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By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 8:58:38 am

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not....

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not. It begins at the first point of contact, and in any business of real size, that point is almost never the founder. It is the assistant who manages your calendar. The sales executive who sends the first proposal. The person who handles your WhatsApp, the receptionist, the coordinator who confirms the meeting. These people speak for you every day, in your name, using your reputation, and most of them have never been told what that reputation is supposed to feel like. Many are loyal, hardworking and capable. That is not the issue. The issue is that nobody ever showed them what a first impression of this founder should feel like. Here is what a prospective client experiences. They do not separate you from your team. They cannot. To them, the speed of a reply is how seriously you take them. The tone of the first email is the tone of your leadership. A proposal with a spelling error, a late response, a careless "will check and let you know" becomes evidence about the person at the top. If this is how the organisation presents itself while trying to win my business, they reason, this is how it will treat me once I have signed. And they never tell you. They simply go quiet. The deal that stalls after a promising first call. The partner who becomes "busy". The client who chooses a competitor and offers a reason that has nothing to do with the real one. Across a year, that is every enquiry that stalled, every proposal left unanswered, every introduction that never became a meeting. This is a personal brand problem, not a staffing one. A founder can spend years refining how they present in a room and still lose the room before they enter it, because the impression was formed by someone else, in a conversation the founder was never part of and never heard about. The founders who avoid this are not the ones with the most polished staff. They are the ones who have made their brand legible to the people around them. Their team knows how the founder speaks, what the business stands for, what warmth looks like in a reply, how a delay should be explained and how a client should feel in the first thirty seconds. The team is not following a script. They are carrying a standard, because someone took the time to define it. When did you last experience your own business the way a stranger does? Not a test call arranged with your team's knowledge. A real one. Send a first enquiry from a number nobody recognises. Notice how long it takes to be answered, what the tone is, and whether you would want to do business with whoever replied. Then ask yourself honestly whether that person sounds like you, and whether you would be proud to be represented that way. If the answer is uncomfortable, it is worth acting on now. Every week of that experience is a week someone forms a verdict about you without your knowledge. Your personal brand is not only what you say. It is everything said on your behalf. If you have a suspicion about how your business is being experienced before you ever walk in, that suspicion deserves a direct, focused brand consultation, not a casual chat. Book yours here: https://www.calendly.com/divyaaadvaani/founder-brand-audit — Divyaa Advaani, Personal Branding Strategist (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

Beyond Palaces and Pomp

Writer: Smitha Balachandran
Smitha Balachandran
Aug 18
3 min read

Immortalizing a literary work which juxtaposes art and history, culminating in the creation of a masterpiece is no easy task. But a historian of Manu S. Pillai’s caliber has achieved this on a monumental scale in False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma.


Pillai describes the travels of the painter Ravi Varma through five princely states. He demonstrates how these maharajas, far from being frivolous despots consumed by lust and luxury, were involved in industrialization, potentates who funded nationalists and even engaged in good governance. They maintained a pragmatic, sometimes even highly assertive, bordering on confrontational relationship with the British.


Credit must be given to the very pivotal role played by the Dewans of several of these monarchs in states such as Travancore, Pudukottai, and Baroda in spearheading very far-reaching and impressive reforms in these states. Stalwarts such as T. Madhava Rao and Seshiah Sastri made improvements in education, legislation, public works, medicine, public health, agriculture, and were instrumental in clearing the public debts of these states. The Dewans had the onerous task of reconciling the power and supervision of the British with the genuine requirements of the states and modernizing them in a way so as not to offend the caste and religious sentiments of the people and the kings.


The author begins with a description of the rulers of Travancore: Uthram Tirunal (brother of the famed Swathi Tirunal) was an anglophile—well versed in European customs, literature and a fond collector of European art.


Ravi Varma, who flourished for a long time in Travancore, came from a family hailing from a village called Kilimanoor which had, for generations supplied husbands to the kingdom’s matrilineal princesses. “The great Martanda Varma, the founder of Travancore, was the issue of this alliance.”


The aristocratic painter flourished in the Travancore court under Uthram Tirunal, and his elder son Ayilyam Tirunal. However, due to a feud between Ayilyam and his younger brother Vishakham, when Vishakham acceded the throne in 1880, Ravi Varma was obliged to leave the palace to take up an assignment in Pudukkottai state.


Baroda was a state whose adopted ruler Sayaji Rao not only effectively governed the kingdom, but supported the abolition of the caste system, the emergent nationalist movement, and the diversion of resources to orphanages, boarding houses for backward caste children and scholarships (in the latter he was guided by Jotirao Phule). B. R. Ambedkar’s studies were thus supported by the Baroda government. Sayaji Rao’s vision for a reformed Hindu society found expression even in Ravi Varma’s art.


Mention is made of how in Mysore where Ravi Varma spent some time, most of the rulers carried out a non-confrontational, balancing act with the British. The latter had taken over the economic and political bureaucracy of the state in the late 19th century due to gross mismanagement by Krishnaraja Wadiyar III. Apart from strict control by the British, a program of large-scale industrialization of the state was carried out. All this not only drained the state exchequer, it also diverted funds from the rural areas of Mysore to the privileged urban areas.


Lastly, the author chronicles the sojourn of the painter in Udaipur, capital of Mewar. Fateh Singh, ruler of Udaipur, locked horns with the British due to his policies of resisting modernization, ignoring instructions from his colonial superiors, and to rule autocratically despite this approach creating unending problems.


Pillai’s descriptions of the princes, their consorts, their progeny and powerful palace courtiers are deeply penetrating. Added to the vivid, spellbinding literary portrayal of these characters are pictures of them painted by the celebrated Ravi Varma. Further, by focusing on the portraits and their significance, both from the aesthetic and human angle, the writer literally brings these personages and details of their existence to life.


The book is redolent with anecdotes, palace intrigues, and examples of interference by the British on various occasions in the states described. On numerous occasions, through the British Resident in the state, the Dewan and the Viceroy of India, and the help of a certain section of the palace coterie (in many cases the ranis or women who were the mothers to the heirs of the throne) political, economic and legislative matters were transformed and controlled to suit the needs of the colonial power.


Pillai’s palette in creating this book is akin to that of Ravi Varma’s while painting his compositions: themes which take on hues of various kinds—hues that are interesting, mesmerizing, sophisticated and extremely absorbing.


(The writer is a Mumbai based educator.)

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