A curious mind. A life in motion.

An aspiring entrepreneur, curious learner, passionate dancer, and fifth-generation member of a family business.

I’m a Class 12 student at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata, and if there’s one thing that describes me, it’s that I’ve always been curious about how things work, especially when it comes to people, businesses, and the ideas behind them.

Growing up in a family that’s been in the tea business for over a century, I’ve been surrounded by conversations about everything from tea gardens and production to packaging, pricing, and marketing. What started as simply listening to these discussions gradually turned into questions of my own. Why does packaging change the way we perceive a product? What makes an advertisement memorable? How can a century-old tea brand connect with a new generation?

Rather than just wondering about these things, I wanted to explore them myself.

That curiosity has taken me from the tea gardens of Assam and Siliguri to factory floors, professional tea-tasting sessions, and digital marketing discussions. I’ve conducted independent research on premium tea packaging, iconic Indian advertising campaigns, and the digitalisation of the tea industry. During my internship at EcoConnect, I worked with different brands and helped develop ideas for a tea symposium aimed at making tea more engaging for younger audiences.

These experiences have made me increasingly interested in marketing, economics, and entrepreneurship, particularly how traditional businesses can embrace new ideas without losing what makes them special. I’ve continued exploring these interests through courses from Wharton and Northwestern University, business competitions, and Ashoka University’s Young Scholars Programme.

But there’s another part of me that is just as important: dance.

It was about expression.

I’ve been dancing since I was five, beginning with seven years of Odissi training before exploring Western styles such as hip-hop, contemporary, Chinese, and Jamaican dance. From years of rehearsals and interschool competitions to performing with my school’s Footloose Dance Club, dance has taught me discipline, creativity, confidence, and the importance of working together. Interestingly, I often find myself applying those same lessons when approaching business challenges.

Beyond academics and dance, I enjoy being involved in initiatives where I can make a difference. As a leader of my school’s Peer Support Group and a representative coordinating over 140 students at Xuberance, I’ve discovered how much I enjoy bringing people together. I’ve also grown up contributing to Pehchaan, an initiative started by my sister to empower women and young girls in our tea-estate communities, and I’m excited to play a bigger role in carrying it forward.

At seventeen, I know I’m only beginning to discover what I want to do. But every research project, internship, dance performance, and new experience has helped me understand myself a little better.

I’m proud to be part of a business legacy built over five generations, but what excites me most is the opportunity to bring my own ideas, perspectives, and creativity into its future.

For me, it’s not just about carrying forward a legacy. It’s about learning enough, exploring enough, and challenging myself enough to create something meaningful of my own.

“Some of my greatest lessons have come from classrooms. Others have come from dance floors, factory visits, and conversations over tea.”

My first real step into a business I have grown up hearing about.

Tea has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It has appeared in dinner-table conversations, visits to the gardens, packets lying around at home and discussions about quality, buyers, prices and blends that I usually listened to without completely understanding.

As the fifth generation of my family growing up around the tea business, I have always known that one day I would like to contribute to it. But I didn’t want my connection to tea to exist only because of my surname or family history. I wanted to begin learning the business for myself — and I wanted to start from the product itself.

So, while still in Class 12, I entered the tasting room.

What started as an attempt to understand the difference between one cup and another became one of my first experiences of looking at the family business not as a child who had grown up around it, but as someone who was genuinely curious about how it worked.

My First Surprise: I Knew Much Less Than I Thought

Before this experience, I could tell you whether I liked a cup of tea.

That was about it.

I have loved tea since I was a child. Once I started tasting professionally, I realised how much information can exist inside something as ordinary as a cup of tea — aroma, colour, body, briskness, strength, mouthfeel, leaf appearance and even faults created during processing. Suddenly, “strong” or “nice” didn’t seem like very useful descriptions anymore.

Tea tasting taught me that developing a palate isn’t about having some magical ability. It comes from comparison, repetition and paying attention.

That was reassuring because, at seventeen, I was obviously not entering the tasting room as an expert. I was entering it as a beginner — and slowly learning how experts think.

A Cup of Tea Is Actually Full of Clues

One of the things I loved most about tasting was discovering how much you can learn without anyone telling you the answer first.

• The dry leaf gives you one set of clues.
• The infused leaf gives you another.
• The colour of the liquor tells you something else.
• Then comes the aroma, taste and feel of the tea in your mouth.

A professional taster isn’t simply asking, “Do I like this?” They are thinking about what the tea is supposed to be, whether it has been processed correctly, how it compares with other teas and ultimately where it might fit commercially.

That was when I first began understanding that tasting sits at an interesting intersection of agriculture, manufacturing, consumer preference and business decision-making.