Forty-five years spent making other people visible.

Out-of-home advertising is the least private medium there is. A hoarding cannot be skipped, closed or scrolled past; it stands in the weather, in full public view, answerable to everyone who passes it. Yogesh Lakhani has spent his working life inside that medium — first as the boy who carried the slides, then as the man deciding what a large part of Mumbai would see.

He was born in Mumbai on 25 September 1963 into a Saurashtrian household of modest means. As a boy he sold newspapers and firecrackers to help the family, and grew up in love with cinema. He took no MBA. What he learned, he learned standing in front of the sites themselves — how a location behaves at different hours, what a passing eye actually registers, and why a client remembers the person who answered the phone more clearly than the person who quoted the lowest rate.

From a single rented table and one member of staff, Bright Outdoor Media grew into a company with premium inventory across Mumbai and other Indian metros, transit contracts on the city’s buses, monorail, metro and railways, and a client list the company numbers in the thousands. In March 2023 it did something no Indian out-of-home business had done before: it listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Alongside the business runs a second, quieter record — a free dialysis centre, blood donation drives, food and books for people who need them, and a decision in recent years to spend the budget of his own birthday celebration on institutions serving the blind, the specially-abled, orphans and the elderly instead.