Jahnavi Dalmia

An aspiring entrepreneur, curious learner, passionate dancer, and fifth-generation member of a family business. Learning through research, movement and lived experience.

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Dance

Thirteen years. One constant.

Years in dance

Years Odissi

Odissi & Footloose

8+ years of classical training.
Footloose member since Class 6.

Classical roots. Collective expression.

Recommendation Note from Mrs. Dona Ganguly

“Dance taught me how to express myself. Business is teaching me how to turn ideas into impact.”

What Dance Taught Me

DISCIPLINETo keep showing up even when progress feels slow.

RESILIENCETo make mistakes without allowing them to define the next attempt.

CONFIDENCETo walk onto a stage despite the nerves.

TRUSTTo rely on a team and allow them to rely on me.

CREATIVITYTo see that there can be more than one way to tell the same story.

ADAPTABILITYTo move between classical and contemporary forms without losing my own identity.

PRESENCETo stop thinking about what came before or what comes next and inhabit one moment completely.

COMMITMENTTo stay with something long enough for it to become part of who I am.

More Than Dance

Dance has shaped parts of me that extend far beyond the stage.

It has taught me to be disciplined without losing creativity.

To take correction without fearing failure.

To collaborate without losing individuality.

To remain calm when something unexpected happens.

And to understand that confidence does not mean never being nervous—it means stepping onto the stage anyway.

These are lessons I carry into my classroom, my friendships and the way I approach unfamiliar challenges.

I may have spent thirteen years learning how to dance.

But in many ways, dance spent those thirteen years teaching me how to grow.

“Technique taught me control. Performance taught me courage. Dance taught me freedom.”

My Dance Portfolio

Videos

BOSCO 2024

bss 2024

Maitree 25

Manthan 2025

Youthopia 25

Youthopia 26

Research

“Five generations built the foundation. I’m discovering what I can build upon it.”

Impact of Packaging on the Purchase of Premium Teas

Growing up around my family’s tea business made me curious about something I had never really questioned before — why can the same tea feel completely different depending on how it is presented?

For this research, I explored how packaging influences the way consumers perceive premium tea, looking at elements such as design, origin, freshness, sustainability and gifting value. What interested me most was understanding that packaging is not just about making a product look attractive. It can help communicate where the tea comes from, how it should be stored, why it is different and what makes it worth choosing.

The project became especially meaningful when I began applying my findings to Bateli, our family tea brand. It made me think about how a brand can improve its packaging and storytelling without losing the accessibility and familiarity that existing customers already value.

More than anything, this research taught me to look at packaging as the bridge between the quality of a product and the person buying it.

t13

The Business of Influence: Evaluating Iconic Indian Ad Campaigns

I have always found it interesting that there are advertisements I remember even when I have not seen them for years. A phrase like “Daag Achhe Hain” or “Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye” immediately brings a brand to mind, and I wanted to understand why.

In this paper, I studied ten well-known Indian campaigns, including those by Amul, Surf Excel, Paytm, Cadbury, Vodafone, Fevicol and Tata Tea, and looked at how humour, emotion, cultural relevance, timing and storytelling helped them connect with consumers.

What surprised me was how differently each brand built that connection. Amul used topical humour and consistency, Cadbury became part of Indian celebrations, Paytm responded quickly to a major change in consumer behaviour, while Tata Tea used its advertising to speak about issues beyond the product itself.

Doing this research made me much more interested in consumer behaviour and brand strategy. I learnt that successful advertising is not only about selling something — it is about understanding what people relate to, remember and feel connected to.

For me, that is what makes marketing so interesting: the product matters, but so does the story people attach to it.

Bateli goes Digital

My family has been in the tea business since 1919. I am the upcoming fifth generation.

| grew up around tea, but until last year | had never thought about how someone discovers a tea brand and decides to buy it. Most of what we grow goes into other companies’ packets. Our own name, Bateli, was known mostly to the trade, and to our friends and family.

Tea Tasting

From Growing Up Around Tea to Learning to Understand It

My first real step into a business I have grown up hearing about.

Tea has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It has appeared in dinner-table conversations, visits to the gardens, packets lying around at home and discussions about quality, buyers, prices and blends that I usually listened to without completely understanding.

As the fifth generation of my family growing up around the tea business, I have always known that one day I would like to contribute to it. But I didn’t want my connection to tea to exist only because of my surname or family history. I wanted to begin learning the business for myself — and I wanted to start from the product itself.

So, while still in Class 12, I entered the tasting room.

What started as an attempt to understand the difference between one cup and another became one of my first experiences of looking at the family business not as a child who had grown up around it, but as someone who was genuinely curious about how it worked.

A Cup of Tea Is Actually Full of Clues

One of the things I loved most about tasting was discovering how much you can learn without anyone telling you the answer first.

The dry leaf gives you one set of clues.
The infused leaf gives you another.
The colour of the liquor tells you something else.
Then comes the aroma, taste and feel of the tea in your mouth.

A professional taster isn’t simply asking, “Do I like this?” They are thinking about what the tea is supposed to be, whether it has been processed correctly, how it compares with other teas and ultimately where it might fit commercially.

That was when I first began understanding that tasting sits at an interesting intersection of agriculture, manufacturing, consumer preference and business decision-making.

Things About Tea I Now Find Fascinating

Slurping is actually part of the technique.It isn’t bad manners in a tasting room. Drawing the tea in with air helps spread it across the mouth and makes its aroma and characteristics easier to notice.

Tea is judged comparatively.One cup can tell you whether you enjoy something. Putting several cups next to one another helps you understand why they are different.

Consistency matters enormously.Tiny differences in preparation can distort a comparison. I began understanding why professional tasting requires so much discipline and repetition.

The same characteristic isn’t always good or bad.A tea has to be judged according to what it is meant to be. That changed the way I thought about quality — not as one fixed definition, but as fitness for a particular consumer and purpose.

Good marketing can create the first purchase. The tea itself has to earn the second.

“Tea has always been part of my family’s story. This experience was one of the first times I began discovering what I want my own chapter in that story to look like.”

Certificates & Awards

Competing. Performing. Growing.

I have also represented the Bengal Rowing Club in inter-club dance competitions, an experience that pushed me beyond the familiar environment of school performances and challenged me to perform at a competitive level.

Dance Achievements (Interschool Competitions)

Modern High School for Girls (Troupes of War)

Dance Achievements (Intra-School Competitions)

Maitree (Inter-House Fest for Classes 9-12)

Xuberance Festival – School Representative

Led Modern High School’s contingent of 140+ participants across 40 events at St Xavier’s Kolkata for a prestigious three-day interschool festival.

I was the point of contact and in charge of managing the students, strategic planning, logistics coordination, communication, and scheduling for entire delegation

School secured 1st Place Overall & Best School Award (first in festival history) against 22 competitor schools

“I’ve grown up surrounded by answers. Now, I’m learning to ask my own questions.”

Internships · Jahnavi Dalmia · Class 12 · Summer 2026

Three Weeks in the Tasting Room

I grew up in a tea family. This summer, I finally learned how to taste it.

Born into tea, but new to tasting

My family has been in the tea business for 105 years, through the Bateli Tea Company. I can’t remember a time when tea wasn’t part of my life. It was the conversation at the dinner table, the smell on my father’s shirt when he came home, the foil sample packets lying on the sideboard that I wasn’t allowed to open.

I always knew there was a tasting room. I’d heard about it my whole life: the place where people in white coats slurped tea from spoons and decided what Bateli would buy and sell. But I had never sat at the bench myself. I loved tea. If you had asked me why one cup was better than another, though, I wouldn’t have had an answer.

So in the summer holidays before my Class 12 year got busy, I signed up for a three-week course in our tasting room, from 18 May to 5 June 2026. This page is the story of those three weeks: what I did, what I got wrong, and what I learned about tea and about myself.

Three weeks, three lessons

3/10

Week 1, Learning to prepare (18 to 22 May)

I came to taste and spent the first week learning to boil water. Every tea gets exactly 3 grams of leaf, 150 ml of water and the same five or six minutes, so that the only thing changing is the tea itself. It sounds simple. It isn’t. My first weighings were all over the place, I swapped two mugs and described an Assam as a Nilgiri for ten minutes, and by Wednesday my wrist ached from pouring in rhythm. At the end of the week I sat my first blind tasting and got 3 out of 10.

6/10

Week 2, Learning to taste (25 to 29 May)

This was the week of the slurp: loud, on purpose, so the tea sprays across your whole mouth and the aroma reaches your nose. Then I caught a cold and lost my sense of smell. It felt like a disaster, but it turned out to be the most useful thing that happened to me. With no aroma left, I could finally feel the parts of tea I’d been ignoring: its body, its briskness, the way it grips your gums. By Friday I could tell a spring Darjeeling from a summer one, and I scored 6 out of 10.

8/10

Week 3, Learning to judge (1 to 5 June)

In the last week, the vocabulary finally clicked. We tasted teas in pairs of opposites, such as brisk and soft, or bright and dull, and the words stopped being definitions and became sensations. We tasted deliberately faulty teas and traced each fault back to the step that caused it. On the final day I prepared and tasted ten blind cups on my own and scored 8 out of 10. My instructor wrote one word on my sheet: “Good.” I showed my father before I’d even taken my shoes off.

What I’m taking with me

Loving tea isn’t the same as understanding it. I grew up surrounded by tea, and I think that made me feel I knew more than I did. Admitting I was a beginner was the first real step.
The method does half the work. If the weight, the water, the time or the order slips even a little, the best palate in the world will give the wrong answer. Being careful matters more than being talented.
Taste is really three senses. Smell, the basic tastes on your tongue, and the feel of the tea in your mouth. Losing my sense of smell for two days taught me to notice the third.
Words change what you notice. Once I learned the word weedy (a cut-grass taste from leaf that wasn’t withered enough), I started finding it in teas I’d always called “fresh.”
Judge a tea for what it’s meant to be. A strong tea made for milk isn’t a failed Darjeeling. Smoke ruins most teas but makes Lapsang Souchong what it is.
Being wrong is useful. Every mistake in my notebook pointed to something specific I hadn’t understood yet. By the end, I’d stopped dreading wrong answers and started learning from them.

“The tasting room was never a closed door. It was just a skill I hadn’t learned yet.”

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About / My story

An aspiring entrepreneur, curious learner, passionate dancer, and fifth-generation member of a family business.

I’m a Class 12 student at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata, and if there’s one thing that describes me, it’s that I’ve always been curious about how things work, especially when it comes to people, businesses, and the ideas behind them.

Growing up in a family that’s been in the tea business for over a century, I’ve been surrounded by conversations about everything from tea gardens and production to packaging, pricing, and marketing. What started as simply listening to these discussions gradually turned into questions of my own. Why does packaging change the way we perceive a product? What makes an advertisement memorable? How can a century-old tea brand connect with a new generation?

Rather than just wondering about these things, I wanted to explore them myself.

That curiosity has taken me from the tea gardens of Assam and Siliguri to factory floors, professional tea-tasting sessions, and digital marketing discussions. I’ve conducted independent research on premium tea packaging, iconic Indian advertising campaigns, and the digitalisation of the tea industry. During my internship at EcoConnect, I worked with different brands and helped develop ideas for a tea symposium aimed at making tea more engaging for younger audiences.

These experiences have made me increasingly interested in marketing, economics, and entrepreneurship, particularly how traditional businesses can embrace new ideas without losing what makes them special. I’ve continued exploring these interests through courses from Wharton and Northwestern University, business competitions, and Ashoka University’s Young Scholars Programme.

But there’s another part of me that is just as important: dance.

It was about expression.

I’ve been dancing since I was five, beginning with seven years of Odissi training before exploring Western styles such as hip-hop, contemporary, Chinese, and Jamaican dance. From years of rehearsals and interschool competitions to performing with my school’s Footloose Dance Club, dance has taught me discipline, creativity, confidence, and the importance of working together. Interestingly, I often find myself applying those same lessons when approaching business challenges.

Beyond academics and dance, I enjoy being involved in initiatives where I can make a difference. As a leader of my school’s Peer Support Group and a representative coordinating over 140 students at Xuberance, I’ve discovered how much I enjoy bringing people together. I’ve also grown up contributing to Pehchaan, an initiative started by my sister to empower women and young girls in our tea-estate communities, and I’m excited to play a bigger role in carrying it forward.

At seventeen, I know I’m only beginning to discover what I want to do. But every research project, internship, dance performance, and new experience has helped me understand myself a little better.

I’m proud to be part of a business legacy built over five generations, but what excites me most is the opportunity to bring my own ideas, perspectives, and creativity into its future.

For me, it’s not just about carrying forward a legacy. It’s about learning enough, exploring enough, and challenging myself enough to create something meaningful of my own.

RoutinePassion
ExpectationExpression
MovementMeaning

“I didn’t choose dance at five. Somewhere along the way, I chose to never leave it.”

“My story began with a legacy, but the chapters ahead are mine to write.”

“I don’t just want to inherit a legacy. I want to understand it, challenge it, and contribute something of my own.”

“Leadership has taught me that bringing people together matters more than standing ahead of them.”

“Some of my greatest lessons have come from classrooms. Others have come from dance floors, factory visits, and conversations over tea.”

Journey

Age 5 → Today

“My journey isn’t defined by one passion, but by the curiosity that connects them all.”

01

Thirteen Years, One Constant

For thirteen years, dance has been one of the few constants in my life. In a world where interests often change with time, I chose to stay committed to one art form and allow myself to grow with it. That continuity has taught me that mastery is not built overnight, but through showing up, learning, and choosing to continue.
02

From Being Told to Choosing

I began dancing at five because my parents enrolled me in classes. At the time, I never imagined that something I was simply expected to attend would become something I genuinely loved. Over the years, my relationship with dance changed from obligation to choice—and that shift made my commitment to it far more meaningful.
03

Finding Expression in Movement

Dance gave me a language beyond words. I learned that a movement can communicate an emotion, a pause can create meaning, and an entire story can unfold without a single sentence.
04

Two Worlds of Dance

Starting with Odissi introduced me to structure, precision, rhythm, and the discipline of classical training. Western dance later gave me a different vocabulary—one that encouraged experimentation and individuality. Moving between these forms taught me that different styles can coexist while allowing me to discover different sides of my own artistry.
05

The Discipline Behind the Performance

What audiences see on stage is only a fraction of what dance demands. Years of rehearsals have taught me patience, consistency, and the willingness to repeat something until it feels right. Dance taught me that improvement often happens quietly, through countless hours of practice that no one sees.
06

Learning to Perform, Learning to Grow

Competitions and performances have pushed me beyond what feels comfortable. Each stage has taught me to manage nervousness, trust my preparation, respond to unexpected moments, and remain present. Winning awards has been rewarding, but the greater achievement has been becoming more confident with every performance.
07

Growing With Footloose

Being part of Footloose since Class 6 has shaped my understanding of dance as a collective art. Performing as part of a team taught me that individuality does not disappear within collaboration; instead, every dancer contributes to a larger story. Rehearsing, performing, and growing alongside others has made some of my most meaningful dance memories.
08

More Than an Art Form

Over thirteen years, dance has become more than an extracurricular activity or a skill I have developed. It has influenced the way I approach challenges, creativity, and growth. Most importantly, it has taught me the value of committing deeply to something—not simply to become better at it, but to allow it to change me along the way.

“I grew up with dance. Somewhere along the way, dance grew up with me.”