Author: Dr. Shalu Chopra
You Finally Got There. Then You Started Looking for Somewhere Else to Be.
Why success feels empty is not something anyone warned me about. The morning after I submitted my doctoral thesis, I made tea and sat by the window. That was it. Six years of work. Submitted. And I sat there waiting to feel something that matched the size of what had just happened. It did not…
I Left My Doctorate and Six Years of Teaching. Here Is What That Actually Cost.
I completed my doctorate in January 2024. Six years of teaching had come before it. Lecture halls, marked papers, students who called me by a name that carried weight. From the outside it looked like a life well-built. From the inside, near the end, it had started to feel like a room I had memorised.…
Are You Outsourcing Your Thinking? Here Is What You Lose When You Do.
There is a question worth sitting with before the next time you open an AI tool. Is this helping me think, or is it thinking instead of me? The difference seems obvious until you try to locate it in your own daily behaviour. Then it becomes considerably harder to find. Outsourcing your thinking to AI…
Before You Post: The Wall Social Media Built in Your Mind
Before you post, something has already decided for you. Will I become what I keep paying attention to? I have been sitting with that question for longer than I expected to. It arrived not during some quiet moment of reflection but in the middle of scrolling, which is where most uncomfortable questions arrive now. In…
When Stories Do the Work That Advertising Never Could
When done right, we see marketing as a catalyst for social change, subtly shifting our perceptions and challenging the status quo before we even realize it. You scroll past a jewellery ad. Something about it feels personal. You keep moving, but it stays somewhere at the back of your mind. A few minutes later, a…
The Invisible Side of Marketing
This is how subtle marketing influence shapes consumer choices now. Have you ever bought something and later wondered whether you actually needed it, or whether something quieter had already made the decision for you? Perhaps it was a piece of jewellery that appeared just often enough while you were scrolling to stay somewhere in the…
How the Shows You Watch Are Quietly Teaching You Marketing
Marketing lessons from TV shows are rarely what people expect to find. But they are there. In every episode. Not a textbook. Not a lecture. Not a course you paid for. The shows you watch late at night. The characters you follow. The lines that surface in your mind weeks later when you are doing…
What Marketing Actually Is (It Is Not What Most People Think)
What marketing actually is tends to get lost very early in the conversation. The textbooks arrive first. Segmentation. Targeting. Positioning. Brand equity. Consumer behaviour models arranged into frameworks with arrows pointing in tidy directions. And somewhere between the first framework and the fifth, the person trying to understand marketing loses the thread of the thing…
