Chaos to Clarity

How a filmmaker with 25 years in ad films, acting and streaming directed her first feature in 24 days with newcomers, and took it to festivals in Brazil, Kolkata and Jaipur and a people's choice award in Los Angeles. Nishanthi Evani, director of Impure, on what it takes to make an independent film in India.

She starts with how Impure happened: a bold script about a wedding called off because the bride is not a virgin, a producer who could not find a director, and the friends who turned up for her. Then the craft: why a film is 24 crafts, why most first scripts are flat, the ad that needed 65 takes for one line, and how editors make actors look good. And the leadership lesson from a set: nobody trusts the director until the job is done, and when it comes to being nice or being good, she chooses good.

She also talks about her standards, from Kurosawa to a lookbook that fixes the colour of every wall, growing up in Chennai on two films every Saturday night and a summer of Chaplin, the secret film school applications after B.Com, the talk with her father, and her next film, an absurd political satire.

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How a chartered accountant left a stable job at Bajaj Finserv and built a SEBI registered advisory in Nagpur, with close to two years of registration paperwork before his first client. The story of choosing the hard, registered path in a line where most people never register.

CA Rounak Agrawal is the co-founder of The Trading Mitra, a SEBI registered Investment Adviser and Research Analyst firm in Nagpur. He spent close to a year as a credit manager at Bajaj Finserv, deciding which builders got loans of ₹4 to 5 crore, then left with his own capital and started equity research. The SEBI registration took close to two years of NISM exams and paperwork. Why a chartered accountant reads a balance sheet better than anyone, what a year of approving loans taught him about money, and how he earns trust by showing clients his own portfolio and holding what he recommends.

He explains the difference between a short term and a long term investor, why a car you need in four years should never be funded by trading, why he tells clients "do not trust me, I can only improve your probability", why sectors never drown but companies do, and why he calls day trading time pass. Nothing here is investment advice, it is one founder's journey and how he thinks.

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How a sports physiotherapist built a physio clinic with zero machines, a gym with 200 memberships on day one, and a team of 26 in Nagpur. Dr. Kevin Agrawal, founder of PhysioGym Akhaada, does the opposite of every other clinic: no machines, only exercise.

He starts with what sixteen years of fixing bodies taught him. Why a machine can reduce pain but cannot give strength back, why weight loss is the wrong word and fat loss is the point, what a sitting job does to the body, and why the painkiller and the balm are a quick fix that ends at a surgeon. Then his own story: the shoulder that dislocated three times and healed with exercise, the BCCI and Mumbai cricket years, the boss who sent him back to Nagpur, year one at ₹150 a consultation, and how seventy percent of his clients still come from Instagram and Facebook without a paid ad.

He also talks about the fifteen day event that led to the Indian Army, what an IPL anti-doping chaperone does, treating Virat Kohli at an ad shoot, the terrace that became PhysioGym Akhaada, why he pays his team above market, and why RBI invited a physiotherapist to speak.

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How she became a Supreme Court advocate: a girl from Jabalpur who wanted to be a doctor, then missed UPSC by 0.25 marks, and is today an Advocate on Record at the Supreme Court of India. A law career story about getting your first case on the day you join, 17 hour days as a junior, and the fear that never goes away before a bench.

Tanya Tiwari calls herself an accidental lawyer. Both her parents did LLB and never practised. She dreamt of medicine, failed, sat for UPSC and missed it by a quarter of a mark, then joined law because her father said it is good to know the law of the land. She stood first in the entrance exam. In 2017 she started at the MP High Court in Jabalpur and got her first case the day she joined. Today she is an Advocate on Record at the Supreme Court and practises across Jabalpur, Nagpur and Delhi.

She explains how lawyers really prepare, why her first advice to every client is do not file, the tribal families in Panna who were scared to go to court, what women lawyers still hear about female judges and why she says call it out, and her advice to young women in law: hang on, let the years pass. Then Jabalpur, her first tiger at ten months old in Kanha, the phone call from Africa that became her marriage, and shooting a tigress with a kill beside her husband Varun Thakkar.

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How two friends in Gondia built a pre-school whose kids finish in India's top 3 in national reading competitions and Olympiads, against children from every metro city. Built from savings, with no loan, no posters and no ads.

Gurpreet Kaur Hora and Neelam Agarwal are the co-founders of Fondle Academy, Gondia. Neelam ran a boutique first. The two taught tuition together, announced a school at a Lions Club carnival with 88 schools present and no plan ready, got 10 admissions that day, and painted the school themselves to save ₹1.5 lakh. Twelve years later: two branches, 30 teachers and 10 didis, all women, franchises, and teacher training for schools in Tirora, Tumsar, Amgaon and Balaghat. One job only, set the child's mind to "I can do it", and two founders who trained themselves in everything first, then trained the teachers.

They explain why reading is not studying and listening comes first, why phonics is decoding and not memorising, what a child's handwriting tells a graphologist, the mistake parents make when they force a child to read, and what screen time takes from a small child. Then how they ran a school online from June 2020 with craft kits sent by Swiggy and Zomato, and why they will never take a franchise but give one.

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How a corporate sales head built a premium wildlife expedition platform where 95% of clients come back, with under ₹1 lakh spent on ads in five years, after quitting at 43 with no plan B.

Ratish Nair is the co-founder and CEO of Ecotrailz. He spent two decades in corporate sales, took his first wildlife trip to Tadoba in 2017 on a holiday his wife planned, and started Ecotrailz as a weekend trial in 2019 while still working. In 2024 he quit. His first year's trips sold out in 20 to 45 seconds.

He talks about why he chose premium only and refuses a price war, the closed community he calls the tribe, why every client has met him before signing, why he has never chased a monthly target and will never take external funding. Then the photography: why he shoots manual with auto ISO and not aperture priority, why exposure compensation is the most powerful dial on your camera, when not to crop, breaking the rules of composition, and the tigress P151 at Panna.

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How a cafe in India charges ₹210 an hour instead of pushing you to order, and still makes money. A story about building a space first cafe when nobody was searching for one.

Vandita Purohit is the founder of Mauji The Time Cafe in Pune and Nagpur, where you check in on an app, pay for the time you sit, and beverages, snacks and wifi are included. You can bring your own food and they will hand you the cutlery. She is an engineer and a first generation entrepreneur who has run her own businesses since 2009, and this was her first time in hospitality.

She talks about the survey on a Pune high street where seventy percent of people said they were out to work or meet someone and not to eat, the 6,000 square foot bungalow she took over a week before the 2020 lockdown and the landlord who offered her a way out, where the revenue actually comes from, the consultant who said she needed 32 staff when she runs it with 12, the fifteen cafes that opened within three minutes of her first Nagpur outlet, and the advice she would give herself in 2016.

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How a physiotherapy clinic in Nagpur went from ₹80 a session in two rented rooms to 95,000 sessions and 2,500 square feet, without spending a rupee on advertising. A story about building a name before building revenue.

Dr. Neha Ghatekar and Rohan Ghatekar are married and they are business partners. He resigned from fourteen years in IT and HR without telling her, came home and told her the same day, and their son was one month old. A retired Air Force veteran offered them the ground floor of his bungalow for the six thousand rupees he was already making from it, and PhysioLogic opened with three patients on its first day.

They talk about why ₹80 was a strategy and not a mistake, the first year when the fees never covered the expenses and the landlord carried the rent, the party they threw for 350 patients and their families while still in the minus, and how a married couple runs a business without carrying it home every night. Then Dr. Neha takes over on the medicine: what pain actually is, why an MRI is not the full picture, why pain comes back after treatment ends, and the knee pain that turned out to be coming from the hip.

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The furniture in most Indian homes was an afterthought, and it shows. This conversation is about how to get it right, with a founder who has built more than ten thousand pieces and started at sixteen with fifty thousand rupees.

After his tenth board exams, Ayush Mate's mother suggested they try an interior design firm. They put in fifty thousand rupees, rented a two thousand square foot room in Nagpur, and he started with no experience of the industry at all. That firm became Karagiri, which now designs, manufactures and installs with its own factory and its own craftsmen.

He is direct about what actually goes wrong in this business. Good design is everywhere and execution is rare, so the projects that reach him are often the ones somebody else abandoned. He explains why he refuses to outsource the furniture even though it costs more, what happened the day a full teak set arrived at a house with doors too small for any of it, why he tells people to buy the furniture before they build the house, and why the room you copied off the internet never looks the same in your own home.

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In the year 2000, Pratigya Thakur trained on Oracle's own programme in Bangalore and was offered a job at the end of it. She said no, came back to Nagpur, and opened her own institute instead. She was nineteen years old. Twenty five years later, more than 80,000 students have passed through Unisoft Technologies.

In this conversation she talks about walking into Oracle University at nineteen and being told she was too young for the course she wanted, the ninety thousand rupee fee she paid anyway, the laptop she rented to practise on, and the classmates ten years older than her who took evening classes to help her clear the modules. She describes her first seminar in front of three hundred students, where the colleague she had brought along to speak looked at the crowd and refused to go on stage, and the twenty two students who made up her entire first year.

She is also direct about the industry she works in. Why she says a hundred percent job guarantee is marketing and not a promise, what she believes an institute actually owes a student, what she tells a twenty year old to learn now that AI is writing code, and what twenty five years of watching people try to change their careers has taught her about who makes it.

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