Mojave Road
THIS IS DUMMY COPY THIS IS DUMMY COPY THIS IS DUMMY COPY is a creative director and ambitious connector. He was also a self-described outsider for much of his life, and his path from Bangalore, India to New York City has been a winding one driven by sheer stubbornness and a keen instinct for creating community wherever he goes. Whether founding the hugely successful storytelling platform Untold or creating award-winning content for some of the largest organizations in the world—Samsung, Asian Paints, W Hotels, eBay, and the U.S. Army among others—he infuses all of his work with vibrant color, a love for human stories, and above all, a deep curiosity.
What was it like growing up as Yashas? How did your creative life begin?
I was born and raised in Bangalore, India. When I grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s, it was a very different city. It wasn’t the tech hub that it is now. But it did have a huge sciences culture. So I grew up surrounded by science and commerce, very far from creative professions. I also come from a lower-middle-class family. So we were focused more on survival as opposed to pursuing passions and interests. But I think what really helped me was where my parents came from.
My mom is from a small village and she grew up with her grandmother near a farm, so it was two women doing things by themselves. They had to learn things like, How do you spend time by yourself? How do you make things? How do you entertain yourself? They invented a lot of games and a lot of really interesting storytelling techniques. And then my dad, he was from this very eclectic family. He was a little bit of an adventure guy, who was never into traditional education. So I grew up with him taking all sorts of weird, fascinating jobs that took him to all sorts of places. And I said, Wow, I want that life. He was a loan recovery agent at one point. He’d have to go and recover property bought with loans that were defaulted on. It was super dangerous. We used to wait for him to come back after 18 days in the field and tell us all sorts of crazy stories. So I grew up with my mom on the one hand teaching herself to do things like sculpt chalk by hand by candlelight, and my dad off doing whatever wild adventures he was doing. I grew up around very rich storytelling.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
What were some of the inflection points in your youth, moments where your perspective shifted on what kind of work you might pursue?
I didn’t even know that creativity could be a profession. I didn’t know anybody around me who was in a creative profession. I was working to apply to get my commerce degree and I remember my brother saying, “You suck at math. What are you doing?”
So I decided to change my studies to communications, which ended up actually being psychology. But the program changed my perspective, coming as this small family guy to a world of opportunities where now I had friends and connections from across India. I was so curious about all of these people from different parts of the world—and I was also doing all kinds of freelance work. It was a cocktail of stimulus for an 18-year-old.
And this is when you started developing your design sensibility?
Actually, a weekend graphic design class in High School sparked that interest. But, this institution did have a profound impact on my life. I came from a lower-middle-class family and now I was at probably one of the most prestigious institutions in Bangalore, surrounded by people from very different classes of society. I basically started getting all my classmates involved in my creative freelance work, which eventually became a design practice. We had a cracked version of Photoshop. I don’t know if you want to include that, but—
He’s a criminal, you heard it here.
[Laughs]. We didn’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on that! An entire generation of creatives in India will tell you that they grew up on pirated software. I learned how to move type on Illustrator and I designed hundreds of ugly logos all over India. But I grew alongside my clients as they grew their businesses, and I got better.
I suppose this is when I realized the power of a network, which I think, for someone like me and coming from where I come from, is the only way into this world that’s well guarded, because if you’re an outsider, a complete outsider, there’s no real door that you know to get into. I felt that if I wanted to break in I needed to learn from someone who is a legend. I ended up basically stalking Mr. Suresh Seetharaman, the first national creative director for JWT in India and co-founder of Virgin Comics, until he gave me a job as his creative assistant. That really set me on a creative path.