How I started up!
“Every year, I spend so much money on your school fees, food, clothes etc. And what do you do for me? Nothing! You are a liability to me. You should commit suicide. You can do that by hanging yourself, stabbing yourself or even by consuming rat poison. Think about it”. These words by my father stand out from the many memories of my past that I have learnt to ignore.
I had tried putting a knife to my stomach then, partly because of extreme sadness and partly because it felt strangely heroic like a scene straight out of a Yash-Raj movie. But I was just too scared. At 13 years of age, perhaps I was not supposed to kill myself.
My mother Zakia and I had actually started thinking of ourselves as liabilities. We had to, right! After all, the only other member of our 3-member family always beat it into us - how useless we were and how he was doing us a favour by letting us live. My mother was my best friend. She was my only friend. I didn’t have any other friends and my father hadn’t allowed any contact with any relatives. She was all I had. I remember the many times we hugged and cried. I kept whining about how sad I was and she never shared how she felt. How could she! She was my mother and to her, shielding me from her pain was more important than sharing it.
The outside world didn’t help much either. Our birthplace of Ahmedabad in Gujarat didn’t seem to like our names too much. When I was in my 2nd Standard in St. Xaviers Loyola, our class teacher Mrs. Sinha had once asked “How many Hindus in this class?”, “How many Muslims?” and so on. I didn’t know what any of those words meant. How could I, our family never practiced or referred to any religion whatsoever. I didn’t raise my hand at any of those questions. My bench partner Ivon Mendonca noticed this and complained: “Ma’am, he didn’t raise his hand!”. My teacher asked me “What are you?”. “I don’t know”, I stumbled. She raced through some documents and told me: “You are Muslim!”. I said “Ok, ma’am”. I came home and asked my mother: “Mumma, what does ‘Muslim’ mean?”. “Its just a name beta, we have that name”, she replied. That is how negligible a role religion played for us. But Ahmedabad didn’t see us that way. My grandparents’ home in Azad Society was burnt in 1992 and we were threatened into leaving our own home in Vastrapur. My mom insisted that she didn’t want to shift into a ghetto, that she wanted her son to grow in a cosmopolitan setting. That is how we moved to Paldi. While the ‘other’ rejected me, my ‘own’ disowned me because I wasn’t religious enough for them. Muslim boys in my lane would gang up and bully me saying stuff like: “You don’t pray or fast and you wear shorts. Our Maulana says shorts aren’t allowed”.
We left my father in 2003 and his last words to me are still crystal clear: “Arastu, I was right, you were wrong. One day you will realize this and come to me”. After leaving my father, we had no money on us at all, no property either. Just some clothes and our important documents. My aunt Huma had sheltered us then. My mother starting working right away, at an NGO, making 20,000 Rs. per month. We later rented a small apartment and then moved into a home she bought with a loan. However, I do not remember a single occasion when she denied me even a penny whenever I asked.
After I had spent 3 years doing nothing except enjoying on a self-proclaimed license-to-enjoy-thanks-to-a-deprived childhood, my mother forced me to do something for the first time ever. She packed me off one day to lead a Delhi University student volunteer team for Internal NGO ActionAid at the India Social Forum in Delhi in November 2006. There were rape survivors, drought survivors, riot survivors, people pushing for rights of homosexuals, of the lower castes, of poor women…It was too much to take! Memories of my own past resurfaced and combined with what I was seeing there, I knew I had to do something! I knew I had to help people. I didn’t understand jobs, I knew I had to create something. That was the beginning of my Entrepreneurial journey.
I started my own Youth Organization. It was named ‘The Difference’. We would work on minds and mindsets, I decided. We would influence young people’s minds and try and create platforms to trigger processes of change within them. I had seen how a suppressed mind can suffer and I was beginning to see how a liberated mind could fly. But I was just 18 then, it took me about 5 years to understand the professional world. However, each day I spent on this journey taught me something. From 2006 to 2012, we worked with over 6000 College-going Youth, primarily in Ahmedabad and Delhi on mindsets, stereotypes and attitudes with issues such as Religion, Gender and Citizenship in the background. We held debates, organized competitions, did seminars and workshops, tournaments and concerts, used films, theatre, lectures, interactive activities. We did everything we could think of and we did it the way we wanted to. I also ended up doing my Post-Graduation in Sociology remotely. My graduation in Commerce had just been a usual involuntary inheritance of my being Gujarati.
Sometime in 2012, I began getting disillusioned with the non-profit world. I was fed up of begging for grants each time. I was fed up of being told that what we were doing didn’t fit into any conventional framework. We were not building homes or fighting cases or eradicating poverty. We were trying to influence minds and saying it that way. I wanted to do something self-sustainable now. At the same time, I had begun to realize that in an imperfect world such as ours, human beings worry first about their own set of individual issues and then those of others. I thought — Why not take up issues that trouble these Youth themselves! Isn’t that helping them too!
In July 2012, I joined VentureStudio as a Venture Design Fellow. A collaboration between Stanford Center For Design Research and Ahmedabad University, VentureStudio ran 6 month-long Venture Design Fellowships for passionate people to learn the different stages of Venture Design and launch their own Companies at the end of it. We learnt user and need identification, market research and concept generation, business plans and finance, foresight analysis and pitching.
Halfway through the fellowship, my friend and colleague from my non-profit days — Aarti and I got together and co-founded ‘Empower Futures’. We would work on the single issue that most Youth had come to us with. We would work on their Careers, their academics. Making career selection a smooth and happy process. Doing something about the pain we felt each time we saw the angst on the face of a student being pressurized from all sides and having nothing and no one to support him/her at all.
After several failures and tumultuous yet fruitful evolution, our core offering — Kgurus.com launched in early 2013 and is the World’s 1st platform of its kind, where we connect aspiring students to current students, from top colleges across fields for career mentoring. Having receiving a tremendous response, we are now in the process of enhancing our product and learning each day to fall and get up again, but in essence to keep moving. The fact that some of the known Venture Capitalists of India are interested in our product and are waiting for it to boom certainly doesn’t harm either.
Today, my past seems as if it never happened. Seems like a bad dream that is gradually fading away. I have no regrets, I am what I am because of what I was. Today, I am free. My mother, my hero is extremely happy and is waiting for her son to achieve what he dreams of. Today, I dream of helping millions of Youth across the world be a little happier.
(‘Kgurus’ later became ‘CollegeBol’ and things panned out differently. This piece is as written in 2014 for publication in ‘Chicken Soup for the Indian Entrepreneur’s Soul’ compiled by Raksha Bharadia)
