Extensions are pieces of software that add custom functions to your browser. Chances are you’re using one right now — maybe it’s to improve your productivity, or keep you focused, or simply to block ads.
In fact, when Sundar Pichai pitched and conceived Google Chrome in 2008, users of other browsers were puzzled. Chrome didn’t have most of the stuff that others had. Notably, it didn’t have any extensions. Despite this, Chrome racked up millions of users quickly, mostly because people loved it. It was fast. It was beautiful, and it performed remarkably well. Soon, Chrome supercharged these features by building an ecosystem of extensions, and well, the rest is history.
Today, we’re adding four talented colleagues across key roles to take our products one level further.
These are our extensions.
Rahul Chaudhary
It’s always special when one of our interns graduates to a full-time position at The Ken.
And that’s what Rahul did.
Rahul joined us as an intern in the marketing team back in September, and almost immediately took over all our social media channels. It helped that he was a subscriber of The Ken from 2020. Over the next three months, he dramatically increased our reach and social presence, and by the time his internship came to an end, we agreed to keep a good thing going.
A native of Jamshedpur, Rahul completed his undergraduate in Mass Communication from Whistling Woods International, Mumbai. In his own words, “I fell in love with journalism, as a means of public service. Now, I’m trying to understand it as a product.”
Prior to The Ken, Rahul interned with ‘Unfiltered by Samdish’ where he was in charge of social media, research, and outreach.
He’s a big fan of Richard Linklater’s films and during his undergrad, he worked as an Assistant Director for a feature film.
You can reach him at rahul at the-ken.com
Shaswata Kundu Chaudhuri
It’s not often that you hear journalists talking about one event that made them decide what kind of journalist they wanted to be. Shaswata is an exception. A few years ago, he made a trip to the Sunderbans — the world’s largest mangrove forest and a major climate change hotspot, that made him immediately aware of the catastrophic effects of climate change. And he was hooked.
After having written for The Caravan, The Independent, and Open, Shaswata joins The Ken in Bengaluru to track the business of responding to climate change. In other words, he’ll focus on electric vehicles, renewables, and energy-storage technologies, among others.
An economics and journalism graduate, Shaswata has also written on music and enjoys everything from Bangladeshi rock to Cuban pop. You can reach him at shaswatak at the-ken.com
Prashant Turamari
Prashant joins The Ken as our Mobile App Developer.
This was a role we’ve been seeking to fill for a long time. However, due to a combination of reasons, we could never quite find the right person to entrust our iOS and Android mobile apps. All that changed when we met and interviewed Prashant.
Prashant joins our small but exceptionally talented engineering team, and will be responsible for taking our mobile apps to the next level. In Prashant’s words, he’s a “fun loving guy” and loves coding and is a fan of TV shows like Peaky Blinders, Family Guy, and other dramas.
You can send him your bugs, feature requests and everything else at prashant at the-ken dot com
Siddhartha Gupta
In March 2019, Siddhartha gave us feedback as a subscriber, saying
“I think for me, the one thing that would make me want to read The Ken even more and eagerly wait for the mails would be a little more wit. No offence, I think the articles, while informative and interesting, sometimes feel dry.”
Then, in Aug 2020 he wrote to us checking if we had any suitable openings for him.
“I am a writer. I write fiction and commentary pieces. I would love to write such letters for The Ken, say once a week – perhaps Sunday. The letters could include book/movie reviews, or slice of life pieces, or very short fiction.”
Finally, in Jan 2023 he wrote to us again.
Siddhartha joins us as The Ken’s Brand Partnerships & Sales Manager. He’s also had a fascinating career progression. After getting an engineering degree from IIT Kanpur in 2012 he didn’t get a job like everyone else. Instead, he joined the Young India Fellowship, a liberal arts program at Ashoka University. Then, he joined Open magazine as a freelance writer, and then, Indian Express as a reporter on the city team. After this he got himself an MBA from the Indian School of Business in 2016. That was followed by 3 years at Paytm doing sales & BD, then a year with Zomato managing their Chandigarh operations.
After this, he then spent a year scaling and running a sustainable products D2C company and later joined YourStory in their Growth team.
Much of the last year he’s been writing his debut book, a semi autobiography of sorts.
Siddhartha grew up in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, and his hobbies are swimming and he loves driving, specially DCT automatics.
You can say hello to him at siddharthag at the-ken dot com
If you’d like to work alongside some of the sharpest, friendliest, funniest, and most ambitious people in India and Southeast Asia—whether journalists, engineers, podcasters or marketers—take a look at our Careers section.
If you can’t find what you are looking for, just drop us a nice email at careers[email protected] telling us what you’d like to do and why.
