There is something genuinely refreshing about talking to someone who is actively figuring things out in real time – and doing it with total clarity about who they are and where they want to go. That was my conversation with Saurik Dheer on Episode 165 of The Naina Experience Podcast. Saurik is a young entrepreneur and creative director based in Adelaide, and in the space of an hour we covered creativity, filmmaking, music, MBA life, the Adelaide creative scene, and what it actually feels like to be an Indian immigrant trying to break into a professional world that isn’t always open to outsiders.
Saurik moved to Adelaide in August 2024 to pursue his MBA – and notably, he had never visited Australia before. He even passed up a chance to come for his cousin’s wedding in Melbourne because he was running his media production house back in India and didn’t want to step away. That tells you a lot about how seriously he takes his work. Back home he was running a media and marketing business, but his passion was always creative advertising and filmmaking side of it – not the client-chasing and marketing hustle that inevitably comes with keeping the lights on.
The way he described his creative process is fascinating! Saurik studied music from the age of 4, and when he started moving into videography and filmmaking, he discovered that he thinks in music first – he hears the emotion and rhythm of a piece before he ever thinks about the visuals. The visuals then follow the music in his head. It’s one of those things that sounds obvious once someone says it, but I genuinely had never considered that a filmmaker might work that way.
We also talked about the challenges of being a young Indian creative in Adelaide. Saurik reached out to every single creative agency in the city – around 20 to 21 of them – multiple times. Not one replied. It’s something I could completely relate to because I had reached out to a ton of them myself when I had arrived and I never heard from any of them. There is a gap in Adelaide between what the city could be and what it currently allows outsiders to access, particularly in professional creative spaces. That said, cracks are definitely opening up.
He also had an idea that I am still thinking about – a series of niche cultural events in Adelaide. His example: hire a boxing gym, run a Mexican luchador wrestling match, add a daiquiri and tequila, and let the city discover something it didn’t know it wanted. Adelaide is a blank canvas, he said. Someone just needs to start painting on it.
Watch & listen to the full episode on YouTube & Spotify.
Saurik Dheer’s Instagram
