My favourite quote:
It is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves living in a world that no longer exists – Eric Hoffer
To pluck some words from Satya Nadella, I have enrolled in more online courses than I could finish.
My brief curriculum vitae:
Umesh Ponnusamy
Advertising Copywriter & Web Content Editor
– 1995 B.Sc. Visual Communication from Loyola College, Chennai, India
Specialisation – Copywriting.
– 1994-1995 Junior Copywriter – Purple Patch Copywriting Services, Chennai.
– 1995-1998 Copywriter, Goldwire Communications, Chennai.
– 1998 to 2023 – Copywriter/Web Content Editor, Portal Administrator, Dubai United Arab Emirates.
TLDR – Detailed Writeup I had submitted while enrolling for Seth Godin’s altMBA course in 2015:
I work in the Digital Customer Experience team of the government Telco and ISP in Dubai mainly maintaining content on corporate portals and websites. It’s a very intensive job as we have to get campaigns up and running on the web at very short notices to capitalize on market opportunities. Being the only specialist web content editor and with lots of work pouring in from different departments, I take extra effort to ensure that the final content that goes online is consumer-friendly and free of corporate jargon.
My current most pressing challenge is to find more creatively satisfying avenues where I can put my creative thinking and copywriting skills to better use. Though I love my job, its now turned into a mechanical monster with little scope for my other creative skills.
Some of my previous online personal projects
– We ran an online music magazine for a couple of years with a group of like-minded music fans – we all had met in a music forum and were spread out all over the world. Being a copywriter and a self-taught webmaster, I set the editorial tone, created the website and managed the site, even creating content, while the rest contributed articles and content. The link from the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030608033351/https://www.dhwanii.com/
I started an online city-based forum for creativity along with a friend. To attract enrollment, we offered a free print magazine that I myself desktop published and printed. I advertised this free offer in all the online city-based forums, websites etc. and got around 300 subscribers within a week. We organised monthly offline meetings to plan creative projects etc. Though I no longer am involved, the group is still running with my friend now organizing treks and theater activities regularly.
I learned that people liked the idea of a free print magazine and one day I plan to resurrect this.
I took a major risk putting my monthly earnings and savings into a company run by entrepreneurs who ploughed any profits or income into other sick businesses or entrepreneurs who needed support…as a result the company was always in debt….though I lost a lot of money the whole thing was a great education meeting different kinds of entrepreneurs and people and learning the pros and cons of different businesses.
3) I run a network of wordpress sites centred around my country of domicile (United Arab Emirates – UAE), curating content based on categories that interested me:
1) UAECreatives.com (a blog record of interesting ad campaigns in the UAE)
2) UseUae.com (a blog of useful information related to the UAE).
3) UAETamil.com (a blog about the tamil community in the UAE)
4) UAEWorldRecords.com (a blog about the different world records set in the UAE).
5) UAEWebOfLife.com (a blog about UAE based web services, forums etc.)
My favourtie Blog: Doodlers Anonymous
My favourtite Book: Autobiography of a Yogi
My favourite Music: My own compositions soundcloud.com/swarlokohms