When I was a kid I did not understand the causal nature of our actions. For example, I used to get up and forget to turn off the AC. Forget to turn off the geyser after taking a bath, sometimes even let it be with my laziness. Because my brain could not comprehend how we could be out of electricity. That seemed unreasonable.

Would you have believed in 2019 that a pandemic could pause the world for months in 2020? Would you have believed that we don’t have enough medical facilities to treat people/find vaccines in the 21st century? I definitely did not. I was so naive. “People who survived World War-2 mostly took the right decisions for the rest of their lives.” Because, yes, they lived through the horror. We understand some things only when we experience them first hand. I guess very few people cared about coronavirus when China was going through it alone. We only cared about it when the first case was reported in our country, our state, our district, our neighbourhood. A lot of people still do not follow the precautions as they did not come across a victim first hand. We all watched the Contagion movie after the lockdown and felt like we are living in a sci-fi movie. It can happen again. 2030, 2050 or even 2025 if we don’t care. And it would be too late by the time we realize that we are living in a sci-fi movie, yet again.

Some of us are able to fight the virus through our immunity. But do we have any immunity against nature? When we hear the word nature, we automatically picture something nice and beautiful. What we ignore is it can be the end of us if we keep destroying it. We all heard about the pollution in Delhi this year, we were the world leaders (with AQI > 1200). I witnessed this first hand and I know how ugly nature could turn out to be. The skies were grey and all I could see was smoke and dust. But we forget about it the moment news channels want us to forget about it. Or when something more interesting comes up.

People who wish that they would have done things differently in 2019 to prevent this pandemic, read on. Others you should definitely take the rest of it seriously, this is for you.

Unlike the novel coronavirus, the pandemic our environment could cause acts slowly (over years) and irreversibly. IT IS SERIOUS. Alllll the things we hear about the extinction of animal species, plastic pollution in oceans, destruction of coral reefs, running out of coal, melting of polar ice caps, increase in temperature, effects of deforestation, forest fires….it’s alllll real. It is going to hit us/generations to come so hard. I am not saying this to scare you. I am saying this because I am scared. Just like the pandemic, we are in this together. What you do is going to affect me and vice-versa. We all need to do our bit. Conserve electricity. Be mindful with the use of plastic. Try to recycle. Prefer sustainable products. Help those people striving to improve the environment. Spread knowledge. I am doing my 2 cents here. Let us together stop the EIA draft and today is the last day to do so. EIA draft has been advocated as a fast track clearance mechanism by the government to allow industrial and infrastructural projects to be set up at the cost of forest areas.

Do we really need to invite the next pandemic when we are still battling with Coronavirus?

We don’t need war threats. We don’t need politicians who don’t give a damn. We don’t need lawyers protecting the chemical factories which don’t follow basic precautions. We don’t need industries which pollute our environment. We don’t need more products wrapped in plastic. We don’t need policemen who kill innocent people brutally. We don’t need people who torture harmless creatures. We don’t need ego battles and hate speech on the internet. We don’t need discrimination. We don’t need religion. We don’t need the superpower title. We don’t need big statues. We don’t need fair and lovely. We don’t need artificial plants. We don’t need a substitute for the earth.

What we need is common sense and empathy. That’s it. It is that simple.

India announced it’s a one-day national lockdown on 22nd March 2020 — Janta Curfew as we call it. Within less than 48 hours, our Prime Minister announced a complete national lockdown for 21 days (till 14th April). I call it the Lockdown Season 1.

The first thing I did on 22nd March was watching Contagion. Definitely not a very wise decision. I kept checking the number of rising cases as if it was some sports finale. All of that did not end well for me. I had gotten extremely anxious and started imagining the worst that could happen. Let’s just say that I have spent season 1 dealing with my emotions. I didn’t find much motivation to do my work, I felt sleepy even after sleeping for 10 hours a day, I missed my friends and I missed the special delicacy, Ugadi Pachadi, we make on Ugadi (Telugu New Year). It is the first time since I was born that we did nothing on Ugadi. We just could not risk going to the market and getting all the ingredients. I was down. I couldn’t see beyond that day. I don’t want to think about it so I am not going to write much about it. What’s going on is really scary. I had to really really really take care of myself and not panic. My mind was picturing a doomsday tbh. It’s doing just fine now. 🧠

In case you are feeling anything remotely similar, just pick up your phone and call your best friend right away. I am not going to take this post down. Seriously, do it. There is nothing wrong in feeling down with what is going on. We are only human.

After a few days, the best I could do was get some work done, eat well, sleep well, not watch the news and do some physical activity. Have you heard people say everything happens for a reason? Well, I felt that’s true when I found a yoga mat that I had bought years ago but it was still “new”. You understand why.

There came the announcement of Lockdown Season 2 (till 3rd May) premiering in Reality TV. Only this time I was not down, I had hope. I believed that if everyone complies by staying home, we can win this. I decided to do something fun to cheer my friends if possible. Then came the trends in Instagram where you draw orange and nominate more of your friends to do the same, Bingo, This vs That and many many more. I did most of those and even blackmailed a few of my friends into doing it. Honestly, I got bored in a couple of days. One fine day I opened YouTube and I saw a video in my recommendations that read Minimal bullet journal setup » for productivity + mindfulness. As the name suggests, the video is about how journaling could help us stay organised, make us feel better. So I decided to give it a try. I always liked the idea of keeping a journal. I had done it for a few years in my high school but eventually, I got busy. I wrote down some things like what I am grateful for, most cherished moments and one page on describing yourself. I closed my eyes (not being dramatic, my eyes were paining then :P) and thought about it. It is a really complicated question. It got me thinking about what my core qualities are, what I am passionate about, what I love, what I regret, what I believe in and honestly I don’t think I can do a good job explaining all the thoughts that raced in my head. It is honestly thaaaat complicated. The interesting thing is, growing up, I always had a different answer to the same question. We live in a physically growing world and mentally growing one too. Change is the only constant in life. I decided to pick up some old hobbies where I left off and even some new ones. I started doing some online courses, some baking, understood a bit about stocks and started investing, stitched my travel experiences into Youtube videos, created this blog with a couple of posts, spoke to friends, played pubg, listening to audiobooks and also started watching Money Heist. I continued to eat healthy food, kept myself physically active and mentally healthy.

The moment you read this, I am sure some of you started categorising them as useful and some as a waste of time. Well, don’t worry too much. Do whatever makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others.

Unfortunately, we need more time to win this war. We still do not have a vaccine, positive cases are still rising and more people are dying. As of today, we have 3,632,610 total cases — 2,197,093 active ones and 251,423 people have died. Still, the best I can do is to keep calm and stay home. It is more important than before. If we fail to quarantine one COVID positive person, just one person, we are back to Day 1. I guess we know how serious it is by now. So please stay home and stay safe.

I absolutely love movies and I have been watching a lot of them lately. I cannot help but throw in a dialogue, bear with me it’s just one dialogue, that really makes sense in this context. It’s from Aravinda Sametha (Telugu) movie — “100 adugullo neellu padutundante 99 adugula varaku tavvi aapese vaadni emantaru..mi vignatake vadilestunnanu. Aa okka adugu vandadugulato samanam sir.”

What it means is that if we give up now, everything that we have been through will be for nothing. We owe it to the ones who lost their lives, especially the ones who lost while trying to save the rest of us.

Thus began the Season 3 (till 17th May) of Lockdown which happens to be my least favourite third season ever! Even Stranger Things did a better job. While I want to keep up with my hobbies I also started thinking about how I can make this phase a little better for others. I got this inspiration from my parents who have been doing their share of service to the ones in need. While I sit in an AC room stuck to my laptop doing all the things that make me happy, they took it on themselves to buy and distribute the essential items to daily labourers and workers. I cannot be more proud of them. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy. I realized that we are all in this together. My actions are responsible for the well being of everyone and vice versa. Did you ever think your neighbour’s health would be of concern to you?

Instead of just asking people to donate, I wanted to see if I can offer them something that is useful to collect funds. I wanted to do my part for the greater good.

Of all the hobbies I listed, my most favourite is listening to audiobooks. I learnt so many things effortlessly and I really wish I had started doing this way before. I want my friends to try it out and see if it works for them. I use Audible which has a huge collection of audiobooks. But there are a couple of things that could be better. Audible has some free books available for their users and even a 30 days free trial. This means you will be given access to the platform for 30 days without having to pay 199 INR. But I personally found that there are some good titles which are not available for free. With the free trial, you get one credit which you can use to purchase a title (audiobook). And this happens every month i.e. you get one free credit every month with which you can buy titles. I found this a little restrictive because I have limited choices. So for a better experience, I want to offer access to my personal account to anyone who is interested. Initially, I had my doubts about the whole thing, I did not know if anyone was even interested in listening to books. It definitely is not the same for everyone. I asked my friends on Instagram if they would be interested in something like this and I received a lot of positive responses. So here I am making it live right away. It is truly amazing how the whole situation induced a sense of “WE” in everyone.

Here is how Sharing An Audible Library Online works:

You can sign in to their website or app using my credentials and start listening to any title you like from the available options.

Link to the web page : click here
Audible app : Make sure your location is set to the US in the app.

I have only one sincere request, please donate something (big or small) if you use this and if you find it useful. In case you do not know which organisation to help, send it to me or you can send it directly to the PM cares fund. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way for me to keep track of what you listened to and for how long, only you know it. It brings us to the challenge we could face — it is not possible to keep track of your progress in the library as there may be other people listening to the same title. So you need to note down what title you are listening to and how far you have come. If you have any suggestions regarding how to solve this, do let me know.

For credentials, please comment below or ping me on Instagram. I do not want to share them on a public platform. And I would love to know what title you chose and your thoughts about the book. Do share this with your friends and family.

That’s it for now.
From Shree With Love

We have created a website that shows what we have done. We have a working prototype which sends a message to users asking for a suitable time for delivery and shows delivery man the results in form of a excel sheet. We all know very well how useful and powerful this could be for the delivery men.

Here comes one more challenge. Our solution alone isn’t going to solve the problem completely. We are a missing piece to complete the bigger picture. We need to work in integration with other pieces. Simplifying, there is a method (root planning algorithm) that every delivery company follows, to get a path that can enable delivery man to deliver more packages by travelling less distance, to enhance the efficiency of delivery process. When they use our solution their path has to updated according to the user response. Thus next step we are looking at is to integrate our solution with current method. Thanks to Greg, managerial level employee at UPS, for speaking with us and giving these valuable inputs.

While the big companies are filling their pockets, customers are left to complain and suffer. In many cases packages are not just packages. They have some emotions attached to it. They not only carry items but love and affection from the beloved ones. We at runDvous understand and try to nurture these emotions. That’s what makes us unique and close to our customers. We make sure that the product is delivered exactly the way it has to be. If you choose us, you can be rest assured that the package is safe.

Our service avoids packages lying unnecessarily in front of doors or in front gardens, because customers are notified of there packages actually arriving. It is this feedback loop between the delivery men and the end customer that makes our MVP so powerful. The delivery process is extremely streamlined untill the last mile. The lack of communication between the delivery man and the actual person he is trying to serve, leads to so much waste in time for both parties, waste of resources for the delivery man, and frustration on the customers side. With this method of sending messages and receiving feedback we aim to make the delivery process better.

Having spoken to 72 Logistics companies of which 16 replied and we met with wide range of of 8 companies{Amazon, Deliv, FedEx, Shippo, Pack and Mail, Gold Express, Independent Electric Supply, DeliveryKing}. With 10% of our attempts being fruitful we tried to make the most of what we have. Also we scheduled more appointments this week with Uber, Doodash, Sprig, Shipy.

Logistic Start ups :

The major inconvenience for the delivery men is that lot of people are not at the destination they mention and the delivery man ends up waiting for quite sometime Independent Electric supply were reluctant to mention the problems during delivery.

Finalisation of the solution :

The delivery now includes 3 major tasks to be taken care of.

Event 1:

Calculate the approximate time of arrival for every package, based on the position in the list. For instance, if there are 200 packages to be delivered in an 8 hour time frame (9am — 5pm), package 100 will arrive around 1pm.

Event 2:

• Every morning when the delivery truck leaves, a text message is send to every customer

“Your package will arrive today around ______ . Are you home at this time? Reply

1: Yes, myself or someone else

2: No, please come back another day

3: No, leave the package outside

4: No, send it to my neighbor

Happy Delivery! RunDvous”

He receives the replies from the customers, and put this input in the list for the delivery man, so he knows who will be home, and who not.

Event 3:

Delivery man gets feedback and does the delivery according to it. After the delivery is done, a confirmation message is sent to the customer.

Link to Business Model Canvas : https://canvanizer.com/canvas/rqLfmR3SqBKkN

Know us better : http://lindachang1.wix.com/rundvous

Customers are also contended when they and their packages are treated with care. This is exactly where our application comes in. We facilitate this interaction and enhance the customer satisfaction thus the people receiving the packages are often happy. In case of big companies sometimes if the package goes missing there are doubts if the package was actually delivered, leading to them arguing with the delivery company. This leads to a bad customer experience and harms their relationships. The major difference is because the local logistic companies are ready to adopt the new changes as their main motive happens to be customer satisfaction whereas the large companies are mainly concerned with profit maximisation.

This can be simply achieved by notifying the customers when their package would be arriving through a simple text message. Also if people can select the location of the delivery during different times of the day that would be really solve the problem. What all we need is an application to bridge the gap between these two environments of the delivery men and users. For eg: the user says “Till 10AM I will be at address1; From 10AM to 4PM I will be at address2; etc.” This simplifies the latter part of package delivery to a very large extent.

Link to Business Model Canvas : https://canvanizer.com/canvas/rqLfmR3SqBKkN

Know us better : http://lindachang1.wix.com/rundvous

Exploring and expanding… was originally published in SVIA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spoke to a couple of companies about the transportation issues they are currently facing. Most important problem we found was that there is a huge reverse logistics cost involved in the shipment of products in the modern times. Most of the errors happen due to the human communication mistakes. If we can minimise the cost we can save a lot of investment and human labour.

How? Our solution is to create a software which enables the delivery man to notify the customer when the package will be delivered and this helps in reducing the communication gaps we have. A message will be sent to each customer who have a scheduled delivery that day and their availability is recorded with the help of simple text message. This system is prevalent in India, China which has been really successful. To whom? Our potential customers are the delivery providers like FedEx and also the free lance delivery man. We have different customer segments which would benefit from the idea, one being the delivery and transport providers and other are the customers who buy the products who also will be the users of the software/application.

We are calculating the numbers and coming up with the revenue model. We have spoken to few end users and have scheduled meeting with other delivery system’s supervisors. We have made a website that explains how all of this works and this helps the customers to track their packages effectively. It ensures a safe and secure delivery of all the products.

One of the ideas we are considered was to use “drone” technology but that could be very expensive and a lot of hardwork is involved. Amazon has been working on this idea since quite sometime and we will look into the progress of it as well.