By Dr. Anshul Rawal, Veterinarian

Word count: 792  |  Suggested placement: pet, health or lifestyle desk

The dogs that worried me most were never the old ones.

Geriatric patients with failing kidneys are part of veterinary practice. You expect them. What I did not expect, during my years in clinical training and practice, was how often a three- or four-year-old dog would come in for something routine — a skin complaint, a bout of loose stool — and leave with bloodwork showing liver enzymes that had no business being elevated in an animal that young.

One case is a case. Twenty cases start to look like a pattern.

The presenting complaints were remarkably consistent: a coat that had lost its shine, hair fall the owner had written off as “just the weather,” digestion that never quite settled, an energy level the family had quietly accepted as the dog’s personality. Individually, none of these send anyone rushing to a clinic. Together, in a young animal, they are worth paying attention to.

So I started asking a question I had not been asking often enough: what is this animal actually eating, every single day, for years?

The part of the bag nobody reads

Most pet parents in India read the front of the packet. Chicken. Lamb. Real meat. Complete nutrition. Almost nobody turns it over.

On the back, past the protein percentages, you will often find a short list of synthetic antioxidants — compounds added to stop fats from going rancid so the product can sit on a shelf for eighteen months. The common ones are BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole), BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) and ethoxyquin.

Here is where I want to be careful, because this topic attracts more heat than light.

These compounds are permitted at regulated concentrations, and the regulatory position in most markets is that at those levels they do not present a safety concern. I am not going to tell you that a bag of kibble caused any individual dog’s illness. That claim would be scientifically dishonest and I have no data to support it.

What I will tell you is what the record actually shows. The US National Toxicology Program classifies BHA as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen,” based on rodent studies. BHT has shown tumour-promoting effects in animal models at high doses. The European Union suspended ethoxyquin’s authorisation as a feed additive pending further safety data — a decision that reflects incomplete evidence rather than proven harm. And European regulators have noted that for cats specifically, tolerance data was insufficient to establish a safe dose for certain antioxidants.

“Insufficient data” is not the same as “dangerous.” But it is also not the same as “proven safe over a fourteen-year lifespan of daily exposure,” which is the actual question a pet parent is asking, whether they realise it or not.

That gap between what is permitted and what is well-studied is the gap I could not stop thinking about.

The trap on the other side

The obvious response is to cook at home. Many of my clients did exactly that, with the best intentions, and created a different problem.

A bowl of chicken and rice looks wholesome and is nutritionally incomplete. Home-cooked diets built without formulation almost always run short on calcium relative to phosphorus, which matters enormously in growing dogs. Cats fed home meals without supplementation risk taurine deficiency, which affects the heart and the eyes and does not announce itself until damage is done. Add the inconsistency of a busy household — one member cooks on Tuesday, another improvises on Friday — and the diet drifts.

I watched pet parents move from a food they distrusted to a food that was measurably unbalanced, and feel better about it. Sincerity is not nutrition.

What I would actually tell you to do

Four things, none of which require you to change brands today.

Turn the packet over and read the full ingredient list. If a manufacturer will not tell you what is in the product in plain language, that is information in itself.

Check whether the preservation is synthetic or natural. Mixed tocopherols (vitamin E) and rosemary extract are common natural alternatives. They shorten shelf life, which is precisely why they cost more to use.

Ask what “meat” means. “Chicken” and “poultry by-product meal” are not the same input, and the label is where that difference should be visible.

If you cook at home, get the formulation checked. A single consultation with a veterinarian on calcium, phosphorus and taurine will tell you more than a year of internet recipes.

None of this requires panic. It requires reading. The animals in my clinic could not do that part themselves — which is, in the end, the whole reason I stopped practising the way I had been and started working on the food instead.

Dr. Anshul Rawal is a veterinarian and the founder of Pawpeye, an Indian pet nutrition company that formulates preservative-free wet food for dogs and cats through in-house veterinary R&D.

Faridabad is set to witness a major celebration of dance as C&S Event Planners, founded by Chirag and Sharmila, prepares to host Nritya Prabha Season 4. The upcoming competition will bring together 446 participants from different states and is expected to continue for nearly 13 hours, making it a significant event for the dance community.

Chirag and Sharmila are closely associated with the dance and event industry. They also run C&S Dance and Fitness Studio in Sector 21, Faridabad, where dance and fitness training is offered. Along with managing their studio, they are involved in event choreography and work on dance performances and productions for different occasions. Their involvement in dance training and choreography has kept them connected with dancers, academies and performers.

Nritya Prabha Season 4 marks the fourth season of the competition and is also the ninth event organised by C&S Event Planners. Their previous events have received a positive response from participants and audiences, and the latest edition is expected to be considerably larger in terms of participation and duration.

The competition will feature six categories: Solo Sub Junior, Solo Junior, Solo Senior, Duet, Junior Group and Senior Group. Three winners will be selected in each category, resulting in a total of 18 category winners. This structure gives dancers across different age groups and performance formats an opportunity to compete and showcase their skills on the same platform.

One of the notable features of the event is that every participant will receive a trophy and certificate. The organisers have also planned special recognition for performances that come close to winning. After the main results, 15 additional top performances will be selected from among those that performed exceptionally well but missed out on a winning position by a small margin. These performers will receive a special trophy, giving recognition to strong performances beyond the main winners.

With 446 participants scheduled to perform, the competition is expected to showcase a wide range of dance styles, choreography and performance techniques. Dancers travelling from different states will get an opportunity to compete with performers from outside their usual regional circuits and gain experience on a larger competitive stage.

The approximately 13-hour schedule also makes the event a substantial gathering for dancers, teachers, parents and dance enthusiasts. Such competitions provide performers with more than just an opportunity to win awards. They can gain stage confidence, experience a competitive environment and observe different approaches to choreography and presentation.

For Faridabad, the event also adds to the city’s growing presence in dance and cultural activities. Interstate participation is expected to bring together dancers and academies from different regions, creating an opportunity for interaction within the wider dance community.

As C&S Event Planners move towards its ninth event and Nritya Prabha enters its fourth season, the scale of participation indicates the growing reach of the competition. With 446 participants, six categories, 18 category winners, additional recognition for 15 outstanding performances and trophies and certificates for every participant, the event places considerable emphasis on recognising performers at different levels.

With nearly 13 hours of performances lined up, Nritya Prabha Season 4 is expected to turn Faridabad into a vibrant meeting point for dancers from different states, bringing together competition, creativity, recognition and a shared passion for dance.

Prime Signal has managed over ₹84 crore in ad spend across 260 brands and 22 cities. Its founders argue the Indian growth agency model is broken — and that the fix is refusing to take a retainer without a roadmap.

There is a particular conversation that repeats itself in Indian small-business boardrooms, and Manpreet Singh has heard it several hundred times.

A founder has been spending on advertising for two years. The dashboard is full. Impressions are up. The agency sends a monthly deck with a lot of green arrows. And yet nobody in the room can answer the only question the promoter actually cares about: did any of this make us money?

“Most Indian SMBs are not under-marketed,” says Singh, co-founder of Prime Signal, the Noida-headquartered growth firm. “They are over-serviced and under-diagnosed. Someone sold them nine channels before anyone bothered to look at their unit economics.”

Prime Signal, which operates out of Sector 121 in Noida and has been in the market since 2016, has built its entire commercial proposition around that complaint. The firm describes itself as a “full-stack growth partner” — marketing, finance, operations and brand run as a single system rather than as separate vendor relationships. By its own published figures, it has managed more than ₹84 crore in advertising spend, generated over 8 lakh leads, and served 260 brands across 22 Indian cities and ten industries. It carries an average client rating of 4.8 out of 5.

The refusal that became a business model

The most unusual thing about Prime Signal is not what it sells. It is what it declines to sell.

“No retainer without a roadmap” is written into the firm’s operating principles, and co-founder Abhinav Prakash treats it as non-negotiable. Before any campaign goes live, the firm runs what it calls a diagnosis: an audit of every channel, a review of the client’s numbers, and direct interviews with the client’s own customers.

“An agency that starts spending your money in week one has told you something important about itself,” Prakash says. “It has told you the media budget is its product. Ours isn’t. Our product is the decision about where the money should go — and sometimes that decision is that you should spend less.”

Prakash’s insistence on this sequencing is not accidental. His background is in finance and compliance rather than creative, and Prime Signal is one of the few Indian growth firms that runs a compliance-and-finance service line alongside performance marketing. The logic is that a business with broken margins does not have a marketing problem, and pouring paid media on top of it accelerates the loss rather than the growth.

The engagement itself runs on a four-step, ninety-day structure the firm calls Diagnose, Design, Deploy, Compound. The design step happens in a single working session with the client’s leadership, and both sides sign the resulting plan. First results are contracted to appear within thirty days. The final phase is explicitly about making the agency less necessary — systemising what worked and training the client’s internal team to run it.

“We are trying to build something the client can eventually operate without us,” Singh says. “That is a strange thing for an agency to say out loud. It is also the only version of this business I am interested in running.”

Nine signals, one system

Prime Signal organises its work into nine service lines it refers to as signals: lead generation, performance marketing, discovery marketing covering SEO, AEO and GEO, content marketing, retention marketing, conversion rate optimisation, authority marketing, proximity or local marketing, and compliance and finance.

The breadth is deliberate and, the founders concede, commercially inconvenient. It is easier to sell one thing well than nine things together.

“The reason we do it anyway is attribution,” Prakash says. “If your ads are with one vendor, your email with another and your website with a third, nobody owns the number. Everybody owns a slice of the number. That is how a company can spend for three years and never find out what worked.”

The client roster reflects the range. On the consumer side the firm has worked with nutrition and wellness brands including GoodMonk and Wellbeing Nutrition, and with fashion and lifestyle labels such as RDKLU, Deepa Gurnani and fine jewellery house Renu Oberoi. In pet nutrition it counts Pawpeye, the vet-formulated dog and cat food brand. Its industrial and B2B work includes Ester Industries and manufacturing clients such as Vijay Plastics, where the challenge is less about brand awareness and more about generating qualified enquiries in a narrow buyer universe.

The results the firm publishes are stated in the client’s own operating terms rather than in agency metrics. A Delhi streetwear label moved from 420 to 1,950 monthly orders across five months. A Bengaluru food and beverage brand took monthly D2C revenue from ₹4 lakh to ₹22 lakh while lifting return on ad spend from 2.1x to 5.3x. A Delhi dermatology clinic went from 45 to 210 monthly bookings as cost per lead fell from ₹1,850 to ₹620. A Coimbatore CNC manufacturer went from 11 to 64 inbound calls a week.

“Nobody takes impressions to their board,” Singh says. “They take orders, bookings and margin. So those are the only numbers we agree to be measured on.”

The 10,000 number

The firm’s stated mission is to help 10,000 businesses achieve what it calls sustainable, scalable growth by 2030 — a figure that is roughly forty times its current client count and which the founders acknowledge cannot be reached by adding headcount.

“You cannot service 10,000 companies the way we service 260,” Prakash says. “The only route is productising the diagnosis — making the first ninety days repeatable enough that it works without either of us in the room. That is the actual engineering problem in front of us.”

Prime Signal currently serves clients across 22 Indian cities and in four markets beyond India: the UAE, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia.

Whether the firm reaches its 2030 target is an open question. But its founders have picked an uncomfortable position to defend in a sector that rarely volunteers one — that the honest answer to a growth brief is sometimes that the client is not ready to grow yet.

“We lose deals over that,” Singh says. “We would rather lose the deal than the client.”

Website https://share.google/6ZawWS7cV70NZgFJ4

Founders Linkedin Bios:

Manpreet Singh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manpreet-singh-project-manager/

Abhinav Prakash: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caabhinav-prakash/

Prime Signal is headquartered at Sector 121, Noida, Uttar Pradesh. More at primesignal.in.