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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.)

Democracy, Dravidian-Style

Correspondent
Nov 3, 2025
3 min read

M.K. Stalin’s cynical campaign against the Election Commission reeks of political theatre, not principle.

Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu

In Chennai’s political theatre, few performers relish the spotlight as much as M.K. Stalin. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, scion of the Dravidian dynasty that has ruled the state for much of the past half-century, now casts himself as democracy’s last defender. His latest move was to summon a grand all-party meeting railing against the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. This act has been billed as a crusade to protect the voting rights of Tamil Nadu’s people.


The resolution that emerged from this conclave of the like-minded thundered against the SIR as “anti-democratic” and a “direct attack” on Tamil Nadu’s electorate. Stalin and his chorus have warned that should the EC fail to halt the process, they would march to the Supreme Court to rescue democracy from Delhi’s grasp.


The irony is almost theatrical. The SIR, a bureaucratic revision of electoral rolls underway across a dozen states and union territories, is an attempt to ensure accuracy. Yet in Tamil Nadu, Stalin would have people believe that it is the reincarnation of the Emergency. His allies denounce it as a stealthy National Register of Citizens.


If Stalin were truly concerned about constitutional propriety, he might have begun by inviting all major parties to his so-called ‘all-party’ meeting. Instead, both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the AIADMK - his chief rivals - were conspicuously excluded. A leader who sermonises about inclusivity cannot bear dissent at the conference table, it seems.


For a man whose government faces an ever-thickening fog of corruption allegations, the timing of this manufactured moral outrage is convenient. The SIR provides Stalin with a distraction, a fresh villain in Delhi against whom he can rally the faithful. Actor-turned-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam dubbed the meeting a “political stunt” while pointedly noting that while Kerala’s government had passed a formal Assembly resolution against the SIR, Stalin’s DMK has done nothing of the sort.


The DMK’s language betrays its motives. In public, it warns that the SIR will allegedly snatch away voting rights. In private, it fears that an updated voter roll may loosen its grip on certain constituencies by pruning inflated or duplicated entries that quietly serve the ruling machine. Stalin’s feigned indignation is, in essence, an admission of political insecurity. A party confident of its public support would welcome a clean electoral roll.


Tamil Nadu’s long Dravidian tradition of populism has thrived on paranoia of Delhi, of Hindi imposition, and of northern interference in general. Against this backdrop, Stalin’s inflation of grievance frames any administrative action from Delhi as an attack on Tamil pride.


What makes this pantomime particularly galling is the DMK’s own record. This is a party that has never hesitated to manipulate institutions when in power, whether by bending local bodies to partisan ends or using state media to amplify its mythology. Its outrage over electoral rolls rings hollow from a party that has spent decades perfecting the art of patronage politics and bureaucratic capture. In Tamil Nadu, the ruling party’s idea of democracy has always meant democracy on its own terms.


Stalin’s resolution will, of course, find no shortage of allies. Every small outfit that thrives under the DMK’s shadow will join the chorus. They will all speak of defending democracy while ensuring that the only democracy that survives is their own.


The episode exposes the hollow heart of Dravidian politics which is a perpetual victimhood narrative that turns every administrative process into a battlefield for political theatre. Stalin is less the guardian of democracy than its most flamboyant performer. His outrage over the SIR is not a stand for liberty but a smokescreen for fear.


If there is indeed a ‘murder of democracy’ in Tamil Nadu, it lies not in the Election Commission’s paperwork but in the cynical manipulation of democratic language by those who have long mistaken power for principle.

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