When the Jack of All Trades is the Master of Success: A conversation with Pavitra Darbar

 What if the most valuable expertise wasn't knowing one subject deeply, but understanding how seemingly unrelated ideas connect?

We're often encouraged to specialize early, to choose a niche, master it, and stay within its boundaries. Yet some of the most interesting perspectives emerge from people who refuse to think in straight lines.

For Pavitra Darbar, curiosity has never followed a single discipline. Hir interests span luxury branding, psychology, theology, fashion, culture, storytelling, and human behaviour, not as separate passions, but as interconnected ways of understanding why people believe, create, aspire, and connect. Whether exploring the psychology behind luxury brands, studying theology alongside science, or examining how stories shape identity, he approaches each field through the same question: What does this reveal about people?

In this conversation with Conversations by Brains In You, Pavitra reflects on building an interdisciplinary mindset, overcoming the fear of public speaking through TEDx, finding meaning in psychology and theology, and why curiosity, empathy, and cognitive flexibility may become some of the most valuable skills in an increasingly complex world.

Q1. Your interests span luxury branding, psychology, fashion, theology, culture, and even the occult fields that many people wouldn't naturally connect. How did these seemingly different interests come together to shape the way you see the world?

Honestly, most of this goes back to being a curious kid who noticed things other people didn't. It started with questions about my own religion. But those questions never really stayed contained, I ended up reading about other faiths too, just trying to understand belief itself, not only the one I grew up with. That's basically where my whole occult and spiritual journey began.

I think I've always had a strong intuition, even as a child, I perceived things a bit differently and picked up on things others missed. That peculiarity is what pushed me to actually study the occult seriously instead of brushing it off as "just a phase" or something weird. But alongside that intuition, I also had a genuine love for science, and that created an interesting tension in me. I didn't just want to believe things, I wanted to understand and justify religion scientifically and logically too. That's actually what led me to ecospirituality, and to the psychological and sociological reasoning behind why religion exists in the first place, why humans across every culture seem to need belief systems, and where that need actually originates from. In a way, science didn't replace my spirituality, it gave me a framework to understand it.

Creativity was a big part of my childhood too. I genuinely wanted to be a fashion designer. But once I saw how hard that path actually is, and after talking to my dad, I pivoted into business instead. I didn't really leave that love behind though, I just found a way to channel it into fashion, art and heritage through a different career.

And underneath all of this, I was a kid who felt things for other people really early on. Almost an instinctive empathy for lives that weren't mine, before I even had the language for it. Looking back, it feels like an early, childlike version of sonder, that realization that everyone around you is living a whole life as real as yours.

But that empathy was also exhausting. Most kids don't have to deal with absorbing that much of what other people feel. So I learned boundaries pretty early too, not really as a choice, more like something I had to figure out just to protect myself. That mix of sensitivity and boundaries, along with my interest in theology, is honestly what pulled me toward psychology, especially mental health and how the mind works.

So none of these interests really grew on their own. They all came from the same curious kid, just showing up later as religion, the occult, fashion, business and psychology.

Q2. You delivered a TEDx talk while still in school, an opportunity many aspire to for years. Beyond public speaking, what did preparing for that stage teach you about communicating ideas that genuinely stay with people?

Honestly, I was actually quite scared of public speaking. But I decided to put myself forward for TEDx anyway, mostly to challenge myself and push past that fear rather than let it hold me back. Looking back, I'm genuinely grateful I got that opportunity while still in school, it changed a lot for me.

My talk was about manifestation and the power of belief, so ironically, the biggest lesson I learned was about the power of connection, not just ideas.

Getting comfortable on stage and finding the right personal story to tell were honestly the hardest parts of prepping. I knew what I wanted to say, but figuring out how to say it in a way that would actually land with people was a different challenge entirely.

During the talk, I added a joke to lighten things up a bit, along with a few personal anecdotes. When I saw people nodding along at those moments rather than the more "factual" parts, it hit me that people don't really connect with information, they connect with emotion and shared human experience. You can give someone every stat and every reason to believe something, but it's the story or the feeling behind it that actually stays with them.

That realization has shaped how I think about business and marketing too. If you want to sell something, you can't just talk about features, you have to tell people how it will make them feel. This is especially true for luxury goods, where people aren't really buying a product, they're buying an emotion, an identity, or a feeling of belonging.

So in a strange way, a talk about belief ended up teaching me something very practical: that belief itself, in a brand, an idea, or even yourself, is built on feeling understood, not just being informed.

 

Q3. During the High School Startup League, you were exposed to entrepreneurs and mentors at an early age. Was there a conversation or moment from that experience that permanently changed the way you think about business or innovation?

 If I'm being honest, it wasn't a single mentor's advice that stuck with me the most, it was my own teammates. Working with them taught me just how important teamwork and collaboration really are, and how much better things turn out when everyone focuses on doing what they're actually good at instead of trying to do everything themselves.

But the experience also gave me a pretty early, and honestly unexpected, look into how the real world can work. In the final round, we realised the competition wasn't as fair as we'd assumed. The production team handed us a script and an idea that was completely different from the one we'd originally been selected on. We didn't think much of it until another team pitched the exact same script we'd been given, and they won a funding offer almost instantly, with far fewer questions asked than we'd faced. It was hard not to notice how biased the whole process felt at that point.

It was disappointing, honestly. But it also taught me something that's stayed with me since: no matter how unfair a situation feels, you have to stand by your own morals and be willing to stand up for yourself. The world doesn't always play fair, but that doesn't mean you compromise on what you know is right.

 

Q4. Luxury branding is often misunderstood as simply selling expensive products. What drew you toward this field, and what do you think people overlook about the psychology and cultural significance behind luxury brands?

 To me, luxury has never really been about the price tag, it's about something sociologists call "cultural capital." That idea is basically what draws me to this field. Luxury pulls so heavily from culture, heritage, and craftsmanship that it becomes a whole experience rather than just a transaction. You genuinely can't buy your way into luxury. You can afford it, but building the actual mindset behind it, the taste, the understanding, the appreciation for what goes into it, takes something money alone can't give you.

That's what people overlook the most, I think. They assume luxury branding is just about marking up a product and calling it exclusive. But it's actually one of the most psychologically intensive forms of branding there is. It requires a deep understanding of identity, aspiration, culture, and even insecurity, because ultimately, you're not selling an object, you're selling a feeling of belonging to something bigger, an idea of who someone becomes by owning it.

That intersection, of culture, craftsmanship, and psychology, is honestly what intrigues me the most about this space.

 Q5. Psychology seems to influence many of your interests from branding to storytelling. How has studying human behaviour changed the way you approach creativity, leadership, or even everyday interactions?

Honestly, this one comes from a very personal place. I always felt different growing up, misunderstood, or sometimes just not understood at all. In trying to make sense of myself, I started reading about archetypes, mostly because I could never fit neatly into just one. That actually disturbed me as a kid, I couldn't point to a character or a "type" and say, that's me. I felt too unique, too quirky to be boxed in, and that used to bother me more than I let on.

So to understand myself and how my own mind worked, I started reading about trauma, identity, disorders, intergenerational trauma, group dynamics, all of it. Part of this also came from the fact that I was always extremely perceptive of other people's behaviour and energy, even as a child, but I had no real framework or "scientific metric" to explain what I was picking up on. Psychology became that framework for me.

It gave me a sense of reasoning behind things I could previously only sense intuitively. It also made me a lot better at assessing people. If I'm being honest, I initially used it almost like a tool, to gauge what kind of person someone was, how they might think or react. Over time, that understanding became less about analysing people from a distance and more about genuinely empathising with them, which now shapes how I lead, create, and even just talk to people day to day.

 Q6. Your profile reflects curiosity across disciplines rather than specialization in just one. In an age where people are encouraged to "pick one niche," do you think interdisciplinary thinking is becoming more valuable than ever?

 I genuinely believe interdisciplinary thinking is far more valuable than narrow specialization. Constantly connecting different fields actually builds more mental flexibility over time. Research on cognitive flexibility supports this: the ability to navigate complexity, adapt to novel situations, and collaborate effectively across disciplines is increasingly vital in today's interconnected world, and studies on interdisciplinary learning have found that exposure to project complexity and knowledge diversity actually enhances cognitive flexibility itself, which in turn drives better problem-solving and teamwork (Xiong et al., 2025).

There's also a well-documented link between this kind of broad curiosity and something psychologists call tolerance for ambiguity, basically, how comfortable someone is with uncertainty and complexity rather than needing everything to fit into a single, defined box. This trait falls under Openness to Experience, one of the Big Five personality traits, and people who score higher on it tend to be curious, seek out novel experiences and ideas, and have diverse interests, particularly in philosophical and artistic areas (Park, 2022). Interestingly, being exposed to creative, open-ended thinking seems to increase people's openness to ambiguity and novelty even further, almost like a feedback loop, the more you explore, the more comfortable you get with not having a single fixed answer (Zenasni et al., 2008).

I live by the quote, "jack of all trades, master of none, but often better than the master of one." As of today, I dabble in almost everything, more like a polymath than a specialist. I play badminton, I've tried my hand at guitar, I love singing, I deeply appreciate classical dance forms and enjoy folk dances too, I'm a mandala artist, I love exploring art and fashion and reading about techniques behind them, and alongside pursuing a career in business, I read about psychology, theology, and biology regularly just to stay curious.

I think all of this allows me to develop holistically rather than narrowly. It keeps me mentally open to new ideas, comfortable with ambiguity instead of threatened by it, and honestly, it's made me a more well-rounded thinker overall, someone who can draw connections other people might miss simply because they're only looking through one lens.

 Q7. You've mentioned interests in theology, culture, and the occult subjects that often spark both fascination and skepticism. What attracts you to exploring these areas, and how do you separate genuine curiosity from misinformation or blind belief?

Theology and culture have been a part of me since childhood, long before I understood why they mattered so much to me. But with age and certain personal experiences, I found myself diving deeper into the occult too, partly to make sense of my surroundings and partly to understand myself better. Those experiences have shaped a lot of how I see the world, and honestly, they make for great stories, ones that also help me guide other people through similar questions or moments of their own.

When it comes to credibility, I try to go straight to the source wherever possible. I read scripture in its rawest form, or as close to the original translation as I can get, and cross-reference it across multiple translations and resources rather than relying on a single interpretation. I've also found that, more often than not, the right information or the right people tend to find their way to me at the right time, almost like the field reveals itself to those who are genuinely looking.

I won't pretend blind belief and misinformation aren't real problems in this space, they are. But what keeps me drawn to it is that it's one of those rare fields where you never really stop learning. There's always another layer to uncover, another translation to compare, another perspective to sit with.

 Q8. As someone who enjoys art, branding, and storytelling, what do you believe creates a lasting emotional connection between a brand and its audience? Is it aesthetics, narrative, psychology or something deeper?

Honestly, I don't think it's just one of these, aesthetics, narrative, or psychology. I think it's all of them working together, in different phases, that actually creates a lasting impression.

I write poetry as well, and one thing people often tell me is that what draws them in isn't just the words themselves, but the flow, the narrative, and the psychological undertones running quietly beneath it. I think the same principle applies to branding. It's never just about how a brand looks. It's about the storytelling behind it, the lifestyle and aesthetic it offers its audience, and the perceived value or status it adds to someone's identity simply by being associated with it.

But for a connection to actually last, I think it comes down to two things: reliability and nostalgia. A brand needs to feel dependable enough that people trust it repeatedly, and at the same time, it needs to tap into something that feels familiar or emotionally resonant, almost like it's reminding you of a feeling you already know. When aesthetics, narrative, psychology, reliability, and nostalgia all come together, that's when a brand stops being just a product and starts becoming part of someone's personal story.

About Conversations by Brains in You

Conversations by Brains in You is a curated interview series featuring students, professionals, entrepreneurs, creators, researchers, and changemakers whose journeys offer meaningful lessons beyond conventional achievements.

Rather than focusing solely on titles or milestones, each conversation explores the decisions, experiences, challenges, and perspectives that shaped the individual behind the profile. The aim is to create a growing repository of practical insights that help students and young professionals navigate their own careers with greater clarity, productivity, integrity, and purpose.

Every featured conversation is thoughtfully selected with the belief that authentic experiences can inspire informed decisions, lifelong learning, and better human development.