On one of less awkward weekly catch-up calls, Bees and Kablers got together to play a game Mary had devised. The game involved answering a bunch of questions from “What was your worst date?” to “What’s the silliest thing you believed as a child?”.
The idea was to help us get to know each other better. One of the questions was, “What is something about you that others find most surprising?” This can be a tricky question to answer: we don’t always know how other people perceive us; we can only make assumptions. Nevertheless, we all answered the question (“I’m an introvert”, “I’m 26 even though I look 12”).
Nikita, our Head of Digital Engagement at The Kable and Social Media Strategist at Bee, was the last person to answer. I don’t remember what she said, but I recall what Karina said to her after: “When someone meets you for the first time, they don’t realise how much rage you hold inside you.”
I’ll get back to the rage part in a while.
First, let me introduce you to our Nikita.
Nikita Mehta spent six years of her adult life studying communication. It started with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electronic Media, stemming from her fascination with production control rooms and everything that goes on behind the scenes of media production. Soon, alternate media caught her attention, and she studied Community Media (PGD) at TISS. There, she realised that her technical aptitude wasn’t at the level she would like it to be, so she went on to do a Master’s Degree in Culture and Media Studies from the University of Hyderabad to strengthen her theoretical knowledge.
Nikita’s first job was at a community radio station during her undergraduate years. She spent most of her time photocopying scripts and handing them over to voice artists, running rehearsals, and creating first edit drafts of skits. Later, she managed to get her own talk show, Yuva Shakti, where her job was to get college students together to discuss current affairs. Her salary was the highlight of this job – Rs. 2,500 per month!
After finishing her studies, Nikita started her career as a print journalist in 2016. Three years later, she changed her career path to work as a communication professional with an incubator. She had to move back to her hometown due to the pandemic, where she and a couple of friends who were freelancing from home decided to come together and offer collective B2C and SM marketing services to startups. Their initiative was called Liden. Karina noticed her work on Liden’s social media pages when she applied for a role at The Kable.
Nikita owns The Kable’s digital engagement role and drives the visual narratives for Bee’s customers in the education space.
I asked Nikita what working at Bee has been like. She says she loves the remote work policy, which is rooted in effective communication strategies that make project management a breeze. “I have been able to do what I really like – travel”, she adds.
Asynchronous communication was a bit of a challenge at first, she admits. It took her a while to get used to the fact that she didn’t have to be always available. Instead, the focus is on getting the work done right and on time.
Putting her writing out there was scary at first because Nikita had never thought of herself as a writer. But the environment at Bee helped her overcome her hesitation, and now she’s one of the writers at Just One Thing (more on that later).
“Connecting and leading conversations with strangers is hard at times. I need lots of rehearsals and practice before every call”, she confesses. “But slowly and steadily, with practice, this too will become easier.”
Nikita enjoys the abundance of opportunities to flex her creative muscles. “There is always room to do more, add, suggest, and try new things.” Her favourite thing about her job at Bee though is that it consciously makes room for growth and evolution. What she finds most exciting is what Karina told her when she was hired – that this is a two-way street. She (like all of us) was not hired for her current skills but for what she would evolve them into. She’d grow at pace with the company.
And now, we come back to Nikita’s rage. Her white-hot anger is easily overlooked because of her quietly reserved ways but looms large in her writing for Just One Thing.
On Just One Thing, we write about interesting things we find on the Internet. Nikita’s fiery writing has drawn our collective attention to how to be an ally in a casteist society, problematic depictions of love in cinema, misogyny and hypersexuality in comics, queerbaiting in entertainment and representations of Black culture and history in popular culture.
Nikita’s rage is the pure rage of someone who sees what’s wrong with the world and calls it out. Increasingly, she is the voice of our collective conscience here at Bee.
Subscribe to Beeswax
Never miss a blog post from Bee. We write about brand strategy, storytelling, inbound, keeping promises, small business and remote. Sign up to receive our updates via email.
"*" indicates required fields