reya reji

Amateur Human.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

Me: Who gave you that LED light?
Friend: My sister.
Me: Oh, Syska LED.
#reyalisations

[Talented @TalentedAgency]

Behind glass buildings, earnings calls, and business headlines are the people, hunger and grit that shape every business to be unique.
We told this story - as one of their kind.

Work for @gocashfree shaped with At Odds Media, Sanjna Krishnan & Rohan Shetty aka Shor Music

[reya reji @reyalisations]

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to beauty ads? To that we would like to say “Pictures abhi baaki hai!” Here’s our
all-new skincare ad powered by
💯% Japanese Glutathione, Dishoom and Drama! GLOW MODE ON ft. @sreeleela14 for @Chicnutrix33217

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@iamsrk Not having a good couple of months :’( Will it get better?

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@RCBTweets With all our ingredients in place and the power-packed audio performance of boAt Aavante, the ‘Real Se Bhi Clear’ campaign came into being, ready to revive the love for the sound of the game.

Toh humne toh boAt Aavante pe
thok-thak definitely sunna.
Aap bhi sunn lo!

[reya reji @reyalisations]

What does it take to create a sonic-first piece of advertising?
Well, a lot of sonic-powered takes and re-takes. Creating this @RockWithboAt x @TalentedAgency campaign was all sorts of fun, with hilarious renditions of thoks, thaks and thadoks echoing through the set.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

With the sonic-hook cracked, next we moved on to landing the visual hook. While we definitely had the presence of @RCBTweets stars Virat, Liam and Krunal Pandya, the question we asked ourselves was who could be even more iconic and unexpected. The answer: Richard Illingworth.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@NammaBESCOM It’s been over 6 hours since the power went out at
HSR Sector 1
How much longer??!!! #bangalore #hsrlayout

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@gautxm I was literally working on an idea and wondering (very anxiously) if I should share it or not. Looks like I got my answer :)

[Gautam @gautxm]

On the performance anxiety of ideas

I’m in the business of ideas. So there's something darkly comic about how most ideas in my head are born insecure, like they have some sort of pre-existing performance anxiety. To a lot of us, new ideas often feel fragile; they come wearing armour, already apologetic for their existence. In those moments before we spit it out publicly, they seem particularly vulnerable, absolutely certain they're about to be laughed at. So folks like me, we develop this elaborate choreography around our thoughts. We perfect the dark art of pre-packaging thoughts, wrapping them in protective layers of ironic distance and careful curation, preparing them for a world that might not receive them kindly.

Or worse, we suffocate them before they can emerge. Take for example, the sheepishly delivered "thanks for coming to my TED talk" that follows a random opinion on something as mundane as coffee - it's both a joke and not a joke at all. Or how we often prefix "this might be a bad example, but.." before sharing a thought - it stems from the same fear, a way of cushioning potential criticism by acknowledging vulnerability first. Even the "I don't know, maybe it's just me" at the end of an honest perspective - a preemptive surrender that dismisses our own insight before anyone else can. They’re all intended to be self-protective, but are ironically self-defeating, becoming a defense mechanism that undermines our thoughts before they stand a chance.

What gets lost because of this choreography and extra packaging is the weird stuff - the half-formed thoughts, the 2am epiphanies that sound brilliant in the dark, but embarrassingly naive in daylight. Conversations that may often seem objectively ridiculous, but those where ideas could be wrong in interesting ways. We've managed to develop a kind of collective impostor syndrome about our own thoughts. Even as I write this, I'm aware of the meta-performance of writing about performance, the way this very post participates in the culture it critiques.

Problem is, this sort of perfection paralysis can be fatal inside creative agencies. At @TalentedAgency, we often say, "In here, the best idea always wins" or that "We're a safe space for outrageous thinking." But the truth is messier and isn’t so straightforward. Getting to the best idea takes work. I've witnessed so many brainstorming sessions where someone's ‘terrible’ idea becomes the spark that ignites something brilliant. But none of that happens if the first person is too afraid to speak up. Because you can't get to the brilliant ideas without going through some bad ones first. The process of creativity is rarely as linear as agencies make them sound to be.

I think about our creator agency, @TheNewThing_in 's ritual of ‘100 bad ideas’ at the start of some of their brainstorms - a practice that feels like collective permission to temporarily abandon carefully constructed personas of creative competence. More often than not, something genuinely innovative would emerge from this sanctioned chaos.

One of the most interesting parts of my week is a recurring one-on-one I’ve got scheduled with a colleague of mine who has a particular affinity for AI. Everyone at Talented will know exactly who I’m talking about. Ever so often he’ll bring up something he experimented with, pitch a creative idea around it and then suddenly stop halfway through, and say something along the lines of, "This sounds completely unhinged and isn’t cooked enough, I know!" But those are precisely the kind of intellectual leaps that might lead somewhere unexpected. The kind of connection that wouldn't emerge from more conventional, ‘serious’ thinking.

Perhaps, what you need most of all if you’re engaged in any kind of creative enterprise, is to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for throwing up a bad idea. People who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves. People who can hold you through those moments gently without immediately crushing your ideas under the weight of practical concerns or obvious objections. Those who understand that good ideas often start out looking like bad ones, that brilliance and foolishness are sometimes indistinguishable at first glance. At work, if this sounds like your immediate manager, then lucky you.

Everyone must have a responsibility to make this sort of vulnerability a part of unconscious culture. To create little pockets of resistance against the tyranny of always having to sound smart. To build spaces where we can be as stupid as we need to be in service of potentially being brilliant. To have the courage to let the process be as messy and unoptimized as they need to be until it isn’t.

My working theory, after years of watching ideas either flourish or wither in conference rooms is that teams that institutionalize this kind of psychological safety - that make it boring and normal to be wrong - will inevitably outperform those that maintain the fiction of perpetual competence. Those that come with a default permission to float bad ideas without fear of them being permanently attached to your personal brand, your professional identity or your entire sense of self. In a sense, the freedom to be wrong becomes the most valuable currency in the economy of ideas. And the ability to speak foolishly, the ultimate privilege.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@harekgun @BangaloreRoomi @MIBangalore @fmrbangalore @peakbengaluru @flatshareblr @twitrbnb DMed you!

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@r__kukreja @fmrbangalore @BangaloreRoomi @GruhamBot @twitrbnb DMed you!

[Gautam @gautxm]

Man, not to get all profound, but just watched this Coldplay hotstar stream from Ahmedabad rn, and it was so nice that it also kind of made me feel like we've been losing a little something as a species since some time. Things and experiences that brings us together, even for a brief moment where we're all rooting for the same thing. No tribalism. Just vibes. Also genuinely feels like it’s had the least percentage of snarky takes on twitter for something of this scale? Wildly rare.

Their entire time doing shows here have felt like a nice phase in time for genuine connection. And I don’t mean in a trite, 'music saves the world' sort of way. Sure it’s only a microcosm of society. It’s just that it’s so rare for anything to unite a significant majority of people anymore. We don’t root for the same things. We don’t see people feel togetherness on that scale. Just Chris Martin, his gang, and a bunch of strangers feeling the exact same thing like we've been seeing on all these concert reels from last week. Those silly alien masks. That coy Bumrah on screen moment towards the end today. Beautiful. Their brand (and band), proudly over-indexed on love, has shown how good it feels to be united, however briefly, by something uncomplicated and beautiful.

We’ve all mostly tended to be cynical about mass experiences like these and how accessible they've seemed - trained to be suspicious of anything that claims universality. Watching this even on TV felt like a temporary dismantling of those walls. An innocent throwback. Fascinating how a band, even in 2025, can become a kind of secular ritual.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@pratik_rat43451 Please try now.

[reya reji @reyalisations]

I have 2 VIP Lounge tickets for Coldplay Mumbai 21st Jan. Selling it exactly at COST PRICE from BMS with convenience fee included.Since it’s a VIP ticket it is the highest priced ticket among all categories. The tickets are 40k each inclusive of all charges. #Coldplayindia

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@ronitchavan Haven’t got a DM. Please send message again.

[Nikhil Unni @NikhilUnni20610]

How do you know when someone’s really enjoying their meal?

You hear it.
In their lip smacks. In their tongue clicks.
And in the case of a delicious bowl of ramen, you hear them sing through the loudest of slurps.

[Pooja Manek @boredmanek]

Attention players, it's your time to slurp and survive🍜🔴🟢
@TalentedAgency x @KnorrIndia x @NetflixIndia
Directed by Atul Kattukaran
Produced by @1DFilms

[reya reji @reyalisations]

For my sake, please stop.
@SRKUniverse @iamsrk

[reya reji @reyalisations]

@iamsrk Can we expect ‘jadoo ki jhappis’ in #Dunki? Special guest appearance maybe? :p #AskSRK