Personal · Mentors & Influences
The people and ideas that shaped me.
Influence is rarely one dramatic mentor. For me it was closer to a slow accumulation — family, a few key ideas, and a lot of watching people who were good at the thing.
I’m wary of the single-guru story — it’s usually too neat. My influences were more diffuse: the values I grew up with, a handful of ideas that stuck, and the agency leaders whose judgement I got to watch up close for a decade.
Family, first
My father, a builder with a PhD, and my mother, a criminal lawyer — two very different models of doing serious work seriously. Add the wider Marwari instinct for enterprise, and you have most of my operating system before I ever entered an office.
‘Before you lead, learn to follow’
The single piece of inherited wisdom that most shaped my path — it’s why I spent a decade following good leaders in agencies before trying to be one. That idea was a mentor in its own right.
The agency leaders I watched
A decade across Webchutney, Jack in the Box, Ogilvy, Isobar and The Glitch meant a decade of watching senior people make hard calls under pressure. I learned more from observing that judgement than from any formal mentorship — the best kind of apprenticeship is proximity.
The journey they shaped: the agency decade · the principles that resulted: Principles.