Owning My True Identity
I’ll admit it.
For a long time I was ashamed of my essential Hindu identity
All of my school & college was in Anglophilic, western-centric education
The only motto during education was to study hard, get good grades & get a great job
All my cultural cues were a heady mix of American pop culture served on a platter of European Arthouse influences
I knew nothing about great Indian playwrights like Kalidasa or Bharavi. But you could wake me up in the middle of the night & I can tell you that the TV guide was wrongly addressed to “Ms Chanandler Bong” ( I can also reel off all the other questions that Ross asks the in the Girls vs Boys quiz for the apartment)
And by the the time I became an adult working in an American company, my essential true Indian self was well and truly buried under pinstripes and taken out maybe once a year on Diwali
To the point of being ashamed & apologetic to be proudly Hindu
Until a few years ago through a series of life-altering events, I rediscovered my Srivaishnava Sampradaya
In this re-discovery process, I realized that I was very lucky to have parents who were themselves deeply immersed & knowledegable in SriVaishnava way of life. Growing up they had given me basics by their own example while giving me a surprising amount of freedom even as a child to follow them or not !
And was astonished to find that my Sampradaya was a greater source of inspiration and energy than any Tesseract
And so I decided to to completely own my true Identity & gave myself permission to to do so
A simple but powerful illustration of this is my decision to wear the Sri Vaishnava Tilak prominently on my forehead every single day & in every situation, at work and elsewhere. I will write more on this game-changing habit later
In the last few years, bringing my authentic Hindu self to work has become a source of competitive advantage too
-In making critical business decisions
– Of where to play & how to Win
– In creating authentic, useful content for consumers
– In our brand semiotics
This path has created meaningfully differentiation for the Krya brand in the minds of our TG
Particularly it gives me great joy to align our branding at Krya with Indic culture. This makes a great deal of business sense too as our products are based on Ayurvedic first principles.
To illustrate this point :
With over 120+ products at Krya , we need to create sub-brands for each niche within the larger framework of skin & hair care
In the first part of our evolution, we chose functional english words to create sub-brands
But in recent years, we discovered the joy of selecting culturally appropriate words and cues in our sub-brand nomenclature
Right at the beginning of the Srimad Valmiki Ramayana , Sage Narada describes the perfect man, i,e Lord Ram through 16 qualities. One of qualities is Dyuti-maan (द्युतिमान्), which describes the briliance/effulgence of Lord SriRama
The study of these shlokas sparked the idea to name our skin care range for hyperpigmentation as “Dyuti”. A memorable sub-brand name which clearly conveys the product benefit. Win-Win
The success of the Dyuti range helped create a valuable template for all the sub-brands that we launched subsequently
This was just a small illustration of the myriad possibilities of how we can we be successfully Indic at work too
It does take some work to understand yourself better , in order to bring your authentic self to work
There has never been a greater time than now to do so nor a greater need to as well
So go ahead & give yourself permission to do just that