Hey, I’m Satvik.
I’m an entrepreneur, activist and marketing strategist based in Toronto.
I’ve had a fairly interesting ride so far. I grew up in India, found a career I never really planned for, spent years in advertising, moved to another country, started a company, and continued finding ways to stay involved with the social and political causes I care about.
I’m a democratic socialist, eternally curious, and probably a little too optimistic about our ability to make things better. I like creating things, meeting people, exchanging ideas and occasionally refusing to stay quiet when staying quiet would be much easier. :)
There’s still a lot I want to do. But here’s the story so far.
My Story
Chapter 01
Childhood
I spent much of my childhood as a dreamer. I wrote plays, acted in them, drew and painted, and went from one classic to another, discovering Hindi, English and Urdu literature along the way.
I grew up in a family with wonderfully eclectic tastes, so curiosity was never really confined to one subject. There was always another book to read, another idea to obsess over, or something new I wanted to make.
Chapter 02
University
Then, somewhat unexpectedly given all of that, I chose Mathematics. I had my very convincing reasons: I wanted to understand what I liked to think of as the language of the universe.
I graduated in Mathematics from Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi, and I genuinely loved the subject. There was something beautiful about starting with a problem that appeared impossible and slowly finding the logic hidden inside it. Mathematics felt, at times, like getting a little closer to understanding the language of the universe.
University life itself was equally formative. I loved being part of Delhi University, with its debates, student politics and dissent, while living in the national capital meant being surrounded by the political climate of the country every day.
It was an education in mathematics, certainly. But it was also three years of reading, arguing, questioning, participating, meeting people and developing ideas about the world that stayed with me long after university ended.
Chapter 03
Social Impact
During my graduation years, I also joined Chahal, a nonprofit that brought together young people from across Delhi to teach children from underserved communities.
I spent time teaching, working with other volunteers and participating in an effort that mattered to all of us. It became one of several ways in which social causes remained part of my life alongside everything else I was doing.
Some of my favourite photographs from those years come from that time.
Chapter 04
Advertising
Then came advertising.
In India, depending on the privilege you have, sometimes you choose the job and sometimes the job chooses you. In my case, the job chose me.
I entered marketing without having spent my childhood dreaming about campaigns or brands, but I ended up loving the industry. Over the next several years, I got to experience advertising from almost every direction: writing scripts, developing strategies, planning media, working with clients, solving performance problems, building campaigns, creating case studies and pitching ideas.
I worked across agencies including Cheil Worldwide, IPG Mediabrands and Grapes Worldwide, and had the opportunity to work with brands including Samsung, Coca-Cola, Honda Cars, BMW, Durex, Volvo and Bata.
There were campaigns I was immensely proud of, ideas that never made it past a presentation, awards, impossible deadlines, long nights, mistakes, friendships and a lot of learning along the way.
And somewhere through all of it, I found something that suited me remarkably well. Advertising gave me room to be creative without asking me to stop being analytical. I could obsess over an idea one moment and numbers the next. For someone who had spent years thinking those were two very different sides of himself, that felt pretty good.
Chapter 05
New Country, New Life
In 2022, I moved to Canada.
Moving countries changes more than your address. I had spent years understanding how my industry worked in India, knowing people, building relationships and becoming comfortable with the life I had created. Toronto gave me a chance to experience all of that from a different starting point.
I became much more hands-on with things I had previously worked on alongside specialists. I learned to shoot and edit, build websites, work more closely with technology and automation, understand the mechanics of running businesses, and generally became comfortable figuring things out myself.
At the same time, there was an entirely new life taking shape outside work: new friendships, communities, conversations and experiences in a country I was slowly learning to call home.
It has been challenging at times, obviously. It has also been a lot of fun.
Chapter 06
Entrepreneurship
Eventually, I decided to build something of my own.
I built Saura Labs around something I care deeply about: helping founder-led brands grow without sanding away the personality that made people care about them in the first place.
After years of working across different corners of marketing, I wanted to build a studio where strategy, creativity and growth did not have to live in different departments, and where understanding the person and conviction behind a business mattered as much as understanding the numbers.
Building Saura has meant learning a completely different side of work. There is a considerable difference between helping someone else solve a business problem and waking up knowing every problem is now yours. :)
I’m still building it, still learning, and still figuring out what it can become.
Chapter 07
Global Social Justice
There is another part of my life that has existed alongside all of this.
I have always cared deeply about politics and social justice, and over the years I have become increasingly willing to participate rather than simply have an opinion. I’m a democratic socialist, and my politics are rooted in a fairly simple belief: dignity, opportunity and freedom should not depend on how much money you have, where you were born, what caste or community you belong to, or how much power you hold.
That has meant participating in community initiatives, organizing, political campaigns and public demonstrations, and speaking about democracy, inequality, workers’ rights, education, climate action, secularism and the rise of far-right and majoritarian politics.
My life is now connected to both India and Canada, and so is much of the work I care about. I don’t think borders make injustice elsewhere irrelevant, and I don’t think having a career or building a company requires becoming politically invisible.
I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I would rather have an honest disagreement than pretend not to have convictions at all.
At Present →
These days, life is a mixture of building Saura, writing, activism, meeting interesting people, working on ideas I care about and trying to make enough room for whatever comes next.
There are companies I still want to build, things I want to write, causes I want to contribute to, places I want to see and plenty of ideas I haven’t figured out what to do with yet.
So this is less the end of the story and more where I happen to be right now.
