Her energy is infectious. The moment she walks in, you are struck by two things; her style – modern yet underplayed and her clear smile that reflects her soul. Meeting Tarika Gulabani was a pleasant surprise. She is everything that one assumes Belgaum girls can rarely do. It must have helped that she is a Sindhi, a community with an innate fire-in-the-belly to make it big in business, but that is just being presumptuous. After you’ve spent like, a couple of hours with her, you start to understand that this girl is all about focus, intellect, guts and hard work.
She works with Zee TV as a producer for shows like Deal or No Deal (reality game show), Agent Raghav (finite fiction series), &tv Holi event,The Voice India Kids, & It’s Diwali (Diwali event), The Voice of India Season 2, and is also working on developing two new reality shows. Quite a lot, considering she’s been at Zee only since 2015. ‘Time is my biggest challenge’ she says, referring to her erratic and unpredictable schedules at work.
Her day begins at 7 in the morning and ends at 2 in the night. ‘You tend to forget you’re a human when you’re working this kind’ she says with a hearty laugh that amply shows she enjoys whatever she’s doing. An alumnus of St. Joseph’s (and it is clear within the first 10 seconds!), GSS, Jain College where she did her BBA and Manipal Uniersity’s School of Communication where she did her MA in Corporate Communication, Tarika’s career trajectory has been well planned.
She owes a lot of her success at a young age to the internships that she did in college and post education. MRF Tyres, Coffee Day Express and JWT are names that mean real-time work experience as an intern. Dance, modeling, editing for her University’s newsletter, anchoring, she’s done everything that can possibly add to a student’s repertoire of experiences. When she interacts with my MBA students, she’s at ease with them, at one moment advising them, then cajoling them to join in the tasks and the next moment, she’s bursting in laughter at her own self. She jots several points on the board, listing out job opportunities in media, sounding extremely mature as she explains each role. Her language is crisp, her vocabulary rich and soon, it’s clear that her training in Corporate Communication has exposed her to speaking to the point using just the right words and phrases.
At some point, one wonders how she could do it all, but then when you enjoy what you’re doing, you never feel tired. Tarika clearly has long innings in the media.