Ritu Kant Ojha

I have been talking to strangers for twenty-five years, and I keep hearing the same story in different accents: a decision made on someone’s advice, and a life that went one way because of it.

Today I am a real estate investment advisor in Dubai and the founder of Proact Luxury Real Estate, which helps Indian and international families build lasting wealth through property here.

I have looked at money from a few different chairs. After the National Defence Academy and IIM Lucknow, I spent over a decade in financial journalism with Bloomberg TV India, CNBC TV18, The Indian Express and Star News, then moved into brand positioning and public relations. My work on sustainability has brought invitations from the United Nations to its COP climate conferences.

For my first book, Real Conversations In Digital Age (2019), I interviewed three hundred people and a hundred families. One sentence kept coming back in different words: if I had sat across a table from the person advising me, I would not have lost what I lost. My second book, The Only Difference (2026), is my attempt to turn that sentence into something useful.

In 2010 a student in New Delhi asked me whether there was a way to choose who advises us. I did not have a good answer. I have been working on one ever since, partly through my own work, and partly by reading the philosophers, scholars and psychologists who thought about it long before me.

What I have found is that the subject is much bigger than money. Advice shapes what we study, whom we marry, how we treat illness and how we run companies. The old texts have a great deal to say about it, and the research is richer than most people realise.

ADVICEdge is the work I want to spend the rest of my life on. I read, I collect what I find in the Library, and I talk to people who study and practise advice. I would much rather do that with others than alone.

If you research advice, teach it, give it for a living, or have a story about advice that changed your life, I would be glad to hear from you. Corrections are welcome too.

I write columns for Khaleej Times and BusinessWorld, and host the podcast Real Conversations. I live in Dubai with my wife, Neha, our daughter, Naisha, and Rufus, our poodle.