I am on a journey: a journey through PR. It’s a smorgasbord of incidents, achievements, failures and emotions, a picture so vivid that it’s humbling to imagine but almost impossible to paint. The journey has been enriching. It’s sensible to listen to your mind, but following your heart pays off as well — that’s what I did when I moved to Singapore … to Rice.

However, experiencing and exploring PR in India was a great lesson.

India is considered a high-context society, where non-verbal cues, social and physical contexts and existing relationships between communicating participants may ascribe much of the meaning.

A successful PR professional is generally at the centre of a large network of kin relations. Thus, when the need arises, many people are able to move along the intricate channels of consanguinity and affinity to establish personal contact with influential persons. Interestingly this network of kin can be extended artificially. Key influencers are often invited to family occasions or become marriage witnesses or even made into godparents. These relationships are constantly manipulated to bring individuals in touch with decision makers. That is the reality of Relations that are very Public.

However, we are all individuals similar to others in many ways and yet very different to each other. It is these differences that make us who we are and determine our evolution as individuals and professionals. Hence, every PR professional finds his own unique way of approaching the profession.

The new age professional outlook and digital outreach is shaping the way the communications industry is surging ahead and India is no different. PR 2.0 is a harmonious mix of traditional media outreach and social media engagement. The web is blurring a lot of cultural boundaries but is also creating its own culture. The media are changing, platforms are transforming, technology is evolving and so is the communications industry. But every change has to have its cultural context to be relevant. Be it the fluid culture of the web or the dynamic mix in reality, the PR industry still thrives on the human connection.

In Singapore what struck me the most is the organised way of life. Everything here has a pattern and so does our profession. It is still early days for me in exploring the industry and its cultural dynamics. However, PR here has a façade of global professionalism but I somehow feel a very strong undercurrent of local socio-cultural perspectives. At the end of the day this business of managing reputation and building brands depend on how we connect to the Public.  And that brings us back to the same old concept of building relationships.

How much ever we strategise, somehow in PR the bottom-line stands: whatever you need, if you don’t know somebody who can provide it, you know somebody, who knows somebody who can!