About

From Kerala to Rutgers, via everywhere else.

I grew up in Kerala — a state with unusually high literacy, unusually competitive politics, and an economy shaped by remittance flows, agrarian transitions, and a civil service culture that treats economics as a civic matter. That context made me an economist before I knew the word for it.

I studied Applied Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where rigorous quantitative training met serious theoretical debate. My MA research used World Bank and CMIE data to study industrial competitiveness in the Indian tyre sector — early evidence that my interests lived at the intersection of firm strategy and the institutional environment around it. I qualified UGC-NET for Assistant Professorship, which opened a chapter in the classroom at Bharata Mata College, Kochi, where I taught econometrics, growth & development, and research methods, and served on the NAAC accreditation team.

The corporate years were genuinely formative. At VAS Carbons I built pricing frameworks from scratch, ran export strategy across international markets, and learned what it actually costs when a model is wrong. At Neste in Houston — after completing my MBA at Rice University — I managed a $50M+ credit portfolio and built risk simulation models against real exposure. In between, I advised Sasol and Toshiba on market entry and cost strategy, and conducted quantitative research on electoral and institutional behavior as a Political Strategy Researcher — applying business-strategy frameworks to settings where the "market" is votes and the "rules" are constantly renegotiated.

At Rice, I served as President of the Indian Students Association and Vice President of Community Engagement for the Graduate Students Association, managing a $200K budget and building cross-program community infrastructure. I also conducted 250 candidate evaluations as an Admissions Ambassador for the MBA and PhD programs — work that reshaped how I think about talent, readiness, and potential.

Throughout all of it, I kept returning to the same question: how do organizations adapt when the rules of the game are unclear or shifting? That question drove me back to research. I'm joining Rutgers Business School in Fall 2026 as a funded PhD candidate in International Business & Strategy, where I intend to study institutional and behavioral dynamics in emerging markets with the methods to make the findings credible.

Outside academia, I founded GradMentor — a boutique admissions and career advisory practice — and Agri Nova Cold Chain Solutions, a sustainability venture addressing post-harvest food losses in Kerala.