Finding joy & time while working in Media & Marketing

Namashkar, welcome to another episode of the Conscious Entrepreneurship Podcast. Stories about inward journeys and the infinite possibilities that open up when you start living life consciously. I am Manisha and today's guest is a veteran in media and marketing who started her CE journey in 2020. In today's episode we learn about her journey before and after CE. So Harini, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Amarisha. To start off, can you tell us more about what you do and how you started on this journey? So I'm a media and marketing professional with about 25+ years of experience. I began my life with educational television. I moved along, I did other things. I got heavily into production, creating documentaries, feature films, TV shows, that kind of stuff. I ran my own company for about 10 more years and then I moved back into mainstream media with the Stinton News. The news really, really scarred me. And then I came back to education all over again. I look at Mark Combe for a large science communication, a gattish communication. I have a second profession which is teaching. I love teaching as an I teach at Booth of Degree at the Mastersland. I teach about the impact of a media on society. I teach about the impact of technology on society. The other part of my life is I adore dogs. I spend a lot of time being the main slave to my lab. So tell us a bit about your journey as an entrepreneur. So I think it may be very honest, the term entrepreneur is kind of misleading. Everybody expects this person working alone in a garage who comes up with ideas. My first job was with C and we were encouraged as pioneers in satellite and cable communication at that point of time to act as entrepreneurs. I'm up with ideas, see those ideas through to fraction and so on and so forth. For me, I've worked as an entrepreneur both within organizations as an employee. And for me, the big difference is, in one, I had a steady source of income. And the other, it was a fair amount of risk on your own, but I still had a steady source of income. I'm an entrepreneur in my head. I like solving problems and seeing if I can produce product services that solve problems. So my conscious entrepreneurship journey began with my step into the path of consciousness that was in 2020 at the high to the pandemic. So if you knew me before, the best way I can describe myself was I was this extremely tensile oil spring ready to jump at any point of time. And what you see me now is this much more relaxed person who's very comfortable with me. That doesn't mean I'm complacent. And I think that that's a fair distinction that needs to be made. I think that before I was completely warmed up, everything was either fight or fight, mostly fight. I was completely battle-ready, I was completely battle-hard. And I've approached everybody as maybe not a foe, but a potential threat. Again, I've worked in the media and if your idea doesn't get purchased, somebody else is will. So you are looking at a fair intense amount of competition on an ongoing basis. So that was me for the large part of my life. I'm hoping that it's not me now. Because I simply don't see the point of it anymore. I think it's so much more fun to smile and collaborate rather than compete with it. Can you tell us a little more about that environment of how things work in the media world? I think that it's very numbers-driven. And I think that we need to be very careful of anything that is so numbers-driven. So for example, if you're looking at two television channels and you are saying that, I have at 830 slot, you the audience, you as an audience, can only watch any one of them. Right. And therefore, it is a good-throat competition to be a year and a year to be able to get through. So if you look at a lot of the shows right now, there are other eta singers who can out-screen each other, who can be more violent than one another. Because ultimately, when I have a show about murder, how do I talk murder? I talk murder by more violent. And then I talk more violent murder by more violent. And so on and so forth. It becomes a very vicious cycle. People don't like watching nice things. Don't nice programs, nice shows to work. Like a Tarak Medagachak, Chashmah or a good life or any of these. These are essentially nice shows that make you think. But in general, a dexter would probably get more reruns than some nice story about this nice person. Although most of our lives are nice, we like to see the edgy part of the universe that we don't come across. Now, when you look at news where I spent about three years of my life, it's the same thing. You don't want to talk about the innate kindness of people. You don't want to talk about the innate niceness of people. Because that's not new. Okay. That's, that's, you want to talk about the innate viciousness of people. You want to talk about the innate brutality of them. And again, how do you talk that? So over a period of time, what you will also find is a lot of us in the media. Just, I would say burnout. I don't think what burnout is in terms of profession. I think emotionally die. There are very few people with 40 years of experience in the media. I mean, there are people of course. But you generally, at some point of time, you look back and you say, "I mean, why really need to do this? Do I need to do this?" I mean, is this really worth it? Okay. And I wish I had this idea maybe 10 years, 15 years earlier. Because I think that a lot of media houses are not working with purpose. They confuse profit with purpose. And I think that's what you see. Not just in India, but across the world. It's, it's not an India-specific problem. It's a worldwide problem. How do I cut costs? How do I maximize profits? How do I make sure people are addicted to me? So can you tell us a bit about how your thought process is evolved since consciousness? I think that what we need to do is to stop confusing and collating abundance with stockpiling. For me, abundance is the sense of joy. Okay. So I'll give you a simple example. You have 24 hours a day. How much news can somebody reach? How much entertainment can one look at? Okay. Most of us, it's one hour, one at a half hours, two hours. Now, the moment you start saying, "I want a person to be glued to me and me. Me, me, me, there, an entire window into the world." That's when you start going edgy. I think that maybe one of the things that people need to do is to step back and ask, "What can we do that's optimum and good?" As opposed to, "What can we do that is terrible and bad?" I'm hoping that with things moving away from linear television to a OTT platform and people making their choices as opposed to being stuck to a fixed time table. People will be more conscious in terms of what they watch. But I think a lot of things are also about what can I do that attracts eyeballs instantly. What can I do that shocks people into reacting? How can I make sure my shares go up or my likes go up or my engagement go up? And that makes people hateful. Because like I said earlier, people don't want to say, "For example, I wish you a good morning and a happy life." Nobody apart from you and me will comment on that. If I put out ugly picture there, which kind of says that this is what's going to happen to you today. Like a bunch of crores of pigeon sitting on your head. Suddenly it will go by. If only for people to abuse you, if only people to say, "Ah, fantastic, how funny you are." The edgy, the gritty, the ugly, the nasty, tends to kind of overwhelm our lives because we are also becoming more and more performative. Now this is the mix of the media and this and social media. We don't just get polarized, we don't just get ag/o/mainstream media. People are also kind of distributed further with social media. So it becomes a compound viciousism. And we are seeing this everywhere. We are seeing this in the US. We are seeing this in India. We are seeing this in the Middle East. We are seeing the entire ability of people to kind of look at each other and snarl instead of looking at each other and smile. Now when you look at consciousness, the first thing that you would ask yourself is, why am I doing this? Okay, is there more to my life than just making people angry at you? Is there more to my life than just making people hate you? Nobody is saying you need to lie. Nobody is saying that you need to hold your true. Nobody is saying that you shouldn't express yourself. But can you say the same thing differently? Can you say something in a way where the person you are aiming your criticism at becomes a collaborator in changing things rather than becomes an enemy in trying to confront you? And I think that's been the way I've become by a major mind shift since I began working the part of consciousness. Because for me, the very fact that two people, two people in a studio and get them to scream at each other is the best way to. You know, it's a very interesting way to kind of get eyeballs in place. It's the most normal thing in the media. Now I'm looking at the media and saying, "Why don't you do things where people where you start conversations, where people actually from different parts?" For example, left wing and right wing. I mean, ultimately, you all have to live in the same country or the same city or the same world. It's not like there's a separate planet for left wing girls and a separate planet for right wing. So, I mean, you have to make up or make do with each other. Yeah, I'm talking. How about talking with each other? Who about talking without screaming? Is that so difficult? One of the things that struck me with the conscious entrepreneurship, how do you look at activities that are high payoff and low pay? And how do you not focus your energies on things that can be done right now and you need to do it? Otherwise the world will collapse. How do you stop focusing on that? Coming from this comes the second thing, which is this that I have learnt to deal with periods where there is nothing except thinking time. Okay, and sometimes what happens is that when we are in a mode where we are constantly either attacking or sense being attacked. Okay? The tendency for you to pull back and think and have a plan of action reduces trust. Yeah. So for me, the entire thing of being using into a world of bold in that sense of the world, you know, emptiness where you can actually think, I think that's something that is being phenomenal because for the first time in my professional career, I have time to think. So I have always devoured information. I have been unsated as far as information is concerned. I will just slap it up from anywhere. It is almost like lots of data chunks sitting in my brain. Now I have the ability to process it and maybe applied or maybe discarded. And I think the second part of it, which is equally good is understanding the fact that you are not just a professional. You are also a person. So for the longest time in Asia, I define myself. If you ask me who I was, I would say I am a media professional, and I do business. Now you see me. If I describe myself, I say that, you know, I do many things and I enjoy all of them. So I define myself so much by my profession that I actually neglected everything else around. I took my family, my friends, my pets, my everybody for granted. I think that I just assumed that they will understand. I assumed that they would know that I loved them. I did not think that they were important enough for me to share information. Oh, will they? How will my mother understand what I am doing and do a kind of thing? I think it was also the thing that, you know, what I am doing is super specialised and so fantastic. And so, you, your mother, mortals will never get it. So that they did share arrogance. Now I have discussions about random stuff with people at home and it's just made me so much happier. I think happiness. A better time management and prioritisation leading to happiness. I think the other thing, Minesha, is that a lot of us, right, at least from the nine people who began working in the late 90s and little 1000s. We were led to believe that this entire happiness thing is a myth, that it's stuff that happens in the movies and it's meant to sell our G's cards and you know, what really gets you happiness is success and success was defined as career success and ownership success. You know, I own this. I own that. I own our house. I own a book. I own diamonds. Whatever else. So the media plays such a big role in selling the story that success means the chase, right? You just put it so beautifully that there is most of the things we are chasing actually are purely utilitarian. Money, the way it started, it was purely utilitarian and our entire existence has become about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that we put premium on the wrong things. It's stuff that appears to do us kids like take sweets to our neighbors, house on their own. A lot of that has come down drastically. Okay, we do it for our friends. We don't know our neighbors. Okay, so when we talk about our community, we are not part of a community. We are part of something in the cloud, okay, which we occasionally meet up in between lots of Instagram, likes and Facebook, likes and whatever else. I think that's something that we will probably need to address. You know, life is not a Kodak movement and even Kodak calls it a moment. It doesn't call it a dire life type. Okay. So, just for those picture perfect moments, I think that is something that we will probably have to look at again. Let's come closer to home. What changes have you started to make within your teams? I think the first thing is the level of is to be able to understand and appreciate that if you want excellence and success and control and ambition, so do your teams, that you can't, like, it's something that we learn in filmmaking. You can't be in every frame of the film, okay, that if you mess around too much with your camera man, you will get a really lousy out. I think in corporate life, those boundaries aren't good. Okay, at least in the media. I think that one of the things that I've been able to do after this Kodjasautroponational program is to be able to give people their own, is to be able to work with teammates to understand how they operate and therefore be able to give them their own sphere of work without interfering. I think that's for me a whole new thing because I have been always very hands on and hands on can often mean interference. But I think that the bigger thing here is how do you let people make mistakes, how do you not stand there like that? And he's saying that, "Opo girega mirko bhaja na pathe na ne ne ne kirega na gireme." "Op girega uthega aur fair bhaagye." You know, so that, I think that's become a huge big change in the way I think I operate. So I know a bit about your journey as an entrepreneur, right? Any specific incidents that you can think of that, you know, after you did CEP that come to mind that, "Okay, you know, I would have done this differently back then." When we started our business, right, we looked at it as a way of not handling corporate idiocy. We didn't start our business because we wanted to bring value or make a difference or anything that my true, if I was going to be truthful, if I look back, I think that all of us wanted to start that business because we wouldn't have to listen to really bad orders. So I think that if I had to relearn that space, I would probably, when we were starting the business, go with a purpose which was far more useful than I don't want to listen to ideas. Because ultimately when you go down that path, I don't want to listen to idiots. One fine day you discover you are that idiot. Okay, so that pick ups a huge problem. I think that was the first part. I think the second part is this that I told you in my journey, I started with education and ended up in education. Okay. And one of the reasons I quit my company at that point of time was that they decided to shut down the education business. And I think that I would have stuck to education. Okay, rather than look at entertainment, rather than look at nonfiction, rather than compete in a pool I had no clue about and I had no interest. And we did that again for the same thing, prophets and blah, blah. And when your heart is not in it, so all three of us, we were all, we were all people who like the documentary film. We like the serious program. We like the program that looked at impact of media or technology or liberalization on society. Okay, we like the serious stories. But I think that somewhere we got lost saying that if we need to make lots of money, we can't do it down this path. We need to take the path that everybody else is taking. So I think that maybe if I've done the consciousness program then this may not have happened. I think that we were stuck to our original purpose, key home quality programming. And let's find that gap which is this entire set of nonfiction content that we like consuming, that we like watching. I think we moved away from it. And I think that I was probably largely to blame on it. To wrap up, if you had one tip for entrepreneurs, what would that be? Ask yourself, why am I doing this? I think most of us don't ask for something. What are we going to do to make a business? Why? We will make money. How can we make money? So why are you doing this? I think I asked yourself that question. This question of why am I doing this? It feels so loaded, it feels so scary. I think we need to ask this. Even if at your first pass your list says, I want to buy a Ferrari car. It doesn't all have to be a sort of a wonderful, beautiful or conscious. Even if it is unconscious, even if it is this that I want to be able to send my parents on holiday, put it down. Because if you don't have those things to take off, what are you doing this? Getting valuation and being on the, you know, New York Stock Exchange, great idea. But start with the moment, then put down why are you doing it? The example you used was so perfect. The reason we are so scared of why you're doing this often just comes down to because I want certain things right. And we are so afraid of our wants and desires. I think that the line some year used once was, we are afraid of our own dreams. Put it down. I think that if you not going to put it down. There's a lovely, I think there's a lovely song from one of the Hollywood musicals, think of a South Pacific. It says, "If you don't have a dream, how are you going to have a dream come true?" So even if it's a Ferrari, a Ferrari is a dream, there's nothing wrong with the dream. Yeah, okay, it's wrong if you think it's wrong. Okay, it's wrong if you rob a bank or if you rob some poor people and kind of buy that it's wrong. But if your company has done well, if you earn the profits, if you have paid your taxes, if you have money left or when you're buying that Ferrari, good luck to you. You should be very proud of the fact that you're managed really or whatever else that you designed. I think put down why you're starting a business, why you're doing something. Wonderful. Thanks, Arunee. This has been such an amazing conversation. It's been fun being here. It's, you really made me think and I've been enjoying the city so far. This was a story of Arunee and her personal evolution as a leader in the dynamic world of media and marketing. Is it possible to work in media and be purpose driven? What are the challenges one faces when doing so? Do share your thoughts in this episode's comments. Thank you for listening. 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