MAM
Vinayak Burman returns with a deeper Season 3 of The Lifeboat
MUMBAI: After striking a chord with listeners across its first two seasons, The Lifeboat, the long-form conversation podcast curated and hosted by Vinayak Burman, is ready to set sail once again. The third season of the series will premiere on December 30, 2025, promising its most evolved and emotionally resonant edition yet.
Season 3 marks a clear shift in tone and texture. Moving beyond surface-level success narratives, the new episodes lean into themes of resilience, reinvention, vulnerability and personal purpose. The result is a more intimate listening experience that invites audiences into the quieter, less spoken-about moments behind ambition and achievement.
The upcoming season brings together a diverse mix of founders, creators, investors and cultural voices. The lineup includes Karan Motwani; Rachana Gupta and Vishal Gupta of Gynoveda; Nitin Jain, Founding and Managing Director of Neo Group; and actress-turned-entrepreneur Pooja Bedi, among others. Each guest offers candid reflections on their personal values, defining career learnings and inner turning points that shaped their journeys.
Launched in November 2023, The Lifeboat began as a refreshingly honest space where entrepreneurs and investors spoke openly about the realities of building and sustaining businesses. Season 1 featured voices such as Shashank Kumar of DeHaat, Vikas Lachhwani of mCaffeine, Supriya Paul and Shobhit Banga of Josh Talks, Smriti Chandra of Abler Nordic India, and Kaushik Mukherjee of Sugar Cosmetics, with conversations centred on navigating uncertainty, failure and growth.
Season 2 widened the lens further, exploring leadership, communication, personal evolution and spirituality. The speaker roster included Shweta Shalini, Priyavrata Mafatlal, Arjun Vaidya, Vineet Rai, Koreel Lahiri, Geetanjali Saxena, Aditya Hegde, Rohan More, Mrunalini Deshmukh and Avanne Dubash.
Reflecting on the new season, Vinayak Burman said the team had intentionally raised the bar. “While Season 1 and Season 2 were warmly received, this time we pushed ourselves to go deeper. The focus is on honesty and reflection. These conversations are richer, the voices more diverse, and the stories feel truly transformative,” he said.
Season 3 of The Lifeboat will be available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms, offering thoughtful listening for anyone curious about what lies beneath success and how people stay afloat when life gets turbulent.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
