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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.)

Incineration to Plasma Pyrolysis: Machines That Safeguard Public Health

Writer: Dr. Sanjay Joshi
Dr. Sanjay Joshi
Aug 29, 2025
3 min read

Effective treatment is the shield that prevents biomedical waste from turning into a public health disaster.

In the earlier stages of biomedical waste management, we saw how waste is first segregated into colour-coded bags at the point of generation and then carefully collected and transported under strict safety measures. These steps are vital to prevent accidental exposure and to ensure that different categories of waste reach their respective processing streams without mixing. But segregation and transport alone do not neutralise the dangers hidden in biomedical waste.


It is now the operator’s job to further ‘treat’ this waste as per the protocols and specifications described in the BMW Management Rules of 1998 and 2016.


Treatment is essential to get rid of all the deadly infectious pathogens that are lingering in the tissues and fleshy parts, amputated parts, materials soaked in the blood and other body fluids, etc. Such pathogens that have been lying dormant in these organs and tissues for a long time might be waiting eagerly for an opportunity to spring back and invade and infect the healthy human body. So before they get such an opportunity, destroy them! That is the whole purpose of treatment at CBWTF. There are different types of equipment and machines used for treatment. The following is a brief introduction to these machines.


Incinerator: Incineration is a thermal process that transforms medical waste into inorganic, incombustible matter, thus leading to a significant reduction in waste volume and weight. The main purpose of any medical waste incinerator is to eliminate pathogens from waste and reduce the waste to ashes. However, certain types of medical waste, such as pharmaceutical or chemical waste, require higher temperatures for total destruction.


Medical waste incinerators typically operate at high temperatures between 900 and 1200°C. Developing countries like India usually use low-cost, high-temperature incinerators of simple design for the stabilisation of healthcare waste. The most reliable and predominant medical waste incineration technology is pyrolytic incineration, also known as controlled air incineration or double-chamber incineration. The pyrolytic incinerator comprises a pyrolytic chamber (primary chamber) and a post-combustion chamber (secondary chamber).


Most of these incinerators are diesel-fired. These incinerators are specifically used for treating the contents of yellow bags. These bags containing incinerable waste are loaded in the pyrolytic chamber through a front-opening door either manually or using a conveyor belt. In this chamber, the waste is thermally decomposed through an oxygen-deficient, medium-temperature combustion process with temperatures ranging between 800 and 900°C, producing solid ashes and gases. The gases produced in the pyrolytic chamber are burnt at high temperatures ranging between 900 and 1200°C by a fuel burner in the post-combustion chamber or secondary chamber using an excess of air to minimise smoke and odours. The flue gases from the secondary chamber then pass through air pollution control devices such as a venturi scrubber for complete elimination of particulate matter, if any. Finally, the smoke is released into the air through a 100-foot-tall stack or chimney. The ash is transported to a landfill for deep burial. Advantages of this technology include a relatively lower and affordable cost and almost a 99 per cent reduction in the volume of the waste being treated. In the past few years, technologically advanced incinerators have been manufactured in India that aim for zero pollution through emission.


Plasma Pyrolysis: This system uses a plasma-arc torch to generate the plasma energy, which can generate heat reaching temperatures as high as 1650°C to 11000°C. However, this is a relatively new technology and has very little track record. While some specific pyrolysis technologies show promise, others have not achieved performance and emission levels claimed by manufacturers, and others have not worked at all.


Whether through proven methods like incineration or newer approaches such as plasma pyrolysis, the ultimate goal remains unchanged: to eliminate pathogens, safeguard public health, and ease the environmental burden of biomedical waste. I will be exploring more technologies in my next article. Until then, wishing you a safe and healthy weekend.


(The author is an environmentalist.)

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