Born in 1965 In Bombay he grew up in a village in the southern most Indian state of Kerala. In 1985 he graduated from Kerala and landed in Bombay looking for work. He happened to find a job as an office assistant in the country’s first video post production house called Western outdoor advertising. Starting with meagre salary of 10 dollars a month he managed to run some technical errands for the audio visual department and thereby learn how to do multi projector audio visual programmes.
Later he was offered a job by one of his clients - J Walter Thompson as an audio visual manager in 1989. Here he ran the department for four years and started dwelling in directing commercials for his employer.
In 1992 he started directing commercials as a full time occupation. In 1995 he started his own production house called Footcandles Film. In a span of 10 years Footcandles film grew to be among the countries premier production houses with a multi director panel. Meanwhile Manav started exploring directing commercials in alien languages by finding representations in countries such as Indonesia.
Till 2008 he continued to head Footcandles Film as the founder and mentor. In 2009 he took a break from managing the company and proceeded to Paris to study photographic art at Speos school of photography. Here he dwelled in non commercial conceptual photography for a year. Till date he has been directing commercials for the Indian market.