Susmita Bhattacharjee - A Selco Incubatee

Susmita in the center

Susmita’s talk really touched one and all in the room. She started with "Until I was eight, I lived without electricity. And the strongest memory I carry of the time is of the fear of going to the toilet in the dark. It was away from the house as toilets in villages used to be (and to a large extent still are), and we used to carry a small kerosene lamp, which we couldn’t take inside the toilet as the water could put it out. So we had to leave the lamp outside and the only light was what came in through the bamboo shafts that the bathroom was made of. And it was an Indian style toilet, which you felt you could even fall into, or from which snakes and scorpions could come out, and that is a fear that was so deep, I have not forgotten it to this day. And I think it’s what made me come back to India" 

From there, she went on to complete her education, right upto a PhD in Germany, living in Amsterdam, Canada, and the US for 17 years. Until, and one fine day it struck her that there are still children who must be experiencing the same fear, and that was the defining moment of her decision. She decided to quit corporate, quit the American dream and come back to India. Come back and do something for those she could. She started to research online, and that's what led her to Selco. 

She also sat with the map of India to figure out which State she’d come back to, and she picked Madhya Pradesh.  Sixty percent of the state does not have proper access to electricity. She works in the Narmada Valley region which also has the dubious distinction of the lowest female literacy in India.

She started a venture called Pushan Renewable Energy

This was three years back and it’s been one big uphill task since then. She realizes the real tough challenge is not as much in selling the product as much as it is in letting people understand the need and benefit. For these low-income rural communities living in remote parts of the state electricity is not a necessity since they have lived generations in entire darkness.

She found that one motivating factor that worked best was TV.  Light was secondary. And after a few such sales, there was this one woman who came and asked her if it was possible to have light in the kitchen, and she told susmita not to tell her husband that she’d asked. It was like the woman's needs not only didn't matter, they weren't even to be acknowledged.  After that incident, Susmita makes sure she gets a light installed in the kitchen whichever household she electrifies. 

She is also having a really tough time building a team as nobody wants to work in such tough terrain, and the locals were just not working out. She had so many bad experiences with the hiring she did, that she says she’s gone through a personal crisis of sorts wondering where her judgment was going wrong. But in and through all that she has stuck it out.

Over the last two years, the impact she's achieved:

· 500 women have light in their kitchen
· 650 girls and boys getting to study at home
· 25 local businesses like poultry and dairy now work with solar power.
· 1500 children learning computers at solar powered schools.
· 5 local entrepreneurs trained with a new skill set
· 2  hamlets with 50 households have light for the first time

Tulsi Bai told her 'It’s so much fun to cook in the evening since we installed solar power '

Susmita, a real kudos to your grit and commitment !! 

Sustainable Investments

The week has been a lot of conferences and workshops.

Last week was the Sankalp Global Summit 2015, at Delhi.A huge event that brought together over a thousand people, on a meet called 'Fueling the Innovation Economy'. 

Last two days was our own Sustainable Investment Workshop at Bangalore. Selco brought together Investors, Practitioners and some Government Banking Sector for discussions on Sustainable Investments. A small cohesive group of around forty passionate and committed individuals from varying walks of life, come together with a common social objective. Inspite of some widely differing opinions on the how of things, the positive energy in the room was palpable and I felt a deep sense of glad to belong. 

Just so I don't get carried away into the abstract, as I'm so wont to do, I'll cover some disconnected specifics. One statement from Richenda, executive director United Nations Foundation says a lot 'Í wish I could take SELCO and put it in Africa'. And now, that’s on the agenda too.

The week gave me my first macro level peeps into the world of social enterprise and social objectives, and it was extremely informative and enlightening, so to say. 

It’s almost like this huge gap of poverty alleviation that’s actually a government mandate, pretty much unfulfilled, the bane of the gap between policy and implementation; while the percentage of the poor has gone down over the years, in actual numbers its higher. 400 million with no access to electricity is one such statistic. We are so protected that we don't even see it today. What we see may at best be the working class, the maids, the drivers. That is not even classified as poor anymore. Beyond that is the poor, the very poor and the abject poor. This is a large large segment being addressed by private partnerships and enterprise, to the extent possible.

It’s such a large landscape that I don’t know where to begin.

It’s like what Harish loves to say ‘Google created the best possible search engine, because the internet existed. We need to create not just the product but the entire internet.’ Meaning to say, the eco system for social enterprise is so not conducive, that to achieve what we want to, we need to work not just on our own product but on the entire eco system, be it policy, technology, human resources, end user finance, enterprise finance, all of it, and that's what makes it so much more challenging.

Selco has been around twenty years, and while it has seen organic growth, maybe even robust growth, it’s been far from steady growth. It’s been lots of trials and errors, and learnings and it’s through all of this that it has developed a holistic approach to addressing the issue, and that’s what we now hope to scale, scale not just at the organic level by extrapolating growth, but by replicating the story and looking for exponential growth.

And this is why we're looking to create more and more such enterprises to cover the rest of the country. We have an Incubation center which enables this process, and we had three of our incubatees come and tell us their stories, absolutely fascinating stories. 

I'll do each story separately, but to close down a brilliant two days were the children from the Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya, who brought in some really amazing music. Like what our mc said, there were no words to describe the experience of hearing these children from the really underserved communities, from the remote hills of north karnataka render chaste hindustani classical music. Here are a couple of pictures and short video clips just to give you a flavour of what they did.

What opportunity can do !

Link to the video:

https://plus.google.com/photos/116296832109747352208/albums/6137787253864481121?authkey=CPini8HQodOXmQE

That's Visalakshi, Sunil and Ravi. Here's the link to a short clip, (couldn't figure out how to embed the videos): 

https://plus.google.com/photos/search/%23Videos?pid=6137416633767307074&oid=116296832109747352208

Smile Foundation

Smile Foundation is a small family effort at doing our bit of giving back. It was set up with the objective of facilitating education of children from under served backgrounds, through funds from family and friends.

This evening saw a touching validation of all our efforts. But before I go into that, let me put in some context.

Smile here is an acronym for Saraswati Mahadas Indira Learning and Education; Saraswati Mahadas being my great grandmother and Indira, my grandmother. This was started by Kamlesh, my aunt, Sukrutha, my mother ( daughters of Indira) and me, way back in 2003; yes, women power all the way :). This was during the phase when I’d quit IDBI and was wondering what else I could do in life.

It came out of a conversation I overheard between our driver, Subbareddy and his wife, Chinni. They were discussing some financial issues, and Subbareddy was saying they would need to withdraw their son from private school to send him to a government school (which meant they saved on fees). For those not familiar, all Government Schools in India offer education only in vernacular language, plus the quality is mostly sorely lacking, be it infrastructure or teaching. His wife says ‘No, never, we’re not withdrawing him from the English medium school, I want a better future for him than ours, and I’ll do anything in my capacity to give him that, even if I have to go without food’.  And there was this despair and finality in her voice which said she would go without food if forced.

At that point, my aunt was already funding school fees of her maids children. My mom was, post retirement, helping out at a shelter for street children. We decided to put our energies and resources together and that’s how Smile Foundation came into being.

The idea was to visit such schools within a radius of 5 kms of our house to identify potential school dropouts. Most of these schools won't let the kids who don't pay, take their exams.  That's the list I’d get and then do some more research to identify the really deserving children, (as our resources were also limited ) and then we’d fund the educational needs of those children, be it fees, bus pass, books, private tuition, whatever be the gauged need.  And the intent was to back those kids through to college. 

Back to the present; this evening my mother called to say that one of our first students, Geethika who we’d picked up in school and had seen through college, came back today, searching for our house, to donate Rs.4000 to the foundation. A lump in the throat moment.

I distinctly remember Geethika, because back then, when asked what her ambition and goal was she’d said, I want a home which has a door. At first I hadn’t understood. And then she explained that they lived in a shack under a bridge, and their shack didn’t have a door, and how that was always a worry as their father was an alcoholic and it was just she and her mother at home. Today she has a decent job and is able to rent a house for Rs.4000 per month, bought herself a scooter and is able to sustain the entire family. Real impact that.

In those first years, when kids would still drop out a couple of years after we'd started to help, or girls were just pulled out of studying, and I’d go through helpless frustrating times, I remember Kamlesh aunty saying, If you can make a difference to one life, if that one family comes out of poverty only because of what you did, think that your achievement’. Geethika would be one there aunty.

Thanks Aunty and Ma, for enabling this beautiful effort. And Ma, more for keeping it going even after I moved out of Hyd. I know we still have discussions on how difficult it is, the last one being three days back, but through all those downs, it's still been so worthwhile. Let's hang in there to do what we can. God willing, there will be more Geethikas'. 

Startup Mistakes to Avoid

A link on Startup mistakes to avoid. Very interesting, and vouched for by what we've seen on the ground, at SELCO Incubation and from friends with Startups as well.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/31/africa/gallery/business-startup-mistakes-to-avoid/index.html

Sophie's Choice (1982)

                             

A movie that will haunt you for a long while after the watching. A story of human resilience through the worst of human suffering, so intelligently and profoundly brought out in the midst of romance and mystery. It unfolds gradually through what is seemingly an eccentric and fun romance, through flashbacks of Sophies survival through the concentration camps.

It’s an intertwining of three lives, which chance to come together to mingle and mesh in many different layers; there's love, hate, jealousy but above all a deep friendship that surpasses all else. Sophie and Nathan are in a volatile and intense romantic liason, and there’s Stingo an aspiring writer from the south who comes into the same apartment. He gets drawn in from the moment he enters, getting besotted by them, as their deep and complex pasts unfold and inevitable falling in love with Sophie while simultaneously caring deeply for Nathan.

Sophie is a polish refugee, from world war 2, carrying the ghosts of the Auschwitz, and when she escapes and attempts suicide she meets with the eccentric and very charming Nathan, to find life again. Must add, it's by far Meryl Streep's most astounding performances. 

Stingo grows up through the experience with Sophie and Nathan, from an adolescent dreamer with the freshness of life to being exposed to the pits of human suffering through Sophies experiences and the schizophrenic Nathan.

And somehow, though its all about really sad stories of pain and suffering and deceit, there’s a zip and exuberance to the movie which bring out human resilience at its best. 

As titled, they are each faced with the most complex and bewildering of choices, some tragic, some frivolous yet you totally go along with them to understand each. 

I've consciously stayed away from anything to do with the Auschwitz, yet this one just grew on me. Strongly recommended for its insights on human resilience, dynamics and complexities of relationships and needless to say, the simply brilliant portrayals. 

SELCOs latest - Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya

Last week saw the inauguration of SELCOs largest single system installation; a 14KW mini grid at Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya at Dharwad. 

This was one of our really tough projects and Senthil the project lead, who ate, slept, breathed Kalkeri for months now, has tons of fascinating stories to tell about the challenges of setting up the installation, so a real kudos to him and the team, they did a brilliant job.

Apart from the excitement of the solar customized design solution, The Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya itself is a really interesting story: 

Founded in 2002, it's set up in a quiet valley, off Kalkeri, a small village close to Dharwad in Karnataka. The institute provides education in music, and also academics to children from villages of the surrounding areas. also providing accommodation, food and healthcare, at no cost whatsoever.

           

KSV is the brainchild of four founders across three countries. The idea was conceptualized by one Mathieu Fortier from Quebec, Canada. Another founder is Ustad Hameed Khan, who hails from Dharwad and is part of an unbroken music tradition; 6th in line of the generation of musicians in a family honoured for its great contribution to hindustani classical music. His grandfather, Sitar Ratna Rahimat Khan, was the innovator of the contemporary sitar. He was a disciple of legendary Ustad Bande Ali Khan of the Indore Beenkar Gharana. The other two founders are Agathe Meurisse Fortier and Blaise Fortier, Agathe is a fine arts graduate from the Sorbonne University in Paris and Blaise, Mathieu’s brother is a Directors of Young Musicians of the World (Canada).

Mathieu Fortier and his wife Agathe travelled extensively in India, during which time they spent two years at Shanti Niketan, West Bengal, learning yoga and Indian languages. Mathieu spent several years learning Hindustani Shastriya Sangeet. This musical journey took Mathieu and Agathe to Benares, and then finally to Dharwad.

In Dharwad Mathieu started to take classes with Shri Rajshekar Mansur, the son of the late Pt Mallikarjun Mansur. It's there that he met Ustad Hameed Khan Principal of the Music College. Mathieu, Agathe and Ustad Ji got together in 2001 and started to give free evening tuition classes in vocal, harmonium, sitar and tabla. It was not long afterwards that Mathieu heard about a farm house on five acres of land to rent just outside the village of Kalkeri which was how and where the Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya was born.

Some pictures of  the installation, the school and the kids.

                                       

The institute has not only a great academic record, but also a 100% passrate in the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya music exams which they all take.

Here's one of their stories:

Sharda is 14, the youngest of four children. Before joining Kalkeri Sangeet Vidyalaya, Sharda had never experienced a regular school day and couldn’t read, write or count. And coming from the poor banjaran community, she rarely had even three meals a day. 

Sharda is now in 9th class, has passed the Government Junior Music Exam and the 3rd level exam with the nationally recognised Gandharva Mahavidyalaya. She has gone from being a quiet withdrawn girl with few opportunities, to a confident young person with outstanding singing abilities and an impressive academic success with an 82% average.

Upon completion of her school education Sharda has ambitions to go on to university to study music.

Stories that touch you deep within.

Lucid Dreaming

It’s interesting how the thought about Lucid dreaming got triggered. Two days back I had a really vivid and intense dream experience, and that's pretty usual for any of us, but what followed is what triggered thought. The same evening three friends, who’d all also had extreme dream experiences that night called to talk about their dreams. Each disconnected, but with each call I was just getting more and more amazed. Interesting, right? Don’t throw coincidence at me, not part of my vocabulary anymore :)

In fact some dream experiences are so intense that it makes me wonder why we don’t experience the same level of intensity in real life, as in waking life. Then you realize that in waking life our sensory interpretations interfere with the essence of the experience and could potentially actually take away from it. And this is where lucid dreams could actually enable a higher level of lucid in real. A higher level of self awareness.

Now what is Lucid Dreaming? Lucid dreams are dreams in which you KNOW that you're dreaming. And what's more, they can be controlled.

I’m sure a lot of us have experienced the knowing we're dreaming bit. But what could be new to many is the fact that lucid dreams can be actually controlled, and that this is an acquired skill. Once you're lucid, you can consciously dream about anything you desire. Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain.

                                     

Dream expert Beverly D'Urso says 'someone who has become lucid has much higher levels of awareness, and that’s one of the biggest benefits of lucid dreaming.' 

The first scientific proof of lucid dreaming emerged in 1975 from the British parapsychologist Dr Keith Hearne. He recorded a set of pre-determined eye movements from his lucid volunteer, Alan Worsley, via an electro-oculogram (EOG). It was a basic communication between the dreamer and the outside world. 

More recently, this 2009 study by the Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt revealed significantly increased brain activity during lucid dreams.

With techniques perfected during Stephen LaBerge's 20 years of pioneering research at Stanford University, now anyone can learn to consciously explore and use their dreams for self-discovery, creativity, fantasy fulfillment, emotional healing, and profound spiritual insight.

Indeed, some argue that it supports the need to classify lucid dreams as a new and separate state of consciousness.

You could also watch this Ted Talk if you want to know more.

And it's apparently not new, Tibetan dream yoga is the original form of lucid dreaming. It is a philosophical practice created in Tibetan Buddhism at least 1,000 years ago. Just like lucid dreams, the aim of this is to awaken the consciousness in the dream state.

Fascinating stuff beyond the real :)