Work
My work has rarely stayed inside one industry. Across fashion, music, education and cultural exchange, I have often found myself building what was missing around creative talent: the platform that creates visibility, the institution that connects learning to practice, the exchange that lets ideas travel, or the room that lets in someone who might not otherwise get there.
LAKMÉ FASHION WEEK
Strengthening the international connection Indian fashion needed
Lakmé Fashion Week was already India's convergence point for designers, buyers, editors and stylists when I joined it. What it needed was a stronger bridge to the world beyond India. Across five seasons, I spearheaded the market-day strategy that put international press and buyers in front of Indian designers, allowing their work to be encountered alongside international peers rather than limited by distance.
In practice, that meant bringing the world to India rather than waiting for India to be discovered: hosting editors from international editions of Vogue on Indian soil, creating visibility for Indian designers in front of international buyers who could carry their work further, and building a confluence between Indian designers and international stylists at a time when styling itself was still emerging as a distinct professional role in the Indian fashion industry.
The experience shaped an idea that has followed me since: talent alone doesn't create opportunity. Someone has to build the convergence where the two can meet.
THE MEDIA TRIBE
From education to industry
India has one of the world's most prolific music and film industries, yet when I co-founded The Media Tribe, structured professional education in music production and sound engineering barely existed. Much of the industry still ran on informal networks and on-the-job learning.
We built The Media Tribe around a different premise: students needed rigorous education, but they also needed to be industry-ready by the time they graduated. So learning extended beyond the classroom into real productions: Coke Studio, MTV Unplugged, major Bollywood films and live tours with industry leaders, giving students professional experience and networks while they were still studying.
The Media Tribe went on to earn national recognition for education leadership and industry interface, and its alumni now work across the Indian and international music industries, including Grammy-winning and Hollywood productions.
The question was never simply how to teach. It was how to shorten the distance between learning and opportunity.
TOTEMPOLE
Founding a point of entry
TotemPole began with a contradiction. Young people were among music's most passionate audiences, yet the live-music world around them; festivals, industry conferences and professional circles was rarely designed to let them fully enter it.
I built TotemPole because of my own daughters. My husband and I worked at a leadership level inside many of India's major music festivals, and yet our own children could rarely stand inside the rooms we were building. The alcohol, and the atmosphere that came with it, made those spaces inappropriate for children. I wanted to build the festival my own daughters couldn't yet walk into.
TotemPole created that room. Through Road to Excellence, a young person could listen to Grammy-winning producers, engineers and other international professionals speak about the industry. Through Top of the Pole, a school band from their own city could then perform on the same stage used by international artists. Workshops and live performances made the distance between audience, participant and professional feel suddenly much smaller.
For years, in grant applications and board meetings, I described what I was building as opportunity. In time, I realised that what I had also built was proximity: a room small enough, and a door open enough, for a young person standing at the edge of a world they'd assumed wasn't theirs to suddenly see how close it really was.
INDIA × NORWAY CULTURAL EXCHANGE
Building the bridge in both directions
For eight years, I led a cultural and educational partnership with Norway's Kulturtanken (erstwhile Concerts Norway), built around music, learning and international exchange.
Students from our incubator did not simply study sound engineering in a classroom in Mumbai. They travelled to Norway and worked inside the crews of Øya and Inferno Metal Festival, learning within teams that had spent decades building some of Europe's most respected live shows. From engineering Lana Del Rey's set to jamming with renowned musicians, our students experienced the industry from within.
The exchange flowed back to India in equally important ways. Through the Norway relationship, we brought renowned Norwegian music producers, as well as Grammy-winning producers and industry leaders from the United States, to work directly with our students through masterclasses, workshops and training. It gave young musicians and engineers in Mumbai access to people working at the highest levels of the international industry, without having to leave India to find them.
The partnership also opened another kind of exchange. Working with MUO in Norway on a program created specifically to increase women's representation in live sound engineering, we brought two women engineers to Mumbai to work as part of the production team at a live festival in Worli, not as guests observing an unfamiliar industry, but as practitioners making the show happen.
Supported by roughly $700,000 in grants across the partnership, the exchange grew over eight years from a sequence of visiting performances into something neither side could call one-directional. It confirmed something I'd already started to understand elsewhere: international opportunity doesn't happen simply because a border is open. Somebody still has to build the bridge, and by the end, nobody involved could quite say who had been the host and who had been the guest.
THE GLOBAL IKON
Building intelligent infrastructure for the global music business
The Global Ikon grows out of more than two decades inside the music industry, and a deep understanding of what it takes, and what is still missing, for talented artists to build sustainable and scalable careers.
We are building intelligent infrastructure for the global music business, connecting artist development, commercial opportunity and technology within one platform. My work focuses on strategy, partnerships and the ecosystem around the company, including conversations that bring artists, executives, technologists, founders and investors into the same room.
The technology is new. The question underneath it isn't: how do we build better pathways between creative ability and opportunity?
FOR THE LOVE OF QUIRK
Culture leaves clues
For the Love of Quirk grew out of more than twenty years spent building, observing and participating in culture across fashion, music and the creative industries. It is an independent platform exploring culture, identity, fashion and belonging through writing, conversations and experiences.