I'm Priyanka Bharadwaj, a people watcher, thinker and writer, pioneering the integration of relational intelligence into the future of leadership and work through a platform.
I believe that every human system—whether it's marriage or management—is fundamentally a relationship problem waiting to be solved.
My intellectual obsession began with India's marriage market, where I ran Marriage Broker Auntie and wrote a relationship column for Mint. What started as an exploration of how people choose life partners evolved into a deeper quest: How do human beings navigate systems of trust, power, and mutual selection?
The parallels between marriage markets and organizational dynamics are more than metaphorical. Both are complex matching problems where success depends not just on individual choices, but on creating stable, mutually beneficial connections. This insight drives my current work on Modern Indian Relationships (on which I am writing my first non-fiction book) and shapes my analysis of leadership and organizational culture.
Shapely Gal takes its name from the Nobel-winning Gale-Shapley algorithm—a mathematical solution to the "stable marriage" problem. But unlike pure mathematics, human relationships don't solve for stability alone. They solve for growth, for potential, for the possibility of becoming more than we thought possible.
This newsletter examines how relational intelligence shapes both personal and professional spheres. In an age obsessed with technical solutions, I argue that the ability to truly understand and navigate human connections is the critical differentiator—whether you're building a marriage or an organization.
If you're interested in nuanced, sometimes uncomfortable truths about how humans connect, compete, and collaborate, you're in the right place. This isn't relationship advice or management theory. It's an investigation into the architecture of human potential.
