Guest Lecture — St. Xavier’s College

Invited back to his alma mater by the Department of Commerce to deliver the closing session of Deeksharambh 2026, the induction programme for incoming M.Com Semester I students — with a brief to make marketing feel like a credible career choice, in an interactive format, in the last slot of the day.

Structured the session as a positioning problem: opened with a sabzi-mandi vendor to ground the 4Ps in something every student already understood, shared an honest non-linear career story (originally CA-track, redirected into the same M.Com Marketing programme by a Covid-cancelled exam), then walked through the real AVI Global Plast case — 8,500 SKUs across 33 countries, the internally-nicknamed "bhagwan bharose sale" problem, and how it was fixed via a 2×2 product-market mix, one-product-per-market focus, multilingual sites, ABM, and channel tracking, closing on external validation: a top-exporter award presented by Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal. Closed the loop by re-running the same 4Ps against Apple, then opened the floor for unscripted Q&A.

Sustained, curious Q&A rather than the polite silence typical of a day's final session; several students stayed back afterward to continue the conversation one-on-one.

The session doubled as a live demonstration of its own thesis — using positioning and a single structural device (the 4Ps bookend) to make an abstract subject concrete for a specific, skeptical audience.