The Amateur's Scratchpad

What do you do when you don’t feel like eating the “sabzi” your mom made? What do you do when you don’t feel like eating your mess food? We all just ‘swiggy’ it, right? Although there are quite a few number of food delivery applications readily available to us now, the scenario wasn’t the same even a few years back. But, how did Swiggy come into existence? How did it become synonymous to food ordering? Here, is the success story of Swiggy and its founders.

BITS-Pilani alumnis Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy were always passionate about kick starting their own start-up. Finally, in 2013, they came up with a technology product called Bundl to connect courier companies across India. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t off to a great start and the duo had to shut shop very soon. It was after their courier tech fiasco that the duo understood they needed to venture into something more needed by the common public. That’s when they had the idea of the food-delivery business. Since, none of them were good with the coding part, they roped in Rahul Jaimini, an IIT Kharagpur graduate.

In 2014, the start-up kicked off with six delivery executives and 25 restaurants on their platform in the upscale neighbourhood of Bengaluru called Koramangala. Within a year, Swiggy expanded to 11 localities in Bengaluru and also opened business in Gurgaon and Delhi. As their business expanded, the founders started putting more innovative thoughts into their model. They hired more delivery executives, partnered up with 300 restaurants within their functional area and added more user-friendly features to the application. The same year Swiggy received its first funding of $2million from Accel and SAIF Partners and broadened its horizon to the other five big cities- Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai.

As good as 2015 was in respect of the funding boom, it slowly died away the following year in 2016. But, Swiggy was on its own victory high. Singapore-based RB Investments and New York-based Harmony Partners invested a lump sum amount of $35 million in Swiggy. While other similar platforms struggled to keep up with the fast growing pace of Swiggy, it kept on adding new features and extending. A new component called Swiggy express was launched along with the introduction of surge pricing in case of excessive rain, festivals or national holidays.

With services like the Bowl Company, delivery till 2 a.m and lucrative discounts, Swiggy was huge hit among millennials. Students or young professionals no longer had to cry or grump about food. In 2018, Swiggy entered the prestigious club of Unicorns (start-ups valued at over 1 million). Today, Swiggy holds the record of 5 million monthly orders.

Although, Swiggy has not really been left out from its share of controversies and crisis, but it has made its mark in the start-up industry and how! With features like Swiggy Pop (orders of Rs.99-200 from local restaurants without any extra charges), Swiggy scheduled (one can schedule their order according to their time), Swiggy Super (a monthly subscription pack) and so much more Swiggy is here to stay.

Sources:

Swiggy Timeline: From a Bootstrapped Venture to India’s Fastest Growing Unicorn

 Timeline: How late-entrant Swiggy became India’s most valued food-tech startup

Over A Million App Downloads, 8 Cities And 5,000 Restaurants – Swiggy’s 17-Month Journey From Bootstrapping To Closing 3 Funding Rounds

Learning from a failure: the making of Swiggy

How long has it been since we haven’t talked? As far as I remember, it was last summer. I was at your place. We re-watched the first season of The Office for the millionth time and ate cheap Chinese food on bed. Had I known it was the last time we were doing that, I would have asked you to play the second season and maybe order another plate of that very sweet kung pao chicken. I know how you can give your life for that. How I wish I knew!

I used to cry often when we stopped talking after that day, after that fight. There were so many questions that formed a huge jumble inside my head and I panicked because I didn’t have any answer to them. I couldn’t figure out an appropriate answer for even one. I kept checking my phone at alternative minutes, but in vain! All I remember is the whirring sound of the fan above my head. I could hear the blood rushing through my ears. But, was I angry? Was I sad? Was I expectant of you? I don’t think I will know. Then, after a few months I left the city.

When I sat inside the cab to go to the airport and it passed across all our beloved cafes and blue-white roads, I thought the trauma will be even more in the new city with no one to keep a check on me. Turns out, it wasn’t so difficult. I got so engrossed in my work, in the city, in the dingy hostel room that I completely forgot about you. I forgot about your existence. I forgot about the exclusivity of our friendship, which honestly was only one-sided. The pain was gone! Until, one day when I went to Marine Drive. Bombay people go there for the view, for the breeze. I went there for my serenity. On my way, I met a lady whom I had approached for directions. No, I still haven’t learnt how to use Google Maps. You didn’t teach me well. Anyway, her back faced me when I called her out. As she turned, I saw a book on her lap. She was reading sitting on the rusty old iron staircase. As she guided me with my incompetency, I couldn’t help but ask her about the weird choice of place for reading a book. “I like to see the sky changing its colours. And it’s different every single day!”, she said.
I was transported back to the freshman year of college when you had said the same thing about skies. How different they are each time you look at them. How they change their colour from Prussian blue to tangy orange to melancholic grey…

Once again, today, as I sit inside this café which is not really bustling with Selena Gomez pop songs but is playing jazz which I am assuming is something called blue jazz and trying to create a sort of an ambience, I am reminded of you, again. It is not particularly impressive, but is definitely a lot humane. As I sipped on my hugely over-priced beer, I take a trip down the memory lane. How you loved jazz and how you would forcefully make me listen to them! I know the band playing is also selling their CDs outside in a stall along with DIY greeting cards. I want to buy one for you, especially because of the card. The cards, I hear, have dead plants stuck on them. I want to write all my thoughts on it and make you read them. I know, this is not really the most precious or the most creative present you could receive from a person. But, dead flowers, blue jazz, Pearl Jam, DIY cards and starry nights are aesthetic. They are also symbolic to our state of being dead or alive.

I’ve too many scattered thoughts now. I’ve to go buy a CD before they run out of them and send it to you. Wherever you are, whatever your address is. Consider me a wannabe Virginia Woolf or a more recent Haruki Murakami, but I’ve to go before they run out or CDs or I run out of time and words…

“When everything is breaking news, nothing is!” – Annonymous

I couldn’t find the person who wrote/said the above quote, but whoever it was, kudos to that human. Press Releases have been an integral part of media and communications for a long time now. But are they relevant in this age of digital technology? More importantly, does every small news or action deserve a Press Release?

Now, what is a Press Release? According to the web, a press release is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing information or making an announcement. But in today’s digital age, we don’t really need to wait for a public relations firm to write and disseminate the press release in order to make an announcement. The organization or the brand making the announcement can simply take the help of their social media networking sites to put out the announcement.

Also, another issue now a days is crisis and its management. For PR people, now a days, everything is a crisis. Be it the delay of a flight or the loss of an actor’s make-up box, every minute things falls under crisis. And the moment that happens, the consultancy advices its client to put out a press release. A few days back, we went for a consultancy visit to Avian WE and the EVP of the firm, Girish Huria, touched upon this particular point. “So what if you didn’t get the first auto? You probably got the tenth one. Everything is not a crisis, but an issue”, said Huria. Similarly, the delay of a flight or an actor’s distressed costume is not really a crisis and these incidents neither require press releases nor deserve them.

There’s also a reduction in the number of people who are patient enough and are actually interested in investing in long form content. So, how can be press releases replaced? Maybe, a short pitch note or a video with all the required details can be used instead of a pitch release. Even from a journalistic point of view, press releases are losing their significance. “Muck Rack and Zeno Group Muck Rack and Zeno Group surveyed more than 500 journalists around the world and found that roughly half of journalists around the world (53 percent in the United States and 41 percent outside the U.S.) don’t use press releases to find new story ideas.”, read an article from PR Daily. For them, press releases aren’t really exclusive anymore. Some other form of media has already captured the news and circulated it even before a PR person has been able to construct the heading. In such a situation, a press release about a very minor issue will make the journalist more annoyed than anything else. Data, analytics and properly established relationships with them are the key to the journalists’ hearts.

Having said all that, another thing is to be kept in mind as well. India hasn’t completely lost the relevance of press releases till now. But, how much longer till we actually stop churning out innumerable of them for undeserving news?

The one word that hasn’t lost its sheen since the 1500s is the word ‘bandit’. A little intimidating, isn’t it? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word ‘bandit’ means a thief with a weapon , especially one belonging to a group that attacks people travelling through the countryside. We chose the word bandit because we often came across the literary use of the word while studying Shakespeare in school. Also, it has a lot of mentions in movies and poems across the globe in various languages. The word has not only retained its meaning but also opened new categories in today’s era. In current times, we hardly hear about bandits or their groups or actions, but new types of banditry has definitely come into existence.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the word ‘bandit’ has often been used in movie titles and poems by world class poets and directors. A very popular movie directed by Shekhar Kapur called “Bandit Queen” was released in 1994. The movie opens with the summer of 68 where the protagonist, Pholaan is married off to a twenty year old man Puttilal. Since her marriage, Phoolan was exposed to sexual and exploitative abuses not only by her husband but by everyone whom she approaches for help. Her exploiters include the Thakurs- the members of the Panchayat, her cousin Kailash, even the local policemen and so on. A lot of other incidents follow all involving Phoolan being stripped off of her dignity and respect over and over again. Ultimately, she decides to form a robber gang of her own with the help of Baba Mustakim, another gang leader and Man Singh. They arrange for some men and guns and thus Phoolan becomes the new leader, Phoolan Devi. So, the creativity here lies in the fact that Kapoor, through his astounding direction has successfully shown the transformation of Phoolan, the naive girl to Phoolan Devi, the ‘daku’. She never intended to be a bandit but the circumstances she went to left her no choice. The title of the movie, “Bandit Queen” also provides an oxymoronic meaning to it where two words with totally contradictory meanings have been used.

In another poem of Rabindranath Thakur called “Birpurush” which means “the hero”, the poet talks about how a little boy who is merely ten years old in conveying his mother in a palanquin. In their way, they are confronted by a gang of robbers and this little boy promises to go fight them away. Here also, the poet has used the word ‘bandit’ in a synonymous way to describe the boy who inspite of being so young gives his mother a word of honour to go fight the evil away. The word describes the valour of the young boy.

As we sat inside that nanoscopic shack in the North Bay island of Andaman scribbling our signatures on a document which boldly declared that I, myself, will be the sole reason of my death if anything goes wrong during the activity, there were two mixed feelings inside of me. One was obviously fear and nervousness and the other was my sky rocketing adrenaline rush. “A child as young as eight years old can also do scuba-diving!”, said the man and flashed his pair of yellow teeth who was also the owner of the shack. I geared myself up, for the unknown. Without wasting another minute, I took the diving suit and the shoes, both of which had quintals of sand inside them and got ready for the first adventure sport of my life!

Finally, I could tick one of the things from my bucket list! My excitement was through the roof. In this case, the magnificent sky actually. As soon as we dipped our waists in the water, we were assigned with a guard. The guard fixed my breathing tube and armed me with the oxygen cylinder. Then, he taught me all the emergency signals and asked me to practice breathing a few times with my mouthpiece under water. Now, here came the struggle! The moment I would go under water and then try to breathe through my mouthpiece, it would feel like the lap of death. After a few tries, I was heart-broken and embarrassed enough to give up. What my fourteen year old sister could do without an inch of effort, I struggled. But, to my very surprise, my guard was not ready to give up on me. He took extra time to make me comfortable, motivated me with the most random stories and then made me practice breathing under the water. It was as if I was learning how to breathe for the first time.

Once we were done with this exercise, he asked me if I was ready to go underwater. I said yes, completely handing out the responsibility of my life to a stranger. “Breathe! And don’t be a miser in using the oxygen. There’s enough for you in that cylinder.” And with this, he pushed my head to submerge me under water. What an experience! The moment we went down, all I could see around me was the colour greenish-blue. I wondered if this it. But how could it be? They show an entire world under the water. Where are the things that I’ve seen on Discovery Channel since childhood?

“Whoosh…”

 A little squeezy orange coloured fish passed right through the glass of my mask breaking my chain of thoughts. And then, things started getting clearer. Slowly, I could see the dozens of fluorescent fishes that swam in flocks from one end to the other, the ends being endless. It felt as if they were leading an indomitable march and were not at all restrained by the alien type creatures that often invade in their world. We moved on to see the coral reefs which opened and closed if touched. They were so many and in different vibrant colours. Nameless fishes- both tiny and moderate in size came in unprepared to eat the algae off the reefs. Then came an uncountable number of crabs who were the only ones interested in the new aliens in their universe. They looked directly into our eyes through the masks and then lost curiosity. So, they went back to find the pufferfishes, probably for their lunch. Sounds like dream, doesn’t it?

Just as I was sinking into my sequences of dreams and how great would it be to keep floating in this greenish-blue hue, I started feeling a blinding pain in my ears. And before I could realize if I was dying or just drowning deeper, I was up and out of the water, the sun falling directly onto my eyes. One moment I was in the tranquil world of the underwater and then I was uprooted and put in that world again which was full of noises and screams and commotions.

“Did you enjoy it?”, asked Neeraj, my guide and I couldn’t thank him enough for having that belief in me that I could it. When I still managed to express some of my gratitude, he said, “Madam, it has been 18 years since I am doing this and there hasn’t been one day when the underwater has disappointed me. Every time I go in that deep, I forget about the rest of the world. So, it was more for me than for you.” And then, he walked away, the flaps in his hand, the sand filled bodysuit on his body and a heart filled with contentment.

Whenever you go for a vacation or for a work purpose to another city, where do you find your stays from? Oyo, isn’t it? The days of finding middlemen or taking the pain of carrying your luggage while looking for a suitable hotel to stay in are gone! Now, it’s only a matter of clicks before you have thousand stay options at the tips of your fingers. But, who made finding hotels this easy? That would be Ritesh Aggarwal who founded Oyo when he was just 19 and thus the tag, ‘the underage CEO’!

Born to a humble family at Cuttack in Orissa, Ritesh’s interests had always been a little different than any of his friends. While boys of his age would be more interested in football and movies, he would find his quack in screwing around computers. It was in 2009 when he left home to join IT coaching classes in Kota that he understood the problems of avid travellers. He realized that finding a befitting place to stay that would also be pocket-friendly was a huge trouble for people who travelled on a daily basis. And that’s how, the entrepreneurship bug bit him.

He started studying and researching about what could be done. While researching, he realized that budget hotels in India didn’t even meet the very basic needs of a budget traveller. Thus, he knew what would be the USPs of his start-up. In 2011, Ritesh moved to Delhi to join the University of London’s India campus but he dropped out just after three days because he couldn’t control his craving of working in his own start-up! In 2012, Oravel Stays finally came to being! It was an aggregator of bread and butter stay hotels in India.

After this, he was showered with awards and fellowships. He secured a funding of 30 lakh rupees from VentureNursery, got shortlisted for the “20 under 20”Thiel Fellowship and even managed to be the only Indian student to receive $100,000 from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and one of the earliest investors of Facebook. But somehow, inspite of all the awards and accolades, his business was not raking up on sales.

The young boy started working more vigorously and finally found out the loopholes. He understood the biggest inconvenience for a budget traveller leaving out affordability is availability and hospitality. With that idea, he re-invented Oravel Stays to Oyo which means “On your own” and added features like complimentary breakfast, easy check-in and check-out, hassle free payments, affordable rooms with basic amenities and decent stuff hospitality.

Since then, there has been no looking back for Oyo. Today it is one of the biggest brands in India and it has recently declared that it is ready to invest 300 million euro to strengthen presence in European vacation rental market. “A college dropout transforms it into largest hospitality company”, reads the headline in The Hindu. Having dropped out from college at the age of 19 and yet making it that big, he surely deserves the title of ‘the underage CEO’. Hadn’t he observed the distresses of a budget traveller during his travels, Oyo would’ve never been born. Observations lead you to places!

Sources:

The mastermind teen behind Oyo Rooms

Success saga of OYO hotel network

OYO to invest 300 million euro to strengthen presence in European vacation rental market

“So no one told you life was gonna be this way…” We should have known, right? F.R.I.E.N.D.S had already been flashing the very obvious message right in front of our eyes from the 90s. And we took so long to understand. How could we? As millennials, we are too busy “constructively” criticizing almost everything that we come across. In the case of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, it’s almost justified. The show did have a chain of serious problems. Whether it was the other five bullying Monica for being fat in her teenage years or Ross being homophobic because his wife came out as a gay woman or the others making fun of Phoebe because she was a bit “weird” in their words or Ross not wanting his son to play with a effeminate toy, the show did have its share of negativity. That’s a story for another day. But, there were a ton of other things that the show did touch upon. Here are five things that F.R.I.E.N.D.S taught us:

1. Your first job won’t be your dream job: The show starts with Rachel, a spoilt daddy’s princess, leaving her alter and coming and settling with her high school best friend, Monica. Rachel who had never even got herself a glass of water starts working as a waitress in the coffeehouse. Two hoots for a first job, isn’t it? But she works her way up until she finds her first fashion job at Bloomingdale’s followed by Ralph Lauren and then she revamps herself enough to find her dream job at Louis Vuitton in Paris. Isn’t it amazing?
2. Live your life being you and without regrets: Phoebe taught us how to do that, didn’t she? Throughout the show, she is shown as the weird one out of the group. Be it her dressing sense, her manner of talking or her songs which included lyrics like “How was I supposed to know that my mom was dead in the kitchen?” (No, smelly cat was nice!) Not once did she think about what other people would think of her songs or her dresses. Even in the episode where Rachel is embarrassed to go for a run with her because she runs like an elephant, she brushes Rachel off by saying that running like an elephant is fun for her and she would not change her style for anyone. That should be the mantra of our life, right?
3. You can be a mother, anyhow: One of the biggest things that the sitcom touched upon even in that mindset of the 90s society is the ways of embracing motherhood. The show made it very clear that there is no one conventional way of being a mother. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s kid, Rachel took the issue even when she was unmarried and decided to be a single parent and Monica and Chandler adopted twins. Through these three events, the show made it crystal clear that motherhood is a choice and you don’t really need to fill the boxes of marriage or a partner or a relationship in order to be a mother.
4. Life will go according to its plan, not yours: You cannot plan your life according to your schedule. Be it a job or a wedding or any big or small decision, life itself will plan it. Initially, Monica could never even imagine Chandler being her boyfriend let alone her soulmate. Ross and Rachel never knew that they were each other’s lobsters. Look where that went?
5. Friends are forever: Certainly! No matter if your day didn’t go well or you failed in your job or you simply had a bad headache, some friends are for life. So, even when Monica wanted Phoebe out of her life, she crawled back right into it. Even when Joey went and bought his own apartment, he did not like staying there without Chandler. That’s the essence of friendships. They are forever!

So, you’ll wind up as an waitress in some random café or lose your job in the museum or go through a rough break-up and end up picking your ex’s hair from the drain or work as some famous actor’s butt, but that is life! And “F.R.I.E.N.D.S” will always be there for you to get through it.

A few days back, we, the twenty of SCoRe, went to Avian WE, the third stop of consultancy exposure for us. There, we had the opportunity of having a session on Client Servicing with Onaiss Vaz, the man with 25 years of experience in the same who called it “Client Delight” very fondly. He started his session with this equation: Passion+Commitment+Positive attitude+Insights+Ideas+Error free= A good client servicer. And then, he went on to explain every point.

• Passion: A person working as a client servicer has to be very passionate about the job and by being passionate, he meant, that person must have a detailed knowledge about the client as well as the competitors of the client. To make it easier for us, he gave us the example of Aquaguard which is a brand in itself but how it has become synonymous of ‘pure water’ for us. We do not ask for pure water anymore but for “Aquaguard ka paani”.
• Commitment: Any person working in the field of client servicing has to be dedicated towards the clients. No matter what emergency comes, he/she cannot refuse helping the client at any point of time. In this context, he gave an example of how he finished an ongoing presentation with Mr. Anil Ambani even when he got the news of his father passing away only because he had previously committed to his job.
• Positive Attitude: A client servicing professional mandatorily has to keep a positive attitude. Why? Because, a client is hugely dependent on the council of the servicer. In the moment of a crisis, even if it is a hoax if the servicer himself/herself panics then it automatically makes the client nervous and this can lead to a huge loss in the business.
• Insights: A client servicing executive has to have information about the brand or the client that he/she is handling at the tip of their tongue. By information, it’s not only basic details about the company but also secretive details as well as statistical data. Without these, the consultations of the servicer would not have a base.
• Ideas: “Ideas would come from insights!”, said Mr. Vaz. A client servicer has to provide his/her clients with ideas about their business- be it a new publicity idea or a discount scheme. So, unless a servicer is properly equipped with general as well as statistical data about the client, he/she can provide to idea to the same.
• Error Free: The last but not the least, a client servicing executive cannot afford to make a mistake because a tiny mistake on his/her end can make the client suffer a humongous loss. Thus, a servicer always has to double or triple check his/her work before sending it out.

Other than these, he also talked about some basic skills that are very important for the profession- to be proactive, punctual, disciplined and organized being some of them. He concluded his session mentioning that client servicing is one of the most interesting professions to be in if you’re passionate enough about it. If you do your job with all the love in your heart, then you end up making “clients for life”!

The other day, I saw my six year old neighbour sitting and watching cartoons on his mother’s phone. It was after months that I saw a certain cartoon playing on a screen and just out of curiosity I sat beside him and started watching. And, of course, no points for guessing this, I was disgusted after a few minutes. Yes, “disgusted”. That’s the word! I did not understand what that show about a policeman and a thief was trying to portray. To me, it just felt like a humanized version of Tom and Jerry just a lot dumber and cheaper in respect to quality. This incident made me reminisce my childhood days.

Being a 90s kid, our entire childhood revolved around television. Be it cartoons, films like Harry Potter or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, serials like The Suite Life of Zack and Cody or even Indian dailies like Shararat or Sonpari, we watched it all. At least, I know, I did. And honestly, to think about this, the content back then used to be splendid. Cartoons like Oswald, Bob the Builder, Tom & Jerry, Power Puff Girls comprised our typical primary television pack. These cartoons and serials were not only entertaining, but also informative at the same time. Tom & Jerry was the classic example of a love-hate relationship between two animals who could neither love nor bear with each other. While the Power Puff girls taught us how to use the women power to fight against the evils of the world, Oswald taught us lessons of how to approach the problems in your life patiently and with utmost optimism. Even, a very silly show like Dora-the explorer showed things related to basic geography and science. Indian serials like Sonpari and Shararat depicted stories on magic in a positive way. Along with these, there was Harry Potter which was an integral part of our life. I cannot fathom to count the number of times I’ve enacted as Harry Potter in front of the mirror with a stick in my hand as the magic wand.

In current times, the content broadcasted by the television channels has hit an extreme low, not to mention, it’s degrading every day. Cartoons like Doraemon show characters like Nobita who is weak and is often victimized and bullied by another character called Gian and Sunio who is the instigator. It also illustrates perversion towards women by showing that the boys peep through the window when one of their female classmates Sizuka takes a shower. Another cartoon, which is apparently a huge hit among kids today is Chota Bheem which shows the main character, Bheem, beating up bad guys with throwing punches and fists at them. The main purpose of parents behind making their kids watch cartoons at the infant stage apart from the time-passing factor is to make them learn small things like names, colours etc. But, these contents like Doraemon or Chota Bheem makes children feel that fighting with people and bullying people with promises of toys, comics or video games is correct and that must have been happening in the real world. As a result of this, children enact similar things that they picked up from cartoons when they go to school.

Television is a very ubiquitous medium in children’s life and we should be very mindful of the content we are letting them watch. But, what other option do we have if there is no suitable content being played by the mediums themselves? For instance, I saw my first Harry Potter movie because Pogo used to play them every Sunday. But now, the channel itself has completely stopped shows like Harry Potter, M.A.D, Takeshi’s Castle and so many more. That is why people often resort to video games on their smartphones or playstations. It literally hurts me to know that these kids won’t ever consume the rich content that we did back in our days, these kids would never experience the adrenaline rush when one had to take a bath between the small interval of advertisement breaks, these kids would never experience the magic of Matilda or the spectacularity of Willi Wonka’s chocolate factory on a Sunday afternoon.

So, yes! This might seem like a rant and I’ve no shame in admitting that yes, it is! Cartoons help shape a person up. Kids pick up a lot of their characterizations from cartoons and if all those are destructive instead of being constructive then it is going to take the shape of a huge problem. The cartoon channels should either bring back the golden shows of our times or create new shows that will help the kids of the upcoming generations.

“90s were the best!”, they don’t say that without a reason. Do they?

In our tenure of three months at School of Reputation and Communication (SCoRe), we’ve had nine or ten masterclasses. Masterclasses are basically typical sessions of one or two hours with a person who belongs either from the public relations fraternity or the Corporate Communication front. They usually come and talk about the experiences of their work life and give us advices and suggestions to make up ours. Of all the masterclasses that we’ve had, one common thing has been emphasized by all and that is “hustle”. Now, I do not have a problem with this hustle culture but I do have an issue with the glorification of it. I have often wondered that why nobody goes out of the vicious cycle of hustling and talk about the little things that we 20 somethings actually need to start doing to have a better future. This qualm of mine was taken care of by Rashmi R.Naik, Managing Partner, Global South Continuum in her master session. She put the spotlight on the following things:

• Build an asset: We, millennials, often stay clueless about our budgets. We are impulsive enough to spend on futile things and oblivious enough to go to our parents at the end of the month. So, we need to save a little. “Just at the beginning of every month, put a very minimal amount in your bank and in no time that will grow to an empire.”, advised Rashmi.
• You’ll fall out of love: “…and that’s okay!” I have often thought about this and panicked and I was glad when she mentioned that this was normal. If you get bored of your work that does not mean you don’t love it. When that happens, we need to find something. Something that helps us keep our sanity and then the fallen out love will restore itself.
• Take care of yourself: We, possibly, try to impress everybody. Mainly our bosses at work, our peers at social gatherings and sometimes even friends. But, you cannot satisfy everyone. That is simply not possible. Instead, why don’t we try to make ourselves happy? A little muscle tear is definitely better than a burn-and-crush-out!
• Don’t postpone on your life decisions: We often give ourselves a window of a time frame. And then we keep doing work which is not really okay and keep extending that time frame. We shouldn’t be postponing our life decisions because “No time is the correct time.” We cannot plan life according to a notebook schedule. Who knows what you miss out on the context of finding the right time?
• When should you cut your losses? We are often caught between the dilemma of leaving or not leaving the job due to various reasons. Again, we take the decision of not leaving it even if there are huge problems at work. We keep on living and working with the luggage of all those issues on our back. But is there a correct time when you can call out? Even when we think of doing it, a whole association of “how can you?” comes up. Rashmi advises us to call out and confront so that you do not regret not doing that for the rest of your life.

This masterclass was a lot more unique compared to the rest. Where can you otherwise hear things like this? Probably, only your parents. So, yes we do not only need to hustle. We also need to be inquisitive, focus more on the details and read like a maniac. Ending the session, Naik says, “The paradigms have changed completely and the possibilities are endless now!” So true, isn’t it?