The unlikely candidate.
My father kept a small watch-and-radio shop and sang on stage. At nine I was sent to The Scindia School in Gwalior — a music teacher who was a friend of his arranged the entrance exam — and I have said since that I was sent to boarding school because I could not be managed at home. I won the junior boxing championship, played cricket and football, and loved hockey best. Years later the school put me in its alumni series, and I described myself as the most unlikely candidate for success. I still think that is fair.
The early years.
Science first, then management: a BSc in botany, zoology and chemistry at Hislop College, an MBA from the Department of Business Management at Nagpur University (1984–86), a post-graduate diploma in Public Relations, and later executive modules in Brand Management and Digital Marketing at IIM Bangalore. In 1986 I started out as an account executive at Everest Advertising — Tobu Cycles, Salora, Pan Parag. Three decades on, in 2018, Nagpur University conferred my PhD for research on the branding process, marketing communication and how consumers actually decide. The academic backbone has always run alongside the practice.
Shells Advertising.
In February 1987, at twenty-four, I came back to Nagpur and founded Shells Advertising Inc. — a one-man show, with an in-house artist hired in month two. The brief was simple: central India deserved a creative agency that thought as ambitiously as anyone in Bombay. Within three years it had paid for an office, a car and my own wedding. The low point came early too — a colleague left, took half the staff, and set up a competing agency. We survived it.
Today Shells works with 150+ brands across food, retail, education and industry — Haldiram's, Dinshaw's, Go Gas, Spacewood, Scindia School — and in 2009 we became the first agency from the region to open a full-service branch overseas, in Dubai. In 2023 a campaign we created for NavBharat's ninetieth year, Hum Sakshi Hain, took two golds and a bronze at the afaqs! Brand Storyz Awards. Through it all the philosophy hasn't changed — big ideas work better than big budgets.
The Happening Nagpur.
From 2000 to 2007 I was chief editor and publisher of The Happening Nagpur, a monthly magazine about the city. What I am proudest of is the people it gave a platform to — Paul Sandip's Nagtoons and Last Laugh cartoon columns ran there first. Through the 1990s I also ran the Shells Advertising Institute, training the next generation of the trade.
A million-follower classroom.
It started, honestly, because my daughter told me to. She said the things I explained at the dinner table belonged on Instagram. Eighteen months later half a million people were listening; when Exchange4media wrote it up in 2025 I told them the truth — I'm an influencer by accident, not by choice.
The decodes are short: why Rolex sponsors tennis but not cricket, how Fevicol built India's most beloved campaign, the science behind a Pringles wafer. The audience is now over a million across channels, 25 million views a month. One video on the "pink tax" put me on CNN-News18's The Breakfast Club and an NDTV India panel inside a fortnight in March 2024, and a conversation with Raj Shamani on Figuring Out has crossed 1.2 million views.
In the classroom and on the stage.
Multiple TEDx talks, and hundreds more at IITs, IIMs, CII, EO, TiECon, JITO and corporate annuals. I have taught alongside the practice since 1989 — Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, thirteen years as a contributory lecturer in Nagpur University's Department of Business Management, Tirpude, IMT Nagpur, and guest faculty at Manipal University, Dubai. Today: mentor at IIM Nagpur's incubation centre InFED, Board of Studies at MIT-ADT University in Pune, and chair of the entrepreneurial-marketing faculty at the Lemon School of Entrepreneurship.
Brief Case.
On 21 September 2026 Penguin Business publishes Brief Case: How Brands Create Desire, Trust and Culture — forty stories behind the world's biggest brand wins and blunders. Bisleri, Maggi, Parle-G, Dyson, Patagonia, LEGO, Spotify. Thirty-nine years of noticing, in one book you can carry.
The boardroom.
In August 2026 MMP Industries Limited — a Nagpur manufacturer of aluminium powders and conductors, listed on the National Stock Exchange and four decades old — appointed me an independent director. As I said at the time: brand and market perception matter more in industrial businesses than most people assume.
Beyond the work.
A Rotarian since 1992 — inducted into the Rotary Club of Nagpur North that April, and its President in 2002–03. Team leader for international exchanges to Sydney (2002), Ohio (2006) and Minneapolis (2016). Chairman of Nagpur Round Table 83 in 2001–02 and Worshipful Master of Lodge Corinth in 2002–03 — a busy couple of years. Chairman of the Marketing Forum at Vidarbha Industries Association from 2009 to 2015, President of the Advertising Agencies Association of Nagpur from 2015, founder president of BNI Andesite — Nagpur's first BNI chapter — from 2017 to 2023, and founder president of Rotary Means Business Nagpur from 2023.
Shalini and I took up yoga in our forties, at a free institute in Nagpur. We both qualified as instructors, and since 2014 we have run a free one-hour morning class at the Chitnavis Centre under the Janardan Swami Yogabhyasi Mandal — it marked eleven years in December 2025. The companion book, Simple Yoga for a Healthy Life, is my way of giving back what the practice has given me.
And between 2010 and 2015 I kept a blog that was mostly Urdu and Hindi verse. The least-known thing about me, and possibly the truest.