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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.)

The Visionary Who Turned the Wheel of History

V L Dharurkar and Kailash Atkare
Mar 19
3 min read

Dr Hedgewar believed that only an organised and united Hindu society could rebuild the nation.

Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar’s vision and mission come into full view in the RSS centenary year. This year marks the prime of the Hindutva era and the beginning of a new phase in rebuilding a new India. Its success rests on two foundations. First, the RSS organised a vast section of India’s middle class, which became the backbone of Indian democracy over the decades, and gave democracy an Indian spirit in the line of Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Deendayal Upadhyaya. Second, it emerged as a powerful instrument of nation-building through social change. In a deeply plural society, Dr Hedgewar understood that caste, community and social divisions had to be overcome, and he worked to infuse among them a common feeling of nationalism, discipline and selfless service.


History taught him one clear truth: whenever Hindu society remained divided, India suffered defeat. This lesson appears from the invasions of Ghori, the Tughlaqs and Babur to the battles of Panipat and Plassey. The defeats of Ibrahim Lodi, Hemu, the Marathas and Siraj-ud-Daulah are presented as the result not only of foreign strength, but of internal division, betrayal and lack of collective national consciousness. After the death of Lokmanya Tilak, when political darkness seemed to descend on the country, Dr Hedgewar rose like a new sun and concluded that Hindu society had first to be united in a spirit of discipline, sacrifice and national purpose.


Born on 1 April 1889 into a Marathi Deshastha Brahmin family, Dr Hedgewar came from a lineage rooted in learning and Vedic tradition. His family later moved to Nagpur. Orphaned young during a plague epidemic, he grew up in adversity but with unusual resolve. As a schoolboy, he boldly chanted Vande Mataram despite official bans and refused sweets distributed on the birthday of the British Empress. He studied in Nagpur and later at the Rashtriya School in Pune before moving to Calcutta for medical education under the guidance of B. S. Moonje.


Calcutta was the turning point. There he entered a vibrant nationalist world, became vice-president of the Hindu Mahasabha in Calcutta province, and came into contact with revolutionary circles such as the Anushilan Samiti. He was also deeply influenced by Swami Vivekananda, whose call for India’s regeneration left a lasting mark on his mind. On returning to Nagpur, he joined the Indian National Congress, supported the resolution for complete freedom, and took part in Gandhi-led movements, including the Jungle Satyagraha in Vidarbha, for which he was imprisoned for a year.


Yet he remained restless, searching for a more enduring path to national emancipation. That search took him to Ratnagiri, where he met Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, then under strict surveillance after his release from the Andamans. Savarkar’s manuscript, Essentials of Hindutva, sharpened his thinking. He realised that political agitation alone would not be enough. India needed a disciplined, independent, non-political social and cultural organisation that could rebuild national character and unite Hindu society. With that conviction, on Vijayadashami, 27 September 1925, he founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Nagpur, at Mohite’s ground, with a small band of selected swayamsevaks.


From those modest beginnings, Dr Hedgewar built the RSS into a disciplined national force. Inspired by Vivekananda’s spirit of awakening, he spread shakhas across the country and made the Bhagwa Dhwaj the supreme guru of the Sangh. Festivals such as Vijayadashami, Guru Purnima and Raksha Bandhan became instruments of cohesion, discipline and Hindu awakening. By the time of his death in 1940, the Sangh had grown into a large and expanding national organisation.


Dr Hedgewar also recognised the next torchbearer. At Banaras Hindu University, with the goodwill of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, he encountered Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, later revered as Guruji, and saw in him the man destined to carry the mission forward. As the second Sarsanghchalak, Guruji gave the Sangh ideological depth and nationwide expansion. Through works such as We, or Our Nationhood Defined and Bunch of Thoughts, he carried forward the spirit of Dr Hedgewar.


Under his leadership, the Sangh expanded into the North-East through efforts such as the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram under Balasaheb Deshpande. Guruji also helped shape the wider nationalist current that later found political expression in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh under Syama Prasad Mookerjee, while Deendayal Upadhyaya deepened that stream through Integral Humanism. Seen in this continuity, the later rise of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi appears as part of the fulfilment of Dr Hedgewar’s vision. The RSS centenary, therefore, stands as the fruition of a dream and the reaffirmation of a civilisational mission set in motion a century ago.



(Dharurkar is a foreign affairs expert. Atkare is an assistant professor of English literature . Views personal.)

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