I build communications functions, from field-level storytelling to organisation-wide governance. I head a team of four across corporate communications, content, design, and digital media at SBI Foundation, supporting communications for 200+ projects nationally.
I grew up moving, with an early childhood in a small village in Nepal, then Kerala. Along the way I picked up Nepali, Maithili, Malayalam, and Hindi, not out of academic interest but necessity: speaking someone's own language was how you made friends and were let in. That stayed with me. A second, less obvious influence came from watching how oral storytellers wove scripture and history into a single, persuasive narrative. It was my first real lesson in how a story gets built.
Journalism was the natural landing point: language, advocacy, and creativity in one place. At Pondicherry University I picked up the technical side too, including video, editing, and camera work, a deliberate bet that multi-skilled people would always be more employable.
That combination led me to the SBI Youth for India Fellowship and a placement with Gram Vikas in Odisha, where I spent time documenting rural migration, farming, and community health. Later, I helped train over 300 field staff to tell their own stories, rather than relying on a small central team to catch everything.
Since 2023, I've been building the Marketing & Communications function at SBI Foundation from the ground up: governance frameworks, agency management, content pipelines, and the institutional writing CSR work runs on. I now head a team of four across corporate communications, content, design, and digital media, managing a multi-crore annual budget and the Foundation's empanelled agency relationships.
What I still carry from those years is a deep sense of being grounded: authentic storytelling is born from proximity, from actually being able to go to a village and speak with people directly. That, and the holistic experience of doing nearly everything myself back then, writing, photography, video, strategy, which gave me a 360-degree view of the process that I still rely on.
This site is where the two halves meet: the field storytelling that got me here, and the strategic, structural work I do now.
Moving from Gram Vikas to SBI Foundation meant shifting from doing to managing. At Gram Vikas, I was the one documenting stories on the ground. Leading communications for a national foundation with over 200 projects across India meant my job became building the systems, team, and agency partners that let the organization communicate at scale. Having done the work myself, writing, photography, video, strategy, is what lets me manage specialists today: I understand what goes into each vertical because I've done it.
I think of the sector's real problem as one of attention, not funding. An NGO today isn't just competing with the organization next door for CSR budgets, it's competing with a content creator's viral reel and the entire entertainment ecosystem. If you can't capture attention, you don't exist. That's why I believe in a "communications-first" approach: planning communications with the same seriousness, strategy, and budget as the programmatic work itself, not as an afterthought bolted on at the end.
The era of the polished, professionally shot documentary as the pinnacle of authentic storytelling is over. A story told on a smartphone by the person who lived it is often more powerful than one told about them by a communications team. Our job has shifted from being creators to being enablers, giving people the tools and confidence to tell their own truth.
I tell people starting out in this field to think like a film director, not a crew member: you don't need to be the best editor or writer, you need a working knowledge of everything and a clear vision for how the pieces fit together. And the job goes beyond external posts and press releases. A communications lead is also a "Cultural Officer," a guardian of the internal culture, because a team that's proud of where it works becomes your most powerful brand message.
SBI Foundation's communications ran as scattered activity, with no shared ownership model. I built the governance from zero: an Ownership Note, a RACI spanning 47 functions across 5 roles, a Master SOP with 20 sections and 12 annexures, and the agency and content systems that now run on a team of four with a multi-crore annual budget.
Decentralised storytelling by training the field team itself. It's the origin of a philosophy that still shapes how I build teams today.
Read the case study →Managed parallel PR, Digital, and Creative RFP cycles end-to-end, with formal approval to MD, COO, and CFO.
Read the case study →Instagram crossed 1 lakh followers too, all at zero paid spend.
Read the case study →
Mohan Majhi's Family (2020)
Purna Majhi's Story (2020)
TWO ENDS — Pondicherry University postgraduate documentary (2020)
