The Media Minds Behind SOSGI: Michael & Maneesha Khanna

SOS Global Indians is led by two people who have lived the global Indian story from both ends — building careers across India and the United States, and learning firsthand what it means to hold two homes in one heart.

Michael Khanna, our founder, is a media and marketing professional who moved to the United States in 2020 — landing, as it happened, straight into a global pandemic. When his own mother was stranded by the lockdowns, he channelled a marketer's instinct for reaching people into something bigger: a support network that grew into one of the largest social-impact communities for non-resident Indians anywhere online. His community building earned recognition from Meta itself, which selected SOS Global Indians for its Community Accelerator program in 2021, and his work has been featured in national media and interviews across the diaspora.

Maneesha Khanna, our co-founder, joined the mission full-time in 2026 after a 25-year career in media and marketing — including thirteen years at PepsiCo, where she rose to Senior Director and Global Media Capability Lead. Her career has spanned Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, New York and Dallas, building brands, leading digital transformation, and shaping how some of the world's most recognizable companies connect with their consumers. She is an active voice in global marketing industry bodies and forums.

Why does this pairing matter for a community platform? Because the challenges of global Indians are, at their core, challenges of trust and information — who to believe, where to look, what is safe. Michael and Maneesha have spent their combined five decades learning how information moves, how trust is built at scale, and how communities form around shared identity. They are applying that craft to the community they belong to themselves.

Both know the pressures of the journey personally: the green-card years, the parents ageing an ocean away, the school runs in Texas and the weddings in Delhi, the pride and the pull of two flags. That lived experience — not just professional expertise — is the compass for every feature on this platform.

Their shared conviction is simple: global Indians are one of the most accomplished, generous and connected communities on earth, and they deserve infrastructure worthy of that legacy. That is what SOSGI is being built to be.