Hello beautiful people. 

Welcome back to Photo Country.

This is Episode 36 and I have a very special guest for you.
He is none other than Kavi Arasu, an old mate of mine from Madurai, my hometown. 

He is a storyteller and using stories he helps organizations become better at what they do. 

Both of us pretty much grew up together right from school and I don’t think both of us imagined that life would take such directions for us. But it did and here we are. I recorded this conversation long time back when I was starting out in podcasting. And I thought it was time I dusted out some of my old conversations and revisit them. So, here we go. 

They say change is the only constant. He sees that as a common thread running through life and the work that he does with organisations.

More than learning. I think the theme that's resonated with me ever since I started out in advertising many, many years ago is change. Change and how people are able to adapt and craft relevance for themselves in the space of the changes that they're seeing around them. That has been the common thread, and learning is an important constituent of that.

What causes the change? One of the, one of the reasons that change happens finally. So learning is more one of the reasons why change happens, and I'm more wedded to the change than to learning in itself.

He was inspired by the stories that his grandmother told him. Influenced by this, he was motivated to use them as a powerful tool to influence change.

We learn through stories. My greatest influence in my early years was my grandmother, and the only reason why I would love to go back to her and talk to her constantly was, She kept telling me a lot of stories, and even now some of the, some of her stories are the cornerstones that have shaped my values, my thinking, and some of them helped me tied over difficulties, faced life in much trying times.

Stories and images are twin sides of a coin, I believe. Kavi uses images to tell stories and uses them as a learning tool in his work.

Pictures have become a very important component of the change work that I do in organizations. I show a person a particular picture, and I show the same picture to someone else in the same room, and they have two different stories to tell. And that in itself is very illustrative for leaders even at the levels of a board room.

We might have taken different paths, but at the end of the day, we are all storytellers. Thanks, Kavi. It was a very insightful conversation. I got a lot out of it. I hope you did too. 

You can read Kavi’s stories on his blog - kaviarasu.com - To tell you the truth he is an amazing writer and you will definitely enjoy his stories on his blog. Keep doing what you do, Kavi. Looking forward to more stories from you. Do follow him on Instagram where he shares his photography - https://www.instagram.com/kavi.arasu/

In the next episode, we talk to a rocking photographer from Brazil, Juliano Baby. He is based in Auckland nowadays and he is a good friend of mine.