Where it started: A Physics lab, not a boardroom
My M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Kharagpur wasn't a detour before "real" work, it's where I learned how to think. My research was on OFET-based PVDF pressure sensors: thin-film deposition in ultra-high vacuum, surface characterization under an atomic force microscope, the slow and exacting business of getting an experiment to actually tell you something true. I still approach a messy sales pipeline or a market-entry problem the same way I approached that lab bench-isolate the variable, test it, don't trust the first result.
Then I taught, because I wanted to know if I could explain it.
Before I ever built a go-to-market plan, I was standing in front of 320 students a section, lecturing on classical mechanics and semiconductor physics at KDB Post Graduate College, and before that, teaching senior secondary physics at Subhash Public School. The numbers were good 100% pass results, top-quartile feedback, a national Best Teacher Award nomination but the real payoff was learning how to take something dense and make it land for a room full of people who didn't sign up to struggle.
The MBA was the bridge, not the destination
I went to IIM Visakhapatnam specifically to connect the analytical instincts from physics to actual business decisions. The projects weren't academic exercises for their own sake: sizing the market for clear dental aligners, building a segmented product basket for postpartum care, running sentiment analysis to catch fraud signals in financial disclosures, studying Asian Paints' entire dealer network to figure out why some territories outperformed others by 20%. Each one was a small rehearsal for the work I do now.
Where that's landed me
Since then, I've worked both sides of business growth — strategic and street-level — often in the same year. At Biomexia Healthcare, I dug into pricing across eight medical equipment suppliers, found a 20–30% gap in non-metro markets, and used that to build a market-entry plan into three new Andhra Pradesh cities, pitching the case directly to institutional stakeholders. At Yokohama India, I ran a full sales territory in Rajasthan — not analyzing it from a distance, but owning it: onboarding 25+ new channel partners, running 20+ trade promotions, and closing the year at 31% YoY growth, built on CRM data rather than instinct.