Every person may be viewed as the center of everything in her or his life but it is nothing without context. What one takes from her environment and gives back to it is the sum of her experience, her legacy. I recognized this thanks to meeting Garima Sharma in the summer of 2018 when I interned at a YouTube multichannel network called Studio71.
Garima Sharma was one of a roster of speakers brought in to share their life and career journeys so as to motivate and inspire us interns. Sharma was a leading journalist and media executive in the Indian media industry and a trailblazer. In our conversations, she talked about the struggles of being a media executive in India. Despite the warnings by family, friends, and peers about the rough and tumble of the media industry, she persisted because it was her passion. On top of that she decided to come to America to widen her entertainment experience. She told in great detail her struggle of transitioning to a new country, culture, and work environment with everyone back home worried and skeptical. But she was determined. Never once did she let the opinions of others or the fear and uncertainty of the future deter her from her passion. The struggle and the hard work she went through to get to the successful station she enjoyed today as a renowned media executive was moving and inspiring.
Sharma’s passion, grit, and relentlessness charged me up. My own context was not too different. I lived the life of a sheltered only child, insulated by my parents from their perceived dangers and insecurities. My parents are immigrants who came from India just a year before I was born in Chicago. They had that immigrant mentality of “survive then thrive.” The media industry–the big bad wolf–was not an ideal platform for the “Survive First” strategy, forget the “ Then Thrive target”. It was no surprise that they completely freaked out when I told them I wanted to pursue a career in entertainment. Then followed a train, a galaxy actually, of well-meaning but discouraging and apprehensive relatives and friends. Through it all though, I was very clear about what I wanted to do.
Quietly, I did whatever I could to strengthen my network of relationships with individuals outside my own circle. I had to improve my social skills and step out of my comfort zone to access and cultivate hard to reach people….to learn and grow from them to be ready for opportunities like this one. I learned to welcome challenges, took the initiative, and went beyond the remit or limitations of my internships to demonstrate to my supervisors that I had the passion, talent, and a learning aptitude to excel in the position. I built on my industry knowledge by reading literature on the industry every day. Providential or not, my efforts timed with the tectonic changes in the industry–including the fragmentation of the media, the social media upending older business models, disruptive technologies, and the convergence or integration of various media and models. This, in turn, fuelled my passion and determination to be at the center of it all this cooking sauce.
The speech and conversations with Garima Sharma and my lonely but determined journey of pursuing my dream made me recognize what really drives me.
It helped me envision the kind of legacy I myself would like to leave. I want to be known as one who is determined but empathetic, a dreamer but pragmatic, and one who helps others pursue their dreams. As importantly, I want to be recognized for my professional excellence, as a person who can see the trees as well as the forest. Sharma inspired me with not only the courage but also a vision and determination to navigate disparate worlds, scale social and cultural challenges, leverage the diversity of my experiences to contribute to an extremely diverse world where boundaries are being broken down very fast, thanks in no small measure to the media industry. I want my own success and future station to be also measured in that context