(September 15, 2025) Screenwriter, advertising professional, and now curator of a one-of-a-kind writing retreat, Bhavna Kher has always followed the pull of a good story. Her career spans a nine-year run at the multinational advertising firm Ogilvy, where she shaped campaigns for Tata Sky, Google, and Vodafone; a BBC travel documentary; and most recently Dabba Cartel—a 2025 Hindi-language crime drama streaming on Netflix. The series, starring Shabana Azmi alongside a stellar ensemble, follows a group of women who operate a drug cartel under the guise of a food-delivery company. Speaking about her screenwriting success, Bhavna tells Global Indian, “Writing long-form, especially a show like Dabba Cartel is like entering a boiling broth. It’s intense, almost like writing three films.”
Following a whirlwind career of ad campaigns and screenplays, Bhavna’s latest venture is a tranquil pursuit. Soon entering its second edition, it’s a writing retreat where creativity meets wellness and the forest becomes a classroom.
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A BBC foray across borders
Long before Netflix scripts and late-night rewrites, Bhavna lent her storytelling instincts to the BBC travel-docuseries Nicotine I Can, You Can. She helped “string the episodes together both pre- and post-shoot, including writing parts of the voiceover and the closing slates.” The project, part reportage and part road movie, honed her ability to blend factual narrative with emotional texture. Its an instinct she carries into every medium.
Stirring the pot with Dabba Cartel
Bhavna talks about Dabba Cartel with the energy of opening night. “I was part of the story development process and co-wrote the screenplay with dialogues,” she recalls. “I loved developing those characters—bringing my gaze to both the male and female arcs, humanising them, unpeeling their layers.”
The thrill came alive in the table reads. “That’s when the pages truly came alive with actors breathing life into the material, surprising us with their interpretations. Shabana Azmi is warm, witty, and a powerhouse to be around.” For Bhavna, the show’s layered characters—women who cook meals by day and smuggle contraband by night, offered a playground for exploring motive and morality.
The first classroom: The advertising world
Nine years at Ogilvy gave Bhavna the foundation she still leans on. “Ogilvy was my first real school of storytelling,” she says. “It was here that I learned how to tell a story in 30 or 60 seconds—how to craft a beginning, middle, and end, and how to write dialogue within such a tight format.”
Surrounded by some of India’s sharpest creative minds and mentored by Sukesh Nayak, she built the confidence to experiment beyond the thirty-second spot. A brief but enriching stint at Rediffusion Delhi rounded out her ad-agency education. “Most importantly,” she reflects, “it gave me confidence, which was my greatest earning.”
From quick cuts to long form
Even while excelling in short form, Bhavna felt a tug toward expansive narratives. “Growing up with an obsession for films, long-form felt like the natural next step,” she explains. “I’ve always been keen to explore different mediums of storytelling, and the longer format called to me because I knew it would give me the space to explore emotion, nuance, and characters in a way advertising couldn’t.”
Her pivot to independent storytelling was affirmed when she won Harper’s Bazaar’s first short-story competition, just as she left the agency world. “From the outside, it may have looked brave, but on the inside, it was terrifying,” she admits.
Importantly, she never abandoned the short form. “Consulting grew naturally alongside,” she says. “I continue to work with brands to help shape their ideas across various formats, and for my personal joy I still write short stories and vignettes.”
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Writing as a wellness ritual
Bhavna’s latest creation is as introspective as her earlier work was high-octane. Born, she says, “from a personal need and the desire to experience writing in a new way,” her writing retreat unfolds at the serene Woods at Sasan in Gujarat’s Gir forest region.
“I wanted to create a space where people could step away from their routines, sit with themselves. A space where writing could be both creative and healing,” she explains. Unlike a conventional workshop, it is “simply an extension of me as a writer—my own sensitivity, humanity, and lens.”
Her approach is intimate and deliberately small-scale, with only 15 participants to ensure every voice is heard. “Our personal stories are our richest fodder for writing,” she adds. “My attempt, always, is to first unlock some of those stories in the room, and then let them anchor the more technical aspects.”
Transformations amongst the trees
Over four immersive days, attendees settle into open-air pavilions shaded by ancient mango trees, begin mornings with yoga and meditation, and pause between writing sessions for sound healing and contemplative forest walks—sometimes light-hearted, sometimes deeply reflective. “Writing can be heavy work, especially when we’re drawing from personal material,” Bhavna notes. “That’s why the retreat is designed to intersperse the writing and interactive sessions with wellness practices like yoga, meditation, and sound healing. These create space to release, recharge and integrate whatever comes up in the writing.”
She also hopes the experience travels home with participants. “I want to introduce, through various tools and practices, a kind of ritual that feels sustainable—something people can take home and make part of their daily lives. I honestly believe it has the power to start a new conversation in the wellness space.”
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The venue itself amplifies the experience. Bhavna admires Woods at Sasan’s philosophy of hiring staff from neighboring villages, which lends a personal warmth to its quiet luxury. “Writing in the shade of mango trees—that always does it for me,” she smiles. “There’s something magnetic about that land. I always sleep like a baby there.”
The retreat’s magic lies in its unpredictability. “One participant, a lawyer who had stopped writing stories because of fear of judgment, found the courage to start writing again. Another person processed grief through the story she wrote,” Bhavna recalls, careful to protect their privacy. Last year’s gathering, she adds, “brought together a lawyer, an image consultant, a corporate leader, an architect, a photographer, and a life coach—the whole gamut.”
“The icing on the cake,” she says, “is the setting itself—the scenic stillness of Woods at Sasan. It’s far from the madding crowd, and it creates the perfect container for this kind of work.”
Now preparing for its second edition, themed Writing as a Wellness Ritual, the retreat will run in the first week of October, this year. Bhavna is looking forward to welcome people who feel drawn to exploring themselves through writing,” offering them, as she puts it, “a space where writing becomes both an act of creation and of healing, like a sanctuary that lingers long after the retreat ends.”
Roots in solitude and song
Bhavna’s affinity for narrative began in childhood. She grew up in Srinagar, then Shimla, before moving to Delhi, nourished by the tales of her father, an Indian Police Medal awardee. “Many of my earliest memories are of listening to family anecdotes narrated almost like tales,” she says. Urdu poetry and song lyrics infused her imagination, while her naturally reclusive nature allowed her to “daydream, feel and observe, and subsequently, express it through words.” Those early solitary hours became the seedbed for her later craft.
A lifelong ritual of words
For Bhavna Kher, writing is more than a career. “You can’t exactly wake up in the middle of the night and go to a spa, but you can always turn to pen and paper,” she reflects. “And that simple act can make you feel lighter, clearer, and well.”
Even as she prepares for a global film collaboration and a feature project with a major OTT platform, Bhavna continues to nurture this quieter mission of helping others find that same solace in language. From high-stakes ad campaigns to Netflix crime dramas and forest-bathed writing circles, her journey proves that storytelling, whether for screen, page, or soul, is a lifelong transformative ritual.
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