The nonsense that is gut instinct
Conventional wisdom demands our instinct is always right. But all evidence suggests this we ignore instinct and rely on data
Charles Assisi
Co-founder and Director
Founding Fuel
Charles Assisi is an award-winning journalist with two decades of experience to back him. He is co-founder and director at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book The Aadhaar Effect. He is a columnist for Hindustan Times, one of India's most influential English newspaper. He is vocal in his views on journalism and what shape it ought to take in India. He speaks on the theme at various forums and is often invited by various organizations to teach their teams how to write.
In his last assignment, he wore two hats: That of Managing Editor at Forbes India and Editor at ForbesLife India. As part of the leadership team, his mandate was to create a distinctive business title in a market many thought was saturated. When Forbes India was finally launched after much brainstorming and thinking through, it broke through the ranks and got to be recognized as the most influential business magazine in the country. He did much the same thing with ForbesLife India where he broke from convention and launched the title to critical acclaim.
Before that, he was National Technology Editor and National Business Editor at the Times of India, during the great newspaper wars of 2005. He was part of the team that ensured Times of India maintained top dog status in Mumbai on the face of assaults by DNA and Hindustan Times.
His first big gig came in his late twenties when German media house Vogel Burda marked its India debut with CHIP a wildly popular technology magazine. He was appointed Editor and given a free run to create what he wanted. During this stint, he worked and interacted with all of Vogel Burda's various newsrooms across Europe and Asia.
Charles holds a Masters in Economics from Mumbai Universtity and an MBA in Finance. Along the way he earned the Madhu Valluri Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Polestar Award for Excellence in Business Journalism.
In his spare time, he reads voraciously across the board, but is biased towards psychology and the social sciences. He dabbles in various things that catch his fancy at various points. But as fancies go, many evaporate as often as they fall on him.
My contributions
106 articles written
An insider’s account of Indian telecom
Sam Pitroda's biography, Dreaming Big, provides much needed perspective from the inside into how Indian telecom came out of the boondocks to be a force to reckon with
The moral imperatives to a lie
Contemporary wisdom has it that any lie is offensive. But is it? As Krishna argues so lucidly in the Mahabharata, reasons exist to lie
These are the best days of my life
Indulge. Find purpose and your True North. Become an entrepreneur. And fall in love with life all over again
There's no such thing as work-life balance
People work all their lives to find peace in their golden years. The more hopeful try to find a balance as they work. Both ideas are flawed
The Gig Economy
From the ingenious and the enterprising to the borderline weird, people are clambering on to platforms like Fiverr to live a life of their choosing
Doctoral dissertations from a tea stall
Cheap labour and algorithms make everything you want done possible. But it's not going to take you any place significant. Unless you’ve got chutzpah like KV Kamath or Arun Maira
How to buy friends and influence people
Ever wondered how some influential (and not-so-influential) people and companies get popular on social media for no apparent reason? In a discreet operation, we investigate how.
Why it makes sense to outsource your life
There is only so much you can accomplish on any given day. So why not outsource the more mundane tasks? It's cheap, efficient and frees you up to do everything else
Confessions of a practising journalist
The state of journalism today came about because my tribe misused the power vested in them.