Going back to the Basics

Return to our roots and find what we love

We all have a place that makes us feel like ourselves. A place that we call our “Happy Place”. For me, it is several different places and experiences that have made me the person that I am. The last two weeks including this one have been a journey back to my old haunts and revisiting another Bindi.

Last week was Divya Bansal , our communications person’s wedding. The first time the current V-ALL team met in person after working together for six months. Hybrid working, a challenge and a blog post for another week. In the process of going to Divya's wedding, Pallavi Kaushal and I ended up planning to travel around Rajasthan a bit before we landed in Pushkar for the wedding. Just talking about all the places from Jhunjhunu to Alsisar, made me think about the crazy initial days. My first steps into the non-profit world were when I came back from the US and used to go to schools and meet some super enthusiastic Gandhi fellows.

It was a journey of self-discovery and unlearning. I broke my romantic bubbles of the ground and learnt about the hardships that people face daily. Those days are what have kept me grounded and given me fuel for the last ten years to keep going on my impact journey. Somewhere in the last year sitting conceptualising this cool idea, this fuel was losing steam. The road trip last weekend, just sitting quietly at Ajmer Sharif and listening to the aarti at Pushkar, reminded me of all those 4 am road trips of Jhunjhunu and those memories in my heart. Reminded me of that bright-eyed Bindi who was convinced that she could create some wonderful solutions that were technology-enabled.

Realised that after ten years, I am finally fulfilling that dream of creating a pan India or who knows even a global solution using technology as a base. Rajasthan and those roads just reminded me that I have a dream that I came to India to fulfil and there is a long way to go before I complete it. No time to rest, it's time to chug ahead full steam and keep going. It sounds simple but the truth was I was losing the drive and asking myself the question, “Why?” a lot more than I have in the last ten years. Maybe because I have finally time to think or I don’t have all the answers so I am pushing myself harder.

I am finally not working on someone else’s dream, I have one of my own and so I am asking those difficult questions repeatedly. Questions that I have would dismissed as above my pay grade in another role. Every comment made by a colleague or question raised by a tenth grader makes me think twice and somewhere about why was taking over and making me forget the dream. This dream and a few moments of silence on that drive ( the rest my co-passenger knows why it was noisy - she is going to kill me for this) have given me a lot of steam to keep going.

While that steam is great, I still needed some direction and drive. That is what I have found this week. Have a new person for technology and he is pushing me to design a mobile application. Now I have already exhausted a chunk of my money to build the first website (stupid decision, probably in retrospect) so I thought well where do I get volunteers to design this? Sat around vegetating for two days and staring into space before realising I used to be a UI/UX engineer who knows how to code. I could do it myself. I might struggle a bit but the reality is, no one can create the idea better than I because it is all in my head and I can’t communicate it all in words.

So over the the last couple of nights, have been burning the midnight oil to create all the figma designs. If I thought Rajasthan was a high, this i something else. I don’t even need caffeine to keep me wired these days because my brain is running 10x thinking of everything I can create. Bindi the engineer was lost in the last twelve years and just re-discovering that part of me has made me realise how much I have missed it. It is the thing that drove me to come to India and made me the person I am. It's a very integral part of my identity because I love solving puzzles and right V-All is a huge one that needs to be untangled and sorted. Just designing the app is giving me insights that I could not have gotten if I had sat for hours, written a business plan and made a strategy.

Sometimes just going back to the basics makes you feel less lost and gives you direction. What I enjoy the most is giving me the road ahead so it's time to sit with my machine, make those wireframes and code a bit. So what if I am doing two jobs, one of the engineer and another of the business person, I don’t think I could love it any other way. Maybe this is all we can do or all we should expect of ourselves. Return to our roots and find what we love.