THE
MAKING
OF A
MIND.

I was eleven when I started helping at my father's optical store. Not visiting. Not playing. Working. Selling. Watching.

Most people saw a shop. I saw a live feed of human behaviour.

I watched how people reacted the moment they tried on a frame. The way a face changed when they saw the price tag. How a mirror made them hesitate. The micro-expressions. The body shifts. How one frame made someone feel powerful, while another made them invisible to themselves.

What made them flinch. How the right words — said at the right moment — unlocked the yes.

I didn't have words like "cognitive dissonance" or "identity-based purchasing." I had real people. Real reactions. Repeated every single day for years.

People were still paying ₹100 for an hour at a cyber cafe. I was sitting with a dial-up connection watching the future arrive in real time. The obsession was immediate and total.

I enrolled in a two-month computer course and finished it in ten days. By 2002, I was in Computer Science Engineering — eighteen-hour study days, scholarship secured — because I understood exactly what I was walking toward.

In my second year of college, I picked up my brother's HTML textbook by accident. Typed Hello World into Notepad. Saved it as .html. Opened it in a browser.

Something I had made appeared on a screen. That was the moment. Not the technology — the realisation that I could build things people would actually see.

I was in the college computer lab looking up Java documentation. One keystroke wrong. Guru.com loaded — a freelancing platform I had never heard of. At 17, I read: "Be a freelancer. Earn money."

I had been building websites for fun. Now I was reading that someone on the other side of the world would pay for exactly what I was already doing. No degree required. No office. No permission. Just skill and delivery.

I applied for a project. Got it in four days. Built the website in seven. Got paid $50 — my entire month's pocket money, earned in a week, from someone I would never meet.

I kept freelancing throughout my degree. By graduation, I already had clients, skills, and an understanding that the traditional career path was optional.

After graduation I moved to Bangalore for an IT job. Stable income. Twelve-hour shifts. I automated eleven and a half hours of the work so I could think about everything else.

On weekends I was freelancing — web design, content, SEO, Google Ads, whatever a client needed. The skills kept expanding. The work kept getting more interesting. The day job kept getting less relevant.

For five years I ran both lives in parallel. Then one night in 2011 it hit me: I was spending my best energy on the thing I cared about least. I resigned the next week. Sat at home for two months. Studied, experimented, sharpened everything. Then walked into a marketing agency interview and got hired as a Digital Marketing Manager — not a junior, not a trainee. Manager. Day one.

Within three months a rival agency poached me as Head of Digital. I was managing crores in monthly ad spend across multiple businesses. By 2016 I had built a team, managed 30+ brands, and was seeing something that nobody around me was seeing.

A contact asked me to write a full academic research paper for a US PhD student. Topic: psychology and its impact on political decision-making.

I spent weeks in academic literature — persuasion, cognitive biases, voter behaviour, the mechanics of influence. And somewhere in that research, a thought stopped me completely:

The same psychological architecture that drives someone to choose a leader drives someone to choose a brand. The decision process is identical. The mechanisms are the same. And nobody in Indian marketing was talking about this.

I started testing it immediately. On ad copy. On landing pages. On how I structured campaigns. The results weren't incremental — they were structural. Conversion rates jumped. Engagement improved. Retention increased. Not because I found a better tactic, but because I was finally working at the right level.

I kept going. More experiments. More campaigns. More research — I wrote over a hundred academic papers in the years that followed, most of them on psychology, each one feeding back into real client work. By 2013 I was, as far as I could tell, the first Indian marketer to formally specialise in marketing psychology. The field didn't have a name here.

By 2016 I had run enough experiments, helped enough brands, and seen enough results to know that marketing psychology wasn't a niche — it was the missing foundation of the entire industry.

Marketers were chasing trends, optimising for platform metrics, building funnels. Nobody was asking the one question that actually mattered: what is happening inside the buyer's mind at the moment of decision?

I started a community of 85,000 people to change that conversation. I started training marketers — classroom sessions in Mumbai, then online. Then in 2017 I wrote my first book.

Google AdWords for Digital Marketing Ninjas — the simplest guide to running Google Ads that I could make. It sold 25,000 copies and became one of the top 10 Google Ads books for beginners on BookAuthority. More importantly, it taught me what a book could do for a personal brand.

In October 2017 I was invited to keynote a marketing conference in Vietnam — 3,000 people, international stage, talking about marketing psychology while everyone else was talking about campaigns and content. The audience had never heard this framing before. Neither had most of the Indian marketing industry back home — but word got back fast.

In 2018 I wrote Psycho Marketing — India's first book on psychology applied to marketing. It sold 50,000 copies. It gave me a name that stuck: The Psychomarketer.

I had the authority, the network, the international contacts. The vision was to give Indian marketers access to world-class knowledge that had previously cost thousands of dollars to attend overseas. A conference that would change the conversation in India permanently.

The event collapsed. A critical piece of the execution broke down internally at the worst possible moment — one week before we were supposed to go live. Speakers started pulling out. Tickets had to be refunded. The story spread on social media in the worst possible way. People who I had helped turned their backs. Partners disappeared. The agency I had built had to be wound down.

I lost the agency, the clients, the investors, the community — everything I had spent years building, gone in a matter of weeks.

But here is what I learned, and what I now tell every brand I work with: loss is a psychological event before it is a financial one. The identity reconstruction required after a collapse of that scale is the most brutal mental work a person can do. I understand firsthand why buyers don't come back after a trust rupture. I lived it.

COVID arrived just as I was finding footing again. The world shut down. And I used the time to do what I should have done years earlier: go deeper on the work itself instead of building around it.

I spent 2020 to 2022 back in agency roles — this time fully embedded in the D2C and e-commerce ecosystem. Managing brands, training teams, building the exact area of expertise that I wanted to own. Each engagement made the frameworks sharper. Each client result confirmed what the research already said.

By 2023 I was ready to build again — this time as an independent consultant, on my own terms, with a clarity about what I do and who I do it for that I simply didn't have the first time around.

I founded The Buyer's Mind — a marketing psychology intelligence firm. I work with D2C and e-commerce brands applying frameworks built from fifteen years of field work, academic research, and real campaign data. The results speak for themselves in the case studies.

Simmi and I are building toward a fully location-independent life. Vietnam — specifically Ho Chi Minh City, the city where I gave my first international keynote in 2017 — is where we plan to land first.

The long-term goal is an island sanctuary for abandoned dogs and horses. That one hasn't changed. Neither has the reason I do the work.