About Me

Born on a sweltering summer day in May, in a metropolitan city in India, I was named after a Hindu God in an unceremonious gathering. At the age of 7, I gathered kids around and told them unbelievable stories, yet they stared into my tattered notebook where I sketched the scenes of my stories. The dramatic characters were mere stick figures that weren’t angular. Or dramatic enough. Yet they looked in awe. Stories and visuals. Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, and Shakespeare kept me company at the school library. I wasn’t mature enough to grasp all of the wisdom in their language. I wasn’t that passionate to feel through their emotions. But I consumed every word as if it were mine. The romance in words; simple and complex. I consumed it all. I continued to write pages and pages of content in school and college. Commerce, Economics, Organizational behavior, and more. All those hand-written pages of content are still stacked somewhere in the attic, owing to the days gone by when more content was considered good content. The first company that I worked for was no different. Big, fat, and voluminous User Manuals were the norms to rate a good quality document and a better performing technical writer. The more I wrote, the more I delivered. And I wrote a lot. Valid or valuable, I didn’t care. And then, the more I wrote, the more it wore me out. Writing without purpose. The content that was never consumed. The information overload that the customers shied away from had me finally question the purpose of every written word. Why am I writing what I’m writing and who am I writing for? Those were just precursors to all of that were to follow and lead me to various countries and workplaces. Sometimes I had to be a content analyst to understand what was at my disposal. Other times I had to be a project coordinator to ensure I lead my team to success by delivering quality content that had a return on investment. I thought I had mastered the art of technical writing. Simplifying lives. Users can accomplish their tasks with my instructional manuals. That wide grin didn’t last long when my wide eyes finally noticed how technical, long, and inconsistent the on-screen content was. Why write satisfying User Manuals when the UI could have done most of that job? The UI had one job! To allow the user to accomplish a task. And if the user couldn’t accomplish it there, they were leaving. They weren’t looking for the User Manual always. They were just leaving. I knew UX writing was now an integral part of my journey. I paid more attention to every interface that I was interacting with. I began visualizing the possibilities of redesigning the screen by providing content that made more sense. Digestible content. Content that wasn’t ambiguous. I wanted to get better at saying more by writing less. Simple, plain, and concise text that everyone can understand. I understood the importance of a Content Style Guide. Why it existed and why it can easily guide me and the team towards a consistent voice and tone in all our content. This wasn’t confined only to UX writers’ team, spanning across multiple teams within the organization - business analysts, visual and interaction designers, product owners, marketing, customer support, engineers, and even legal and compliance. It became imperative that a good Content Strategy was essential to tie them all together - the delivery of good and digestible content in coordination with various teams while staying aligned with the company’s voice and tone. That’s when I began another journey as a Content Strategist. Having been a Technical Writer, UX Writer, Project Manager, Organizer, Planner, and simply a Learner, helped me evolve into a Content Strategist.