Heads up: This story goes way back, so buckle up.

I was 11 when I got on stage, took one look at the 500 or so students sitting in the audience, and immediately started crying (in the howling, can barely breathe, I’m turning blue kind of way).

It was a new school, new faces, and a public speaking topic I didn’t quite resonate with.

For context, in India, we have elocution competitions in which children are required to recite an 800-word essay on a topic that the judge picks. We have 20 days to prepare for it, and on the day of, we’re expected to recite it before a large audience (students, teachers, the principal, everyone.)

Not quite the impression I was hoping to make. Over the next few years, that embarrassing moment stuck with me. I was prepared, public speaking had never been a problem, and the topic was like any other — bland. (side note: this em-dash isn’t representative of AI writing this, I promise.)

Eventually, I realized that reading out what someone else wrote was never going to be my thing. I needed to be passionate about what I was saying to actually want to say it out loud.

3 years passed and 8th grade rolled around. My parents decided it was a good time to let me write my essays without parental supervision, and I took complete advantage of that opportunity.

The topic that year was something along the lines of how humans were destroying the climate and society. So I sat down, and I wrote. I wrote about climate change, rapid industrialization, sexism, bullying, beauty standards and everything my 14 year old brain thought was wrong with the world.

Apart from the cheers and prizes that that passionate 5 minute speech fetched me, I realized I was capable of rallying people around things. It brought conversations up that my otherwise conservative convent school was afraid to talk about. Unknowingly, that was one of the first few things that pushed me down the path that led me here.

The older I got, the more I realized I had a natural affinity towards some subjects over others. Art, literature and math were my favourites and I truly enjoyed learning.

When it came to picking a school, 3 career paths stood before me: psychology, engineering or business. I liked studying people and their brains, so psychology was my first choice. The school I wanted to go to had high cut-offs I couldn’t beat, and if it wasn’t the best school, I simply didn’t want to go. So I dropped the idea.

I got enrolled in an engineering school and realized on day 1 that it was a mass manufacturing factory focused on minting students out that knew everything in theory but nothing practically (this is the commentary on how engineering school mainly works in India, not on how all engineers are brain-less zombies. They aren’t.) So I decded to switch to business school.

Business school was kind to me. It was interesting, fun and practical. We were taught from real-life case studies and I really enjoyed my time there. Because of my interest in math and people, I ended up choosing marketing as my major.

In college, I did 9 internships to figure out what I wanted to do with life. I started out as a writer, freelanced for a bit, did a product internship, joined a UN-affiliated NGO to run events, and finally, decided to become a B2B SaaS marketing specialist.

So if you ask me why I love marketing, there’s no simple answer to it. Maybe it’s because the one embarrassing middle school experience made me realize I liked talking and writing, or maybe it’s because I liked math and literature in school, or because way too many people have told me I’m good with words, or it could be because I couldn’t get into psychology school.

Irrespective of the why, all my paths have led me here, and I feel like a marketer is who I was supposed to be. It’s creative, dynamic, analytical, maddening, and it keeps you on your toes. At the end of a long hard day of work, it feels gratifying. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why I love marketing.

My inbox is always open, you can contact me with the contact form here or with the details below:

Email: sanghavidrishti.work@gmail.com