Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India through 50 Years of Advertising

by Ambi Parameswaran

I was speaking with Krishna Ramkumar of Avanti Fellows – co-founded with Akshay Saxena – which was one of the winners of the Tata Salt Desh Ka Namak Award, 2014. This young man had a plum job with Boston Consulting Group in New York after he had completed his BTech from IIT Bombay. He gave that up after three years to realize his dream of creating affordable coaching for engineering admissions. He had raised some first-round funding and was confident about his future. I spoke with him at length about the risk he had taken with his career and how people of my generation did not dare take such a risk. He had a simple answer to my words of admiration, ‘Your generation did not have a choice. You were lucky to get a good job. You could not give that up and there were no angel investors waiting to fund your dream. Our generation is different. We can always go back to our old employer, who will take us back quite happily. In fact, even if my venture fails, it would be seen as a positive on my bio-data. So I don’t think there is any downside to my decision. In your generation, it was different.’