@ME!!!

I have my own startup. I am a computer engineer by profession and had grabbed the first opportunity to move to Bangalore which had come in the form of campus recruitments. Starting a company was the foremost thought in my mind, but I needed an idea, I needed experience, I needed money, I needed friends and Bangalore was perfect. I realized working in an MNC was not fulfilling to say the least especially as a fresher. I didn’t know what I was contributing to. And walking to my cubicle everyday wearing a tag was the most stifling feeling of my life. So I moved to a smaller company hoping to make a change. I learned everything here, from how they manage the inventory at the canteen to how the CEO delegates successfully and gets the job done. After that, I resigned and went on a 3 month Himalayas trip, starting from Uttaranchal (religious pilgrimage), moving onto Himachal (tour of dope land) , Ladakh (adventure starts here) and then Kashmir (reality strikes when you see the military stationed every 1 km ). This trip humbled me, gave me the courage and the experience to come back and explore options. I was a technologist and I realized I wanted to dabble with technology that is beneficial to the masses. I started with sensor technology that converts public spaces into interactive environments. I came back to Bangalore and registered my company and its my livelihood now

Every challenge I have come across is unique. There is no "biggest" challenge. Be it walking down a trekking path in Dharamsala and you find yourself in the middle of two groups of big, fat Himalayan monkeys who are ready to fight each other over something or be it getting stalked by a man in orange robes who thinks he knows this lone woman traveler from a previous birth. You need to think quickly to get out of “situations” and to think quickly you need to be calm and to be calm when you have monkeys and stalkers around you is a skill by itself. Take the monkey situation, it was afternoon and an empty path. I have no idea where the monkeys came from. 1, 2, then some 30 monkeys on both sides making jeering noises. I realized they were gathering up at the two sides of the make-shift path road on the hill and I was in the middle. I was their imaginary line that separated the two groups of warring monkeys. I was trembling, my knees were giving away. I could write a book on what happened. But I managed to survive by doing nothing

“Not taking a risk is the biggest risk in life” and when you have that as your life motto, life throws at you opportunities that can be enriching and life altering. I also believe that the word failure should be defined as a missed opportunity and not as an end of something you had ventured into. You always carry the experience of a missed opportunity to the next stage of life. I don’t believe that opportunity knocks only once. I believe there is an opportunity, everytime you open a door, everytime you venture out of your comfort zone, everytime you meet someone. And my biggest strength and my biggest weakness is that I persist, I obsess about it and when I move on I will not turn back. I truly believe that life is short and you have to make every moment count and my weakness is that am on a guilt-trip if I think I “wasted” my time by doing nothing. I have my own start-up and my next step is to scale up the business. Am in a comfort-zone now and I believe I need a third party perspective on what I do. I need to be in a  group to understand what other people think and have the bandwidth to take som constructive criticism. Right now, me and my business partner are so in sync with each other about taking decisions. Am looking for a fresh perspective in life

I love the Flipkarts and Snapdeals and Redbuses and the Bansals of India but people like Samit Sharma inspires me. They did something that changed the way people lived, gave them hope. In India, an estimated 499-649 million people (50% to 65% of the population) do not have regular access to essential medicines. The fact that these essential medicines are made in India and then exported to pharmaceutical companies and then sent back as branded medicines that cost 3 times the production cost is just baffling economics. A branded medicine that would cost 100 rupees can be obtained for 10 rupees if the doctors prescribed the salts that form the medicine. And Dr. Samit Sharma, a doctor by profession who went onto become an IAS officer, joined with the Rajasthan Government and created an initiative called the RMSC that got medicines to the poor for free. Through RMSC, the government has banned prescriptions of branded medicine by doctors. An expenditure of 1500 crores by citizens was saved under this scheme. This initiative has created medical stores that give generic medicines for less than Rs. 10 that would generally cost them Rs.100/- This initiative was so successful in rajasthan that it has been adopted by other state governments of India. Now a poor person has access to AIDS and cancer medicines because of this initiative. Only if all the IAS officers thought like him, India would be a better place to live in

I am a woman entrepreneur in the technology sector who has had her equal share of failing and successful ventures. I come with a set of unique experiences that I can share. Am looking for insights by meeting with these “champions of change’ of this world