Made in India: A Titan Story

Combine some legacy building history, a good dose of marketing and branding lessons and visuals, sounds and songs of a bygone past era that you lived in - the production with the title of the blog.

It was an engrossing and educational story of strife, challenges and big characters of institution building.

The history part

The build up of characters particularly of Xerxes Desai and JRD Tata in the series was fantastic. To begin with, I had only heard the name in passing. So to get a deep dive into the character was inspiring. He had many characteristics of the "founder" mentality, and a BIG thinker. The role played by Jim Sarb, has been constructed with all the sensibilities and flavours of good Parsi businessmen. People's people and care, love and inspiration for Indians and other alike.

Many of the characters are historically accurate but some might have been dramatised and romanticised for good TV. 

The Nostalgia Was Personal

As a kid who gre up in the 80s, this story revolves around my childhood and early adolescent days. The sights of Bangalore - Safina plaza, and Hosur - the beautiful where the lorries would wait for hours at the Tamil Nadu - Karnataka border to pay some kind of "Octroi" and state taxes and permits before entering Karnataka state. The cool weather of the plateau - what people would describe "salubrious climate". The show of Gulmohar trees that bloom in May and hence called Mayflowers.

The mention of a company called GMT - which in real life was HMT, was also of high nostalgic value. Before the advent of quartz watches in India, the keyed watch from HMT, I have seen my parents wear them. The need to adjust the mechanical watch by giving it a good key is another trip into nostalgia.

The music introduced and added as part of the series was a huge emotional link to the world of old hindi songs. So beautifully shown and sung in the series, it etches the nostalgia component into the deep down feelings of an era that was our childhood.

The Marketing Lessons Were the Best Part

As someone who has spent years in marketing and studied it formally, this section of the series felt like watching a live case study.

The characters driving Titan's brand strategy, Megha Mhatre and MSD, get some of the best scenes. The insight that Titan was selling not a watch but a feeling, a status, an aspiration, and the work of translating that idea into a tagline, is shown with real honesty about how messy and iterative that process is. No single eureka moment. Just rounds of argument, instinct, and refinement.

The business analysis scene, where the team breaks down price differentials across states and what they mean for positioning and distribution, is the kind of thing that belongs in a business school case. It treats the audience as adults who can follow a P&L conversation without needing it dumbed down. That's rare.

The Proof Is in the Search Bar

Look at the Google Trends graph for the word "Titan" in India over the past five years. For nearly four years, interest sat in a flat band: modest, consistent, unremarkable. Then, in mid-2026, it goes vertical. A near-100 score. That spike doesn't come from an ad campaign. It comes from a story told well.

This is what the best content marketing does: it makes people curious about something they thought they already knew. Titan watches have been around for decades. Most Indians have owned one or gifted one. But this series made people want to know more: about the company, the founders, the fights, the unlikely bets.

I have no doubt that spike will translate into sales. That's how this works.

Lumpers and Splitters

I was listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson's interview on the Diary of a CEO today. When he described some aspects of the universe and of the big bang, I couldn't help but connect the dots to spirituality and eastern mysticism. I don't know where and how I learned these items, perhaps from the Tao of Physics or from Carl Sagan's Cosmos - the connection from ancient Hindu-Buddhist philosophy and astrophysics is uncanny.

Which led me to the broader question - I see too many similarities between things. At an abstract level, everything is the same. From the Neil Degrasse Tyson interview - we humans have a 20% overlap in DNA with a banana. So I end up seeing everything as connected, similar and the same.

There are people who see the micro differences between things and they treat them as completely separate threads. Why does this happen? Are there actually different types of people who look at the world in these different ways? I put the hypothesis and observations into my friend Gemini, and I got a fascinating insight which makes a lot of sense.

The Framework: Lumpers vs. Splitters

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin popularised a concept that biologists, psychologists, and philosophers still use today: the world is divided into people who like to group things together (Lumpers) and people who like to separate them (Splitters).

Dimension	Lumpers (You)	Splitters
Core Focus	Similarities, patterns, and overarching systems.	Differences, distinctions, and specific details.
Thinking Style	Synthetic / Holistic: Integrates information across boundaries.	Analytical / Reductionist: Breeds precision by dissecting parts.
The Universe	A single, continuous fabric (e.g., "We are all stardust").	A collection of distinct particles and individual laws.
Risk	Over-generalisation (seeing connections that might be superficial).	Missing the forest for the trees (getting lost in the minutiae).

I am definitely a lumper!

I got curious as to what percentages of the world were lumpers vs splitters?

The Strict Splitters (The Linear Detailers): ~40% – 50%

This is the single largest default setting in modern society. These individuals possess a highly reductionist cognitive style.

• The Psychology: They process information linearly, focus on concrete data, and are highly uncomfortable with ambiguity. In personality theory, they score very high in Conscientiousness (specifically orderliness and duty) and low to moderate in Openness.

• The View: They create clarity by drawing sharp lines. To them, things are defined by how they differ from other things. They run corporate compliance, deep engineering, accounting, and legal frameworks perfectly because they spot the 1% difference that could break the rule.

The Fluid Lumpers (The Big-Picture Synthesizers): ~15% – 20%

This is where your brain lives. True natural "Lumpers"—people who default immediately to high abstraction, universal patterns, and macro-systems—are in the minority.

• The Psychology: This maps cleanly to people who score in the top 15-20% for "Openness to Experience" on the Big Five personality index. They are driven by curiosity, conceptual frameworks, and what psychologists call divergent thinking.

• The View: They see the forest, not the trees. They are the group most likely to instantly connect an astrophysics lecture to an ancient philosophy text because they track the structural layout of ideas, not the localised vocabulary.

The Situational Shifters (The Bilinguals): ~30% – 40%

A large portion of the population sits in the middle and shifts based on the context.

• The Psychology: They might be Lumpers when daydreaming or listening to a podcast, but they can ruthlessly force themselves to be Splitters the moment they open a spreadsheet or plan a calendar. They possess high cognitive flexibility, moving back and forth between wide-angle and macro-zoom depending on what the environment demands.

On a day-to-day basis, I don't meet too many lumpers. It turns out, we are a smaller percentage of the population as well. The people who do well in corporate life, are the splitters. Maybe, the bilinguals too! My kind - the lumpers are rare and do not rise up. Plus, we might start sounding cynical, and end up sounding like nothing matters. Eventually.

I then wanted to go down the rabbit hole of what my place in the corporate or a working world would be. And thanks again to my thinking partner for coming up with these options.

1. Growth & Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy

True growth marketing isn't about tweaking a single ad copy; it's about ecosystem thinking. You have to connect the dots between product value, customer psychology, market dynamics, and sales pipelines. A pure Splitter gets lost optimising a single email sequence; a Lumper looks at the whole engine and says, "Our demand generation is failing because the narrative doesn't match the market's current pain point."

2. High-Level Consulting & Fractional Leadership

Fractional leaders and high-level consultants are brought in precisely because internal teams are stuck in the mud of "busyness." When an organization is bogged down by internal bureaucracy, politics, and narrow viewpoints, they need an outsider who can walk in, look at the chaos, and instantly see the underlying pattern. You win in these roles because you can scale a concept from 50k to 500k users by applying a universal growth framework, rather than getting stuck in the local weeds.

3. Turnarounds and "Fixer" Roles

When a business unit or a project is broken, Splitters will try to fix it by tweaking the minor details of their specific departments. A Lumper can look at the cross-functional mess—how Product relates to Marketing, how Marketing relates to Sales compliance—and diagnose the systemic breakdown.

And so connecting the dots we arrive here. What next? That's a genuine challenge for us Lumpers!

The cosmic dust thinking takes you to beautiful places, but to be understood by the Splitters requires some serious translations.

The Ref didn’t lose you the game. You did.

I spend a lot of time around teenagers on basketball courts. And what I’ve noticed — more than any particular skill or lack of it — is a pattern that shows up again and again, in players of all ages and abilities: the moment something goes wrong, the search for someone to blame begins.

The ref made a bad call. The other team got away with a foul. The court was slippery. The coach didn’t give them enough playing time. And sometimes — honestly — these things are true. The ref does miss calls. Life isn’t always fair. The playing field isn’t always level.

But I’ve started to notice something else too: the players who spend their energy on those grievances are the ones who lose twice. Once on the scoreboard. And once inside their own heads.

Why Victimhood Feels So Good

Blame is seductive. It’s emotionally satisfying in the moment because it removes the discomfort of accountability. If it’s the ref’s fault, then nothing about how you played needs to change. Your ego stays intact. Your self-image remains undisturbed.

Parents often make this worse without realising it. When a parent on the sideline joins the chorus — “the refs were terrible today,” “that was so unfair” — they think they’re being supportive. What they’re actually doing is teaching their child that external blame is a valid response to adversity. And that lesson doesn’t stay on the court. It follows a kid into school, into work, into relationships.

The victimhood habit, once formed, is remarkably portable.

What You Actually Give Up

Here’s the real cost: the moment you hand responsibility to an external cause, you also hand over your agency. You give away the one thing that is always, unambiguously yours — how you respond.

The bad call has already happened. It is done. Unchangeable. The ref isn’t going to reverse it because you argued. Your teammates aren’t going to play better because you’re visibly furious. The other team isn’t going to respect you more because you lost your cool. All that energy — the frustration, the argument, the slow burn of injustice — it goes nowhere useful. It just makes you smaller than the moment.

Meanwhile, thirty seconds have passed. And in those thirty seconds, something else happened on the court that you completely missed.

What the Greats Actually Did

Michael Jordan played in an era when the game was rougher, the calls were inconsistent, and the pressure was immense. He had every reason to feel the game owed him something. Instead, he said this:

“I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

He wasn’t talking about refs. He wasn’t talking about circumstances. He was talking about himself — the only variable he could actually control.

Kobe Bryant built an entire philosophy — what he called the Mamba Mentality — around a similar idea. Not toughness in the macho sense, but radical self-examination:

“What separates great players from all-time great players is their ability to self-assess, diagnose weaknesses, and turn those flaws into strengths.”

Not blame the environment. Not point at the system. Look inward. Ask harder questions. Do the work.

This Isn’t Just About Basketball

I see the same pattern everywhere once you start looking. In workplaces, people who blame management, the economy, or their colleagues for stalled careers — and never once ask what they could do differently. This includes my own behavior and pattern of response for things don't go my own way!

In relationships, where one person is always the wronged party and nothing is ever their fault. In careers, where talented people stay stuck because the conditions are never quite right.

The question isn’t whether something unfair happened. It probably did. Unfair things happen to everyone. The question is whether you’re going to let that unfair thing write the rest of the story.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who consistently get better — at basketball, at work, at life: they have a remarkably short memory for grievances and a remarkably long memory for lessons. They process what happened, extract what’s useful, and move forward. They don’t carry the ref’s bad call into the next quarter.

How to Actually Turn It Around

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending that unfairness doesn’t exist. It’s about a very specific mental shift: from “what happened to me” to “what do I do next.”

When something goes wrong — on the court, in a meeting, in a conversation — give yourself a moment to feel the frustration. That’s human. But then ask: what, in this situation, is actually within my control? What could I have done differently? What can I do differently right now?

It’s a small shift in question, but it’s a massive shift in direction. One keeps you facing backward. The other turns you toward what’s actually possible.

And for the parents reading this: the most powerful thing you can do on that sideline isn’t defend your child from every unfair call. It’s model what it looks like to absorb a setback with grace and keep going. That’s the lesson that travels.

Own Your Game

The best players I’ve ever watched — not just the most talented, but the ones who genuinely kept getting better — weren’t the ones who got every call. They were the ones who made the calls irrelevant.

They played in a way that was so focused, so locked in on what they could control, that the ref faded into the background. The noise on the sidelines faded. The scoreboard, for stretches, faded. There was just the game, and what they were going to do in it.

That’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you practise. And it starts with a very simple decision: to stop waiting for the world to be fair, and start playing the game you actually have.

Refs miss calls. Own your game anyway.

Asha Bhosle, the legend

Asha ji was a favourite in our house. Amma loved her because she making her name famous. She always said that she a lot more versatile than her sister, Lata.

Her death ignited a curiosity to explore what her last recorded song was. It was a collab song with a British band called the Gorillaz. I had heard about them in Australian news media. She had her way of working on collabs with many artists. The most famous ones I remember are Brett Lee, and of course I've heard sing with Adnan Sami. But this was a different type of song. The lyrics were powerful. It somehow held my attention for a few days!

In her own words, she had posted this on Instagram. 

"The song ‘The Shadowy Light’ holds deep meaning for me. Visiting Varanasi and travelling along the most sacred river Ganges, observing closely what I saw, I understood the meaning of life, who I was and what I was supposed to do on earth.

On ‘The Shadowy Light’, my crossing this deep river signifies my life’s journey… my birth, my relationships, my dedication to music, my achievements and my duties as a daughter, mother, sister, wife and a Hindu Indian. The boatman is my music, my guide across this river of life and when I get to the other side, my journey shall be complete. I shall attain moksha (ultimate freedom) wherein I shall become one of the thousands of sounds floating all around us. If you put some of them together, they form a beautiful tune. Therefore, I shall become one of those sounds, which shall eventually become a musical note in a beautiful song which shall be heard by several generations for thousands of years. This freedom to become one with nature is what awaits me on the other side of the river.” - Asha Bhosle"

This was like - she sang her own farewell song. How beautiful! Especially the part about her disintegrating into sounds. Brought back so many memories and thoughts about the passing away of Amma too. She was also Asha. Her death was mourned. She had lived a beautiful life, with a beautiful mind. One of giving - always caring.

Tributes have been flowing from all parts of the world. Every major news outlet had coverage on her passing away, including so many from Pakistan and all over the world. 

I was worried about opening any comments section on social media. That's a different topic altogether.

For now, I feel like the continuity of generations of music lovers has been broken. Her songs, voice and versatility will live into hundreds and thousands of years. She was a legend.

Consume media or create something

This blog is a written expression of the middle in my head. The middle is just there. Can't do nothing about it. I even had a muddle deciding between nothing and anything in the previous sentence. Back to the muddle ...
In the absence of the writing, I'll end up consuming more useless content. 90% of which I can do nothing about. Or they don't even interest me, remotely.
This blog a digital footprint of my mind. I have stuff written in other places too, but those are not for public consumption.
I have managed to type so much without actually saying anything. So ...

Arnie's 6 rules of success

I was part of a leadership course at work and the introduction was done by our CEO. He showed us an old graduation ceremony in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was the key note speaker. Besides the fact that he simplified and made the concept of leadership really easy to comprehend, he was very articulate and actually inspiring. Without knowing too much about his background and his struggle, the way he told his story was entertaining. He did come across as an authentic person too.

So, what are the 6 rules of leadership?

Rule #1: Trust yourself. Figure out what makes you happy and pursue it

Rule #2: Break the rules. Following the well tread path can do you nothing in terms of leadership

Rule #3: Don't be afraid to fail. If you don't push yourself to try new things, you can't succeed

Rule #4: Don't listen to Naysayers. Most importantly, the little voice in your own head as well

Rule #5: Work your butt off. There's no substitute to hard work.

Rule #6: Giving back.

For a full video of the speech, here's the link.

https://youtu.be/uvYXMnnO2jg

Email: The most important channel for B2B marketing

As a data driven marketer, I get really excited when I see the comparison of how different channels perform. For me email is by far the most important channel. Rather than talk too many words on the topic, I found this infographic from Visually which says why it is important.