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UPKL powers up play with new technical director
MUMBAI: The Uttar Pradesh Kabaddi League (UPKL) is gearing up for a stronger, sharper second season, and it’s making a power move on the mat. The league has appointed Tejnarayan Prasad Madhav, a veteran kabaddi coach and former gold medallist, as its new technical director ahead of Season 2.
Currently serving as chief coach of the Bahrain National Kabaddi Team, Madhav brings decades of experience across playing, coaching and technical supervision. From mentoring squads at the Senior Nationals and Asian Games camps to shaping future champions at grassroots level, his record speaks of precision and purpose.
Commenting on the appointment, SJ Uplift Kabaddi founder and director Sambhav Jain said, “UPKL has emerged as a credible platform that mirrors the sport’s rise across India. This season, our goal is to deepen that foundation by strengthening player development and maintaining the highest technical standards.”
For Madhav, the focus is clear, getting every move right. “UPKL has created a structured environment where players can compete, learn and grow. My goal is to bring technical discipline and dynamic gameplay that highlights kabaddi at its finest,” he said.
Season 2 of UPKL kicks off on 25 December 2025 in Noida, featuring 64 matches of full-throttle action. The player auction, set for 3 November, will set the stage for a season that promises both strategy and spectacle.
With Madhav at the helm, UPKL isn’t just levelling up its game, it’s rewriting the playbook for how kabaddi should be played.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
