A good story begins long before the first question is asked.
Sangeeta Wadhwani has spent a large part of her life around interesting people. More importantly, she has spent it figuring out what makes them interesting.
There is a particular kind of person who can walk into a room, listen to a conversation for ten minutes and know where the real story is. Sangeeta has made a career out of being that person.
Her education part liberal arts, part literature, part creative writing probably helped. So did growing up between Hong Kong, Taiwan and India. But the real education came later: television sets, magazine floors, celebrity interviews, editors’ rooms, photographers, deadlines and the peculiar theatre of putting a person on a cover and convincing thousands of strangers that they ought to care.
She has worked across television and some of India’s most influential magazines, from Society and ELLE to L’Officiel India and HELLO!. But reducing her to those mastheads misses the more interesting part. Sangeeta has lived through several versions of Indian media from the glossy magazine era to the first exuberant years of the internet to the increasingly complicated world of celebrity, influence and personal brands.
She has watched reputations being made. She has watched them being manufactured. She knows the difference.
That distinction matters.
Because Sangeeta’s real strength is not access to remarkable people; it is an instinct for what to do once she has it. She is curious without being star-struck, interested without being deferential and, one suspects, far more interested in the conversation after the obvious questions have run out.
It is an instinct we want to bring into Clause.
We are building a publication that believes the most interesting thing about a lawyer, a leader or an institution is rarely the thing already written in the biography. The job is to look again. To ask the question that wasn’t on the prepared list. To find the contradiction, the ambition, the private obsession or the idea that explains the public persona.
Sangeeta understands that territory instinctively.
And perhaps that is what makes her a particularly fitting part of Clause: she has spent decades asking the world to look beyond the obvious and giving it a reason to keep reading.
Sangeeta Waddhwani is a contributing author to Clause.