Paromita started her career as an entrepreneur of a homeopathic medicine manufacturing unit doing A-Z of all kinds of activities . . . starting from getting myriad Govt. licences to selling in far-flung small towns of Bengal. She accidentally ended up in a college class-room lecturing (only because she couldn't say 'no' to her then-mentor who taught at that College). Those days part-time lecturers were paid Rs. 400 per month. Somehow she ended up clearing NET, SLET and again found herself in St. Xavier's College as Lecturer in Commerce. Initially it was part-time, and then her teacher and collegue went away to Calcutta University on lien; and she got that position. An accidental-teacher, she ended up loving her job, and stayed with St. Xavier's for 7 years. She did her PhD in Marketing from BITS Pilani on psychographics and consumption of Kolkata college-goers (mainly because her students fascinated her, and she was curious to know what drives them). Then she hopped from ICFAI Business School to Xavier Insitute of Management Bhubaneswar to University of Pittsburgh. By this time, she got interested in trying to understand how societal problems may be seen through consumption and marketing lens. Her research interests moved from youth consumption to green marketing, from religious violence to gender violence, from eco-labeling to gender discrimination in education, from sustainable menstruation to North Indian masculinity and consumption, from critical marketing approach to examine clinical depression to well-being intervention for college students.
She was blessed to have Professor Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School mentor her post-doc work. She used a combination of ethnographic enquiry and ZMET, a patented consumer research tool, to complete this study.
After finishing her post-doctoral studies in US, she returned to Gurgaon to take the helm of affairs of a boutique consumer research and branding consultancy that was headquartered in Shanghai.
She is a keen follower of meditative practices, and her best life-lessons have come from being a single mother. She believes that life is beautiful, and is to be lived in the moment, with no regrets whatsoever.
2007 PhD Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani
Teaching Interests: Marketing Management, Consumer Behavior, Gender Violence and Social Marketing for Social Change, Retail Management
Research Interests: Sexual Violence and Consumption, Sustainable Menstruation and Social Entrepreneurship, Clinical Depression from Critical Marketing Perspective, Religious Violence and Social Marketing of Peace, Psychographics and Youth Consumption, Effect of big retail on small retail, Green Consumption of Apparel