and how of creating my own brand. I tend to gravitate to branding that stands for a cause greater than just selling the product. A few of my favourites are Method, BMW, Target, Starbucks, Dove, and Standard Chartered. I also feel passionately about the enterprise of engaging creativity and commitment (at a personal level) and fostering innovation (at the organizational level) in schools as well as at work.

When it comes to deconstructing culture, I am given to digging deep. Perhaps a tad contrarily though - and despite how PhDs are reputed to know too much about too little - the “big picture” is exceedingly important to me. I strongly believe that the typically stark divide between quantitative and qualitative research needs to be more blurred in order to analyze sociological and psychological issues more holistically. Along the same lines (pun sort of intended!), I have great hope that science and art will somehow come together more in this century.

Some people who I find very inspiring: Leonard Cohen, Claude Steele, Jane Goodall, Carl Sagan, Bruce Mau, Oscar Wilde, Ken Robinson, Richard Dawkins, Al Gore, Gordon Allport, Nick Drake, Abraham Maslow, J.K. Rowling, Daniel Dennett, Farida Khanum, Salman Rushdie, Santosh Desai, Noam Chomsky, Georgia O’Keefe, Sacha Baron Cohen.

I spend most of my free time listening to music - both Indian and Western, mostly folk with a touch of the classical. Cooking, reading, singing, blahgging (I also like inventing new words!), and spending time with family and friends are other things I like doing. I love dogs and adore my little cocker spaniel completely. And I would some day like to be involved in public radio…

But for now, I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts. Please feel free to email me and leave comments even - and perhaps especially - if you disagree. Thank you for stopping by.