About me: A writer, operator, systems thinker, and perpetual dot-connector
I am a reader and writer first and foremost. I am also a creative tinkerer, a staunch patron of dying arts like letter-writing and diary-keeping, an interior design fiend, and a growing gym bro.
I’m curious about just about anything as long as I get a whiff of a good story from it, and so my personal research practice is extremely multi-dimensional.
I think of myself as a Third Culture Kid, having been brought up in Nigeria, India and Dubai (and studied in England for a bit). I have a strong tendency to feel most at home first at home, and then in the in-betweens. I live and work in Bengaluru, India, a city that I consider a formative part of my identity.
I am an NCTJ-accredited journalist by training, but fell into the tech world early very early on in my career. My work and writing draw from my deliberately interdisciplinary background: between undergrad and postgrad, I’ve studied and practiced journalism, English literature and theory, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, ethics, print design, and political science.
I currently work at PhonePe, India’s largest fintech startup. One in three Indians uses PhonePe to pay their bills, transfer money and run their financial lives. Here, I spend my days chewing on problems of narrative design, org culture and brand-building. Previously, I spent four years at Obvious, an award-winning product consultancy, as the Chief of Staff to the founders and general Swiss Army Knife.
My newsletter, Kindred Spirits, is where I write on agentic ways of living and making meaning.
Published writing
I write both to think and to tell a story. Here are some of those stories I’ve documented in the last couple of years:
- A modernist structure in Bengaluru’s oldest neighbourhood, for Paper Planes
- Material memory: Vessels of change, for Dhoop (only in print)
- The past hides in a bowl of saaru, for Memories on a Plate (only in print)
- The many ways one can love a book, for Borderless Journal
- Seeing Japan in Noguchi and Noguchi in Japan, for G5A Foundation
- Home is everywhere and nowhere at once, for The Curator
- Jars of pickle and whisperings of generations, for Kitaab
- Finding your personal Zone of Genius, for Humanise
- Your message lives here, for ISHTBAFSTD, Yummy Colors’ Concept of the Year