Before the
Brief.

I grew up walking 2 km to the video store. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. There was always something worth the trip — a cheesy action movie, a rom-com my mum would love, something obscure I'd never heard of that turned out to change how I saw the world.

My mum watches a movie every night. Sometimes two. I get it from her entirely.

I grew up in India during the first wave of cable TV — Hindi movies, Saturday morning cartoons, anything and everything the screen would give me. I burned pirated CDs. I bought bootleg VHS tapes. Not because I was trying to steal — because I was hungry for content that wasn't easy to reach yet.

When I got a job at VH1, something clicked. I was inside the machine I'd always watched from the outside. Programming a channel. Talking to labels. Shaping what people watched on a Tuesday night. Nothing since has quite matched that feeling — and I've spent a long time figuring out how to get back to it.

I've binged every show worth watching and a few that weren't. I still go to the cinema with my kids, every other week — because I think the theatrical experience is worth protecting.

I care deeply about what happens to storytelling from here. I'm not convinced AI-generated content is the route humanity should take. What OpenAI did with Ghibli's aesthetic wasn't innovation — it was extraction. The reason I admire someone like Taika Waititi isn't just the work; it's that he built an indigenous studio specifically to protect the kind of stories that don't survive without deliberate care.

But I'm also watching what's coming with genuine excitement. Showrunner is one of the most interesting things happening right now — generative AI that lets viewers build their own episodes from scratch. Characters, storylines, camera angles, shots. The whole thing. Something that used to require a team, a budget, and three years now takes a prompt. That's not a threat to storytelling. That's what happens when curiosity finally gets the tools it always deserved. The kid who walked 2 km to the video store would have lost his mind.

I want to work on it from the inside — in the ad tier, in the infrastructure, in the part most people never see. Not despite loving the art. Because of it.

I love engineering campaigns. Not just running them — building the architecture that makes them land.

The way I see it, a great campaign is a chain reaction. Real insight leads to a clear problem. A clear problem creates tension worth dramatising. Tension demands a single-minded idea. The idea finds its right channel. The channel makes the outcome measurable. Get one link wrong and the whole thing softens.

Most campaigns die at step one because the insight is really just a category observation dressed up as something sharp. "People love convenience." "Families want to feel connected."

The ones that stick find something true and slightly uncomfortable — the thing people recognise instantly but have never heard said out loud. Pedigree's Hard to Impress didn't sell dog adoption by showing cute dogs. It made parents feel the specific ache of an empty house. That's a different thing entirely.

My Clifton Strengths sit heavily in Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking — Adaptability, Input, Connectedness, Futuristic. Which probably explains why I'm drawn to the architecture of ideas as much as the execution. I collect signals from everywhere, find the thread that connects them, and build toward something that didn't exist before.