To begin with, COMMUNION recently hosted a 3-day residential retreat at Rishikesh, exclusively for my mentees, I have had the pleasure to help over the months.
Focused on multi-discipline personal growth, the retreat had series of interactive sessions with domain experts in entrepreneurship, work-life balance, digital communication, mental health, wellness & nutrition, the art of giving, networking, and more; clubbed with wholesome rejuvenation with long walks, music, recreation, and much more – elements that made a big difference in the way the participants connected with each other and as a tribe – from being almost strangers.
The Retreat turned out to be a game changer in more ways than just personal growth and networking.
It is often said that when we step outside our comfort zone, we begin to grow, change and transform. This is what we experienced during the Retreat at Rishikesh. Breaking away from luxuries, madness, and nuisances of urban living was therapeutic, to begin with, and set the perfect ambiance for us to open up to each other and connect beyond what we had envisioned.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of financial technology company Paytm. Within five years of its inception, Vijay Shekhar Sharma turned-around a startup into a billion-dollar company. A celebrated Indian billionaire businessman, Sharma was ranked as India’s youngest billionaire in 2017 by Forbes with a net worth of $1.2 billion. He has been featured in Time Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People 2017 List and is the recipient of Yash Bharati, the highest civilian honor of the Government of Uttar Pradesh. In 2021, he was ranked as the #62nd richest person in India, according to Forbes. In January 2022, the ICANN-supported Universal Acceptance Steering Group appointed him as UA Ambassador in India.
Sunil Banthia
Sunil Banthia is the CEO of Banthia Consultancy, the only organised pan India consultant in the field of TUFs subsidies, governed by Ministry of Textiles and State Incentives of Gujarat and Maharashtra state. Banthia Consultancy is an organisation committed to provide superior, competent and personalized service at a level that is unmatched in the field of project finance and government subsidy. He has acquired a great reputation as a reliable Subsidy Consultant in India.
Shishir Goel
Shishir Goel is a Founding Partner of GoGroup, an independent venture studio with a focus on creating diverse companies across various industries. GoGroup has not only launched successful companies like GoParts, Trustspace, Eduneon, Evolut, and Wandel but has also forged strategic partnerships with prestigious organizations such as HHLA, ZF, Maxsolar, Terazo, GoPuls, and Warehousing1.
These collaborations are aimed at enhancing the digital capabilities of their ventures, marking significant progress in the European market. Since 2019, Shishir has been dedicated to three primary objectives: nurturing long-term collaborations, ensuring profitability from the very beginning, and embarking on multiple ‘zero to one’ product development journeys.
Before the inception of GoGroup, Shishir built and scaled several tech-product companies and engineering teams across various international organizations. Active in the Indo-German sector for over a decade, he firmly believes that exporting goods and services from India and importing innovation and technology into India is crucial for the nation’s advancement.
Saurabh Nigam
Saurabh Nigam is the Vice President of Human Capital at Omidyar Network, which is one of the world’s ing impact investing organizations. Saurabh supports ON’s portfolio of entrepreneurs in India, with a focus on organization design, change management, talent management and executive coaching. Saurabh has been recognized as one of the Top 25 future HR ers of the country by People Matters & DDI International. He is also the recipient of HR 40 Under 40 award by Jombay for the year 2018. A Bachelor of Engineering (B.E) in Electronics and Telecommunications Saurabh holds Post Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations (PM&IR) and SPHR, GPHR and HRMP certifications from SHRM, USA – being the only Indian and one among the first 10 professionals globally to hold these three certifications simultaneously.
Dr Ravindra Singh Shekhawat
Dr Ravindra Singh Shekhawat is a neurologist practicing at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, Singapore. He has a special interest in stroke and post stroke neuro-recovery. Dr Ravi has completed his medical training from Madras Medical College, Chennai, India, and graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree. He later became a member of the Royal College of Physicians, London (MRCP, UK), before moving on to pursue his senior residency training in Neurology at Singapore General Hospital. This was followed by fellowships at the Academy of Medicine, Singapore (FAMS) and the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP, Edinburgh). He was working as a Neurology consultant under the National Neuroscience institute and has been providing neurology services at Singapore General Hospital and Changi General Hospital.
Pooja Surana
Pooja Surana is a sports enthusiast and holds a 2nd Dan Black Belt in Karate. Professionally, she is a CA, CS, and CFA, currently serving as an Associate Partner at RADS & Co. Chartered Accountants. In this role, she oversees financial consultancy and leads a team specializing in trading and investment across equities, derivatives, and commodities. Additionally, she serves as an Advisor to the issue for SME IPOs
Pratik Kulkarni
Pratik Kulkarni is an Engineer and Entrepreneur. He co-founded a service company in the IoT and Machine Learning domain and did it for 5 years. Currently he is working as a Cloud Consultant while working on his next business idea. He has diverse interests and likes to talk about business, tech, art and culture.
Kausshal Duggar
Kaushal is the Founder/CEO of Teabox, the world’s first vertically integrated premium tea brand that is disrupting a $50 billion industry with its innovations in technology/supply chain. It has been widely chronicled as a disruptive idea in a 200-year old industry and has raised funds from global marquee investors such as Accel Partners & Mr. Ratan Tata among others.
Started in 2013, Teabox has shipped over 5bn+ cups of tea to customers in 150+ countries. Kaushal has also been recognised as Reuter’s Change Maker, Fortune 40 Under 40, Entrepreneur Magazine’s 35 Under 35, Fortune Magazine’s Top 5 Creative People (2016), CNBC’s Young Turk (2016), an INK Fellow (2015) and AACSB Influential Leader (2015). Kaushal has also been featured in publications such as New York Times, CNN International, Forbes, Discovery and The Economic Times.
Kaushal graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s of Business Management from the Singapore Management University (SMU).
Deepa C Dave
Deepa C Dave has been a corporate executive for 25 yrs now. She is a fitness enthusiast and is passionate about healthy eating and nutrition. She loves going to gym and practices numerology, bach medicine, colour therapy and angel card reading for friends and family.
Brijraj Bhuptani
Brijraj Bhuptani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spry, India’s first management, communication and assessment SaaS based platform for the movement health industry. He is a seasoned serial entrepreneur and a veteran techpreneur with extensive experience in the technology domain. In 2012, Brij created Ridlr, an app providing traffic information and accurate train and bus schedules in metro and tier-1 cities. Ridlr was the largest mass transit company in India handling 3 million trips per day on its platform. Later in 2018, it was acquired by ANI Technologies (Ola Cabs). After the acquisition, Brijraj moved on to Ola Cabs where he was offered the position of Chief Product and Technology Officer. He was also heading Ridlr.
Ashish Padiyar
Ashish Padiyar holds a PG degree in finance and is a NSE certified professional. He has 17 year experience in the Personal Financial Management space with Institutions like Dawnaday and Way2wealth. He is the co-founder of Bellwether Associates LLP and is a proponent of Goal based Investment approach and speaks actively about it in various seminars and workshops. Moreover, Ashish is also the co-founder of Auxano – an early stage start-up fund (SEBI registered CAT 1 Angel Fund) where they focus on empowering technology driven new age enterprises.
Abhishek Asthana
A B school graduate Abhishek Asthana, has worked extensively in India and Korea. His experiences include ing the Durex India creative team which won him some coveted awards in India & abroad. Currently Asthanais a team er at GingerMonkey and is the co-founder at Zorro- a pseudonymous social network platform.
He is wellknown on twitter as @Gabbbarsingh.
Damodar Mall
Damodar Mall is the President and CEO at Reliance Retail, SupermarketWala. A pioneer professional in Modern Retail in India, Mall is also winner of prestigious‘Retail Icon’ and ‘MostAdmired Grocery Retailer’ awards. His career-scapeincludes stints at Hindustan Unilever, IIM, Bangalore and IIT Bombay. Mall has also authored two books including ‘SupermarketWala: Secrets of Wining Consumer India’ and ‘Be A SupermarketWala : Step-by-step guide to Supermarket success’
He can be found on twitter as @supermarketwala.
Manish Pandey
Manish is a driven professional, started working from the tender age of 11, teaching tuitions, working on daily wages to sitting in the PCOs and working in the factories during school breaks. After completing 12th in 2007, he started working in a call centre and McDonald’s in Pune, shuffling two jobs for a period of nine-months before entering an international call centre that paid a need-based sizeable income.
He moved to digital marketing after four years in the call centre industry, and started doing pre-sales, appointment settings, and social media marketing. Manish kept working on all opportunities, moved up to managerial roles and then to leadership over the years.
Now he works with content creators across the Nation helping them with content strategy, working with early-stage startups, helping them set up their teams, branding and marketing units and much more. He also works with many entrepreneurs helping them elevate their personal brands using video content and social media platforms.
Manish has worked with several digital and social media agencies, projects like TEDxGateway, and Wikipedia, and is a part of the leadership team of India’s best social impact organization – Josh Talks. Over the years he has now built a profile as a Generalist.
Recently, he co-authored a book ‘Booming Digital Stars’ – covering the aspects of the creator economy and stories of 11 most inspiring content creators of India. The book has gone to become a best-seller within a month of its launch.
Nandita Iyer
Doctor, nutritionist, wellbeing advocate and columnist, Nandita Iyer is also author of three bestselling books. Her fourth book, The Great Indian Thali: Seasonal Vegetarian Wholesomeness will be out in October 2022. She has been writing on nutrition, health and food for over 15 years and since 2006, her popular blog Saffron Trail has been a major resource for healthy food and vegetarian recipes.
You can follow her @saffrontrail.
Pramila Mundra
Pramila Mundra holding a Masters Degree in Food Science and Nutrition and a research thesis on ‘Nutritional value of street foods”, is a Nutritionist. She was a part of ‘Nutrition Supplements Product development Team’ in NOVARTIS for 2 years. Pramila also conducts “Healthy recipes” workshop. Currently, she runs her own Health and Wellness clinic at Adarsh Palm Retreat, Bangalore.
She runs her own Health and Wellness clinic at Adarsh Palm Retreat, Bangalore. She can be found on Twitter at @pramilaMundra and her instagram handle is pamz_nutrition.
Priti Rathi Gupta
Priti Rathi Gupta, Founder of LXME, has led and inspired over 200,000 women towards building their financial acumen and financialization of their small savings.
An Alumni of Harvard Business School, she had held leadership positions as M. D. of Anand Rathi, one of India’s largest Financial Services Conglomerate, at YPO, and Founder of Ishka films. She is a reputed expert awarded for setting up the Commodities desk, Currency, and Forex Advisory business with two decades of experience in the BFSI industry & is now focused on bridging the gap between women & wealth.
Amongst many recognitions, Priti & LXME were featured in Her Majesty the Queen: The Official Platinum Jubilee Pageant Commemorative Album. This album features a range of outstanding individuals and organizations selected for their transformational contribution around the world.
LXME was awarded The “Annual Impact Creator Awards 2021” (ICA2021) as the “Warrior of Change” under the Fintech Innovation category, an initiative by Billennium Divas. Being LXME Facebook Community was one amongst 130 communities globally, to be part of Facebook’s Community Accelerator Program that helps leaders harness the power of their community to turn impactful ideas into action.
LXME is one of the 20 women-founded or co-founded startups selected by the Google for Startups Accelerator Program out of nearly 400 applications.
Rakesh Sheth
Rakesh Sheth is a multi-faceted management professional with over 20 years of experience leading businesses across multiple domains and managing cross-functional teams and operations. A passionate entrepreneur at heart, he has a strong finance background, and built successful ventures from the ground up and grown them to leadership stages in their domain. He also has significant experience in helping family-owned businesses aiding in asset restructuring and family wealth & estate management with a focus on reducing risk to family wealth exposure to business uncertainties.
Sangeeta Mall
Sangeeta is a twice published novelist and editor. Her short story ‘Twenty Gun Salute’ has been adapted into a short film for Netflix.
Apart from working on her new book, Sangeeta also mentors new authors, as a consulting editor with Popular Prakashan. She believes everyone has a story worth telling.
S. Sivakumar
Sivakumar’s Twitter profile (@S_Sivakumar) reads: Urban Farmer (#HomeGarden #GreenHouse), Science Simplified (#SundayScience), Business Model Innovation (#Mentor #Angel), Creative Photography (actually, creative captions for routine photographs).
He heads the Agri and IT Businesses of ITC Limited, a three billion dollar portfolio out of the group’s ten.
Sivakumar also oversees ITC’s Social Investments Programme and Corporate Sustainability Initiatives, which helped ITC achieve the distinction of being water positive, carbon positive and solid waste recycling positive for nearly two decades in a row – the only enterprise in the world to do so.
ITC’s trailblazing ‘e-Choupal’ initiative was developed and executed under his leadership. Operating in 21 crop value chains across 220 districts, the initiative reaches over four million farmers with customised agri extension services, while securing identity-preserved agri produce for ITC’s Branded Foods business and other customers around the world.
Sivakumar serves on the Advisory Council to the Ministry of Rural Development, the Commodity Derivatives Advisory Committee of SEBI, and on the Management Committee of National Agricultural Higher Education Project of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. He chairs the National Agricultural Council of the CII.
Sivakumar has also been on the boards of NABARD and IRMA (Institute of Rural Management – also his alma mater, where he topped the Class of 1983). He has been the Vice Chairman of the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Social Innovation and UN Global Compact’s Core Advisory Group to develop Sustainable Agriculture Business Principles.
Sivakumar blogs at shivsthirdeye.in.
Shubho Sengupta
Shubho Sengupta: a veteran ad guru, Subho Sengupta has worked in traditional/brand advertising working with brands like O&M, Leo Burnett, JWT and Contract Advertising. Senguptahas experience across a spectrum of brands, from multinational to start-ups, including Amex, NIIT, GSK, Gillette, Pepsi, Coke, Motorola, Star-ESPN,DeBeers, etc.Since 2007 he has been involved indigital/integrated advertising and marketing and joined Interactive Avenues in 2007, a digital advertising agency, as National CreativeDirector. Over the years he has worked with brands like NIIT, ICICI, ESPN, Colgate, Travelocity, Rediffusion Y&R Delhi, Airtel, LG, and Xerox.2011-2011. Eventually he moved to Coca-Cola as a digital consultant. From 2013 onwards he has been working as a creative consultant with India’s biggest brands like ABP Group,Tata Tea, Airtel, Nokia, Lava Mobiles, Times Group, and Outlook. Currently he is a consult with IT Ministry (Government of India) functioning as a Director, MyGov.
Vipul Gupta
Vipul Gupta is the Executive Director of Earth Focus, which has a vision to shape a landscape where people and nature thrive together.
Prior to Earth Focus, Vipul spent three decades building teams and organisations in the corporate sector, in the realm of manufacturing and distribution. His last venture, Excel Controlinkage, has over 800 employees and exports to 70 countries. He is as comfortable working with tribal communities as he is in board rooms.
In parallel, Vipul’s philanthropic journey spans over three decades on girl child education across the country. Bringing his business expertise to a new life in the non-profit sector, Vipul works to solve development challenges through a community-driven approach that creates resilient, long-lasting solutions. Through extensive engagement with local communities, civil society organisations, government agencies, and businesses, he realised the need to connect the gaps between funding, data and research, and local practitioners – which led to the birth of Earth Focus Foundation’s bottom-up, in-depth approach.Outside of Earth Focus, he also mentors small businesses and individuals on management and strategy.
He is also leading a mission to bring millets into the mainstream collaborating with researchers, agriculture machines, farmers and CSO’s and retailers. He plays a strategic advisor role at Nature in Focus, a portal on nature, wildlife and conservation.
A passionate and awarded nature photographer, Vipul also dabbles in spatial design and process design.Vipul has a BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Manipal University.
Sandeep Mall
Sandeep Mall is a multifaceted individual who has made significant strides in various domains of life. He is not just an accomplished entrepreneur, but also a renowned wildlife photographer, a dedicated health coach, a respected mentor, and a devoted family man. His journey is a testament to his diverse talents and unwavering commitment to excellence.
Sandeep is the founder of LNM Auto Industries Pvt Ltd, a 100% Export oriented company that specialises in producing precision engineering components for a wide range of industries, including agriculture, mining, construction, and automobiles. His dedication to innovation and quality has earned LNM Auto recognition on a national scale. The Government of India honoured it twice as one of the Top 100 MSMEs in the country, in both 2016 and 2019.
Beyond the boardroom, Sandeep has a deep passion for wildlife photography. His talent in capturing the beauty of the natural world has been acknowledged through numerous accolades. He received the prestigious DJMPC India’s Best Wildlife Photographer award in 2014 and was named the ICICI Camaraderie National Winner in 2015. These honours underscore his ability to communicate the wonders of nature through his lens.
Sandeep Mall is not only a successful entrepreneur and photographer but also a Level 2 Health coach. He holds certifications in various aspects of health, including sleep, nutrition, stress management, and recovery. His commitment to holistic well-being is reflected in his role as a health coach, where he guides individuals towards healthier, more balanced lives.
His influence extends beyond his professional and creative pursuits. He serves as a mentor and coach to some of India’s prominent entrepreneurs and professionals, sharing his wealth of knowledge and experience. He is the author of “Finding the Oasis,” a comprehensive book on deep health that covers all aspects of well-being. His commitment to empowering others shines through his mentorship and written work.
Sandeep’s life journey has taken him to 42 countries, providing him with a wealth of experiences and perspectives. His extensive travel has undoubtedly enriched his understanding of the world and its diverse cultures.
Sandeep remains a devoted family man. He lives with five generations under one roof, from his grandmother to his granddaughter. This strong family bond serves as a foundation for his life’s endeavours and underscores the importance of family values in his life.
Sangeet Kothari
Sangeet Kothari, is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Echo Connect (www.ieecho.com), a boutique digital communication company. Additionally, she is a Market Outreach Consultant to individuals and organisations. Sangeet holds a Bachelors Degree in Economics and Post Graduate Associate Degree in Corporate Communication & Marketing from the USA. Her professional journey in India began at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where she managed PR, advertising, corporate events and more, as a Corporate Communications Manager and went on become an entrepreneur at the age of 27 – first woman to start a web design company in the East.
Sangeet also coordinates Communion and the Growth Retreats. Mother of a teenager, she enjoys street photography, cooking, networking, built heritage and upcycling. She also takes keen interest in art, music and spirituality.
Sumant Kothari
Sumant Kothari is Co-founder of Echo Connect, a dynamic marketing outfit dedicated to delivering innovative marketing & branding solutions, market outreach consulting, and result-driven digital communication & tech services to entrepreneurs & SMEs, world over. With a combination of technology acumen and a strategic mindset, Sumant has been instrumental in helping businesses, across different domains, amplify their digital footprint and achieve measurable success.
Having spent 12 years in the US for higher education (MBA in Marketing and Finance, MS in Software Development & Management, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems with a Minor in Finance) and working in large Fortune 500 global corporations, he is able to spearhead the organisation to serve businesses in different geographies. He is an alumnus of La Martiniere, Kolkata.
In addition to his life partner, his other loves include tennis, music & nature, and doting on his son.
