About Us
Hi there!
We are Maanya & Sanjana, the founders of Hasrat and strategic communication graduates from Columbia University. A little bit about ourselves: We first met in September 2018, as first-year graduate students at Columbia University. We didn’t become friends right away, but there were many instances that made us realize that we would be friends eventually and for life. Like those late nights in the library with our mouths stuffed with hot chocolate and pizza, that one Bollywood movie which had us both on the edge of our seats laughing uncontrollably at something only the two of us found funny from an audience of fifty, and the fact that we didn’t see eye to eye on everything, but were open to talking about it. During our time at Columbia and thereafter, we talked openly, shared secrets and ate… a lot.
In April 2020, we participated in the United Nations’ Global Call to Creatives to help spread awareness about COVID-19. We created content surrounding the messages of ‘Being Kind’ and ‘Physical Distancing’.
As we worked on this project, we realized our joint passion for public advocacy and awareness and utilizing our communication skill-set to inspire social behavioral change.
That’s how Hasrat was born.
We’ve started this portal for many reasons but the biggest among them all is our hasrat – our quest to fulfill our desire to change social behaviour. As young communication professionals, we work beyond industry demarcations to help influence social behavioural change.
Hasrat is a work of art, a compilation of ideas from various parts of India and beyond by writers like us who want to change things for the better. Our aim is to promote the work of writers who want to bring about positive change by expressing their opinion or presenting research on various aspects pertaining to society, organizations, cultures, and professional development from a perspective that may be:
strategic, design-oriented, research-driven, ethics-based, historically inclined, development-focused, among others.
We’ve started Hasrat not just to inspire people like us to think and present on a large scale, but also to give ourselves a platform where we can compile all the work we are so dearly proud of.
We are the women of today. Plainly so – we are imperfect with a हसरत to make the world perfect.