CHANDA.NOW / DOSSIER / 2026
MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA · STRATEGY & CULTURE
RA/JEEV
AB/ OUT
FOLLOWING SENSE IN WORDS, BRANDS, FOOD, BREATH.
POSITIONING LINE:
Brand strategist and writer based in Mumbai. Vice President of Strategy at Chlorophyll across foresight, employee value proposition (EVP) research, and institutional positioning. Independent practice at rxworks for founders and platforms. Training in the 900-hour ATTC at The Yoga Institute, Santacruz. Writing Borrowed Sense on etymology and ritual. Cooking daily and running a home supper club.

STUDIES ↘

TRAINING & RESEARCH
2026
900-Hour Advanced Teacher Training (ATTC)
Asana, pranayama, anatomy, and pedagogy under classical discipline. Examining the condition of the sense-making instrument.
@ THE YOGA INSTITUTE
2026
Samkhya Karikas & Advaita Vedanta
Investigating the dualist grammar of Ishvarakrishna alongside Adi Shankaracharya's non-dual demolition in the Nirvana Shatakam.
@ INDEPENDENT STUDY
2026
Smriti Project / Food Knowledge Sovereignty
Documenting oral, intergenerational culinary technique and resisting ultra-processed substitution in middle-class Indian kitchens.
@ SMRITI / NGFP

WORK ↘

ACTIVE APPOINTMENTS
2026
Vice President of Strategy
Leading institutional foresight, EVP research, and brand architecture across healthcare, retail, residential, and hospitality.
@ CHLOROPHYLL
2026
Principal & Founder
Strategic narrative architecture for founders, investor pitch decks, and commercial positioning models that survive due diligence.
@ RXWORKS
2026
Author & Columnist
Weekly essays on language, etymology, ritual, and the small structural truths that hide inside grammar. Book in development.
@ BORROWED SENSE
2014–24
Brand Planning & Strategy Leadership
Held planning and strategy roles across institutional platforms, commercial real estate, and consumer brands.
@ OGILVY / DDB / BSE
OPERATIONAL TRIAD ↘
01 / PALATE

THE KITCHEN

Ten years of daily home cooking. A paid weekend supper club. 21 cornerstone recipes where theory dies immediately if the heat is wrong.
02 / DISCIPLINE

THE MAT

900 hours at The Yoga Institute, Santacruz. Testing the learner through breath, repetition, posture, fatigue, and stillness.
03 / LANGUAGE

THE PAGE

Borrowed Sense essays, brand strategy at Chlorophyll, and founder narratives at rxworks. Turning clouds of behavior into hardened nouns.
LI/ BRARY
16 TEXTS THAT HOLD UP UNDER RE-READING. IN HAND-THEM-TO-YOU ORDER.
01
Hermann Hesse · [Philosophy]

Siddhartha

The book most likely to be misread as a teenage paperback and most worth re-reading at thirty. Hesse's gift is that Siddhartha doesn't arrive at wisdom through doctrine — he arrives by trying everything and finding the river. I read it first as a story and only later as an argument: that experience is not the obstacle to enlightenment but its only honest path.
02
Adi Shankaracharya · [Advaita]

Nirvana Shatakam

Six verses, each beginning with negation — not the mind, not the breath, not the senses — escalating into the only positive assertion that survives the demolition: cidānanda-rūpaḥ (चिदानन्दरूपः). Reading this as a strategist taught me that good positioning subtracts; it doesn't add. The text is a frame.
03
Ishvarakrishna · [Philosophy]

Samkhya Karikas

The grammar before Vedanta. Samkhya admits two — purusha the silent witness, prakriti the active field — and resolves through discrimination rather than collapse. There's something honest about a system that makes the structure visible before erasing it.
04
Byron Sharp · [Strategy]

How Brands Grow

The book I argue with most often and still recommend. Sharp's empirical demolition of differentiation-orthodoxy and his case for mental and physical availability is uncomfortable for anyone trained in brand semiotics. I think he's 70% right and the missing 30% is exactly where my work lives.
05
Phil Knight · [Memoir]

Shoe Dog

The most honest founder memoir I've read because Knight is bad at performing the role. He's anxious, indecisive, frequently broke, often wrong — and Nike happens anyway. Craft testimony in its purest form: someone who did the thing describing doing the thing, dust still on him.
06
Patanjali · TYI · [Yoga]

Yoga Sutra

Vivekananda's translation is the bridge — Sanskrit to English without losing the muscle of the original — and The Yoga Institute's commentary is what makes it usable for daily practice rather than the seminar room: the how, when, with what disposition.
07
John Berger · [Visual Culture]

Ways of Seeing

The book that taught me that looking is a position, not a neutral act. Images carry the politics of the time that produced them, and seeing is therefore an ideological practice. The chapter on the female nude is still the cleanest twenty pages of cultural criticism in English.
08
Yotam Ottolenghi · [Food]

Simple

The cookbook I've actually cooked from most. What's simple here is the yield per unit of effort, not the technique. Ottolenghi treats the home cook as someone capable of seriousness, not someone to be patronised with shortcuts.
09
Alan Fletcher · [Design]

The Art of Looking Sideways

A 1,000-page collage from one of the great graphic designers, organised by association rather than topic. Creative work is mostly seeing connections others miss, and the way to train that is to graze widely and remember strangely.
10
Peter Mark Roget · [Language]

Roget's Thesaurus

The original 1852 edition — organised by concept, not alphabet. English mapped by the relationships between ideas rather than spellings. I open it when I'm stuck on a sentence and find that what I was missing wasn't a word but a direction.
11
Dave Barry · [Writing]

Guide to Guys

Humour is a structural skill, not a personality trait. Barry's joke architecture — setup, false summit, sharper turn — is studyable, and he does it about a topic that most writers either over-elevate or condescend to.
12
Nassim Taleb · [Strategy]

Skin in the Game

The portable central idea: anyone making asymmetric claims should bear asymmetric consequences. I apply it to strategy work constantly — the people most loudly recommending a path are usually the people most insulated from its failure.
13
Chris van Tulleken · [Food]

Ultra-Processed People

The Indian middle-class kitchen is being colonised by ultra-processed food faster than the literature is catching up. Oral, intergenerational food knowledge isn't just being lost; it's being displaced by a corporate substitute that pretends to be food.
14
David Bohm · [Philosophy]

Wholeness & Implicit Order

A serious physicist argues that reality is an unbroken whole in which apparent separateness is a feature of how we abstract, not how the universe is. Reading Bohm alongside Advaita is uncanny; the vocabularies differ but the structure rhymes.
15
Marco Pierre White · [Memoir]

The Devil in the Kitchen

A confession of the cost of obsession. White lets the damage show. Useful as a counterweight during the year I started the supper club: a warning about what cooking-as-identity becomes when it eats everything else.
16
Anthony Bourdain · [Food]

Kitchen Confidential

The cadence of someone who was actually in service, not a critic outside the line. I return to it for the sentences. The sentences taught me how to write about cooking like cooking is real work.
TA/ BLE
THE KITCHEN, IN PIECES. TEN YEARS OF DAILY COOKING & THE MUMBAI SUPPER CLUB.
01 // Ten-Year Habit · Daily Baseline

The Tuesday Dal

INGREDIENTS:
Tur dal, water, salt, turmeric, ghee, cumin, garlic, Kashmiri chilli, hing, tomato, ginger, fresh coriander.
METHOD:
Pressure-cook dal with salt and turmeric. In a heavy pan, heat ghee; crackle cumin, sliced garlic, hing, and dried Kashmiri chilli. Blister tomatoes and ginger; pour the sizzling tadka over dal. Simmer six minutes. Finish with coriander.
Rule: Consistency over novelty. Let cumin toast dark enough to smoke without turning bitter.
02 // Supper Club Opener · Tokyo Counter

Roasted Aubergine & Miso Butter

INGREDIENTS:
Japanese aubergines, white miso, unsalted butter, sake, raw sugar, fresh lime, toasted sesame, scallions.
METHOD:
Halve aubergines, score diamond lattice deep. Roast cut-side up at 220°C for 22 minutes. Whisk softened butter with miso, sake, and sugar over low heat. Spoon over hot aubergines, shower with lime, sesame, and scallions, blast under broiler 90 seconds.
Rule: The lime isn't garnish; the acid cuts through the miso fat to wake up the palate.
03 // Inherited Recipe · Structural Defense

Borrowed Kheer

INGREDIENTS:
Full-fat milk (reduced by 1/3), aged basmati, raw sugar, green cardamom, saffron in warm milk, slivered almonds, pistachios.
METHOD:
Gently reduce full-fat milk for 30 minutes over low heat. Add hand-crushed basmati; simmer 20 minutes until grains surrender starch. Add saffron and cardamom. Add sugar ONLY once rice is fully dissolved in milk. Cook 5 minutes more, fold in nuts.
Rule: Never add sugar until rice is cooked. Sugar seals the grain and prevents milk absorption.
04 // Coastal Acid · Supper Club

Charred Pepper & Kokum Pachadi

INGREDIENTS:
Red bell peppers, wild kokum skins, roasted cumin, black salt, cold-pressed mustard oil, green chillies, curry leaves.
METHOD:
Char peppers over open flame until pitch black. Sweat, peel, slice into ribbons. Extract kokum in warm water. Toss peppers with kokum, tempered mustard seeds, and fried curry leaves.
Rule: Never rinse charred peppers under water; you wash away all the smoky oil.
05 // Table Condiment · Raw Heat

Hand-Pounded Coriander Thecha

INGREDIENTS:
Spicy green chillies, garlic cloves, fresh coriander stalks, roasted peanuts, sea salt, groundnut oil.
METHOD:
Blister chillies and garlic lightly in oil. Transfer to stone khalbatta with peanuts, sea salt, and coriander. Coarsely pound into a jagged paste.
Rule: Pound, never blend. Blending shears into a wet puree; a mortar crushes into textured punch.
06 // Evening Snack · Ferment & Fat

Slow Confit Garlic on Toast

INGREDIENTS:
Whole garlic cloves, olive oil, dried chillies, fresh rosemary, thick salted labneh, country sourdough.
METHOD:
Submerge garlic in olive oil with rosemary and chilli. Bake at 110°C for 2.5 hours until golden and spreadable. Toast sourdough, spread cold salted labneh, crush warm confit garlic over top.
Rule: Keep heat strictly below simmer; boiling garlic turns it bitter.
WR/ ITING
BORROWED SENSE: ESSAYS ON ETYMOLOGY, RITUAL, BRAND, AND LINGUISTIC ARCHITECTURE.
October 2026 · Language

On Adjectives

Say your own name in your head right now. Feels odd, doesn’t it. Slightly theatrical and slightly weird. Like high-fiving yourself. Because the inside of our head runs entirely on 'I'. Our name is a thing that happens outside us, in other people's mouths. Noun comes from Latin nomen, Sanskrit nāman. A noun can stand alone. An adjective cannot. An adjective is a property permanently in need of something to hang on. What if your name is an adjective? Blue is a report filed by an observer outside of you... I make nouns for a living. That is what brand strategy is: taking a loose cloud of behaviours and performing grammar until it hardens into a noun.
READ ESSAY ON SUBSTACK ↗
October 2026 · Ritual

On Enough

You know the sound. Somebody is pouring, and your hand goes over the glass: Bas bas bas. In an Indian house, bas from the eater is a request and bas? from the feeder is an accusation. Kaafi used to mean suffice, now it means quite a lot. We had a perfectly good word for sufficiency and spent the whole thing on abundance. Meanwhile, we ration what is free and binge what is expensive: affection is free, yet we measure it carefully; work, worry, and screen time go in without measure. What if moderation isn't cutting back, but starting at enough and adding from there?
READ ESSAY ON SUBSTACK ↗
September 2026 · Systems

On Variance

The trap of modern planning is designing for the average customer, average day, or average emotional state. But life doesn't happen at the mean; it happens in the fat tails of mood, accident, and context. Character isn't what you do on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon; it's the structural shape you hold when variance spikes.
READ ESSAY ON SUBSTACK ↗
August 2026 · Practice

On Following

Following is not submission. In Sanskrit, anugamana implies walking behind someone close enough to place your feet in their footprints. In cooking, following a recipe is a mechanical obedience until you understand why the onions must soften before the garlic arrives. True following is how craft transmits across generations.
READ ESSAY ON SUBSTACK ↗
July 2026 · Finitude

On Death

Finitude is the organizing grammar of everything worth caring about. An immortal being cannot make a sacrifice, cannot take a courageously irreversible step, and cannot appreciate a sunset because there will always be another trillion of them. The boundary is what creates the shape.
READ ESSAY ON SUBSTACK ↗
YO/ GA
ON TESTING THE LEARNER. 900-HOUR ATTC AT THE YOGA INSTITUTE, SANTACRUZ.
"YOGA ASKS A MORE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION: WHAT IS THE CONDITION OF THE INSTRUMENT DOING ALL THIS SENSE-MAKING?"

I am still figuring out why yoga has begun to matter this much. The obvious answers are true, but insufficient: curiosity, discipline, philosophy, health, a wish for a practice that survives thirty years.

The deeper answer is that most of my life has been built around sense-making. I listen, decode, structure, name. I have trained the mind to find the sentence beneath the noise.

I no longer trust insight if it exists only in the mind. I want to know what remains true when it has to pass through breath, repetition, discomfort, fatigue, posture, refusal, and time.

That is why this appeals to me: not because yoga is another subject to learn, but because it is a way of testing the learner. It is where the learner is being examined.

THE THREE THREADS ↘

THREAD 01
The Grandfather's Practice
A lifelong morning discipline in Bihar and Bengal — devoid of contemporary wellness theater, quiet and steadfast.
BIHAR / BENGAL
THREAD 02
The Mind-Body Asymmetry
Healing the fracture when conceptual dexterity moves ten times faster than physical presence.
SOMATIC GROUNDING
THREAD 03
The Hedge Against Exhaustion
An anchor outside market recognition, client deliverables, and professional performance.
INCOME HEDGE
WO/ RK
BRAND STRATEGY, FORESIGHT & NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR INSTITUTIONS & FOUNDERS.

PRINCIPLES ↘

FOUR CANONS
01.0
Positioning Subtracts, Never Adds
Like the Nirvana Shatakam's systematic negation, true positioning defines what you are willing to sacrifice, not what adjectives you can claim.
SUBTRACTION
02.0
Mental Availability Over Difference
Brands grow through memory salient accessibility at category entry, not esoteric micro-distinctions.
AVAILABILITY
03.0
A Brand is a Frozen Verb
A company is a cloud of continuous behaviors. Strategy is grammar performed until those behaviors temporarily harden into a noun.
GRAMMAR
04.0
Skin in the Game
Anyone recommending asymmetric strategic shifts must share in the consequence of failure. Theory without accountability is theater.
ASYMMETRY
TE/ AM
HOUSEHOLD OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE & EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL. MUMBAI HQ.
HUMAN // 01

RAJEEV CHANDA

PRINCIPAL STRATEGIST, WRITER, COOK
Lives in Mumbai with partner and two cats. Trains at The Yoga Institute, writes Borrowed Sense, cooks daily, reads Samkhya before bed.
FELINE // 02

BABU

DIR. OF SURVEILLANCE, WESTERN WINDOW
Senior in tenure, calmer in temperament. Monitors pigeon traffic and changing Mumbai late-afternoon light. Has never missed a deadline. Sleeps on kitchen counter despite repeated warnings.
FELINE // 03

TOTKI

HEAD OF DISTURBANCES & ACOUSTICS
Junior in tenure, louder in execution. Conducts acoustic vocal studies between 4:00 and 5:00 am. Maintains unauthorised relationship with the kitchen dustbin. Does not believe in closed doors.
CO/ NTACT
COMMUNICATIONS, DOSSIERS, AND SUPPER CLUB INQUIRIES.
DIRECT
Electronic Mail
Confidential memos, founder strategy inquiries, and long-form correspondence.
rajeevschanda@gmail.com
PUBLIC
Substack Publication
Borrowed Sense: essays on language, ritual, and grammar.
rajeevschanda.substack.com
CAREER
LinkedIn Network
Strategy case studies, foresight summaries, and institutional updates.
linkedin.com/in/rajeevchanda
STUDIO
Geographic Anchor
Physical kitchen, library, and mat practice.
MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA