Born 1958, juggles three passions and one career. His passions are writing, rock climbing and spiritual evolution. After an organic chemistry degree, Kiran started his working life as a school teacher & house-master in an experimental residential J Krishnamurti school in Varanasi. He started his career in advertising in 1983, as a copywriter in Lintas.
He ended up the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Clarion advertising. In 1999, he co-founded chlorophyll, a brand consultancy.Chlorophyll has differentiated over 400 brands and created over 50 brands from scratch. It has four IPs and its own innovation lab. Kiran was Chairman of the committee that consulted with UIDAI, the Government of India’s arm that developed Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometrics-based identity project. He is an online teacher: he designed and delivered the brand module for the Liverpool Business School + upGrad MBA in 2020.
Kiran was the very first speaker at TED University at TED’s first Indian meet in 2009 and at TEDx Bandra in 2017. He won the Indo-UK Short Story Writing award in 1995, has published three books of fiction, Halfway Up the Mountain, Two Pronouns and a Verb and Black River Run and read from them in London, Singapore, New York and Beijing. He facilitated the IFSC World Cup in Bouldering, a form of rock climbing, in Navi Mumbai in 2016 and 2017: events that were voted the best in class in those two years by the global participants. This facilitated the inclusion of rock climbing in the Olympics in 2020/21. He is part of The Basalt Foundation, whose aim is to put an Indian climber on the Olympic podium by 2032. Kiran has a species of spider named after him, thelcticopis kirankhalapi:-)
