On May 31st, 2008 I got a chance to join these kids for their trip to the zoo in Hyderabad. My friend and me went to SPHOORTI at around 9 AM. I was really overwhelmed by the response from the kids. Everyone greeted us calling ‘hi anna’(hi brother) and introduced themselves. Everyone told their names and shook hands with us. The innocence which we find in kids is very hard to find in adults. It was really overwhelming and I can’t really put into words what I felt for the first few minutes I have spent with them. Few of them danced for a song and they all looked very talented.

We reached the zoo at around 11.00AM and there were 38 kids with us. This was my first ever visit to a zoo. So, even I was excited like a kid.

All the kids were so disciplined that they never required any instructions. This has impressed me a lot. Initially I had a little doubt that few of the kids may miss and we have to frequently check the count. But that was not the case, they were so self responsible and really acted like adults.

I will never forget this day in my life and this is the most purposeful and satisfying day in the last few months. This was my first ever visit to an orphanage(they don’t like to call it an orphanage, sorry but could not find any other word). I had promised myself that I will help these kids in whatever way I can.

Srivyal Vuyyuri is the man behind this organization. Please visit the Sphoorti Foundation Website to know more about the organization and how you can help them. They are trying to take more kids into the organization and expand the scope. Visit the website for more details and how you can get involved in this noble cause.

Videos can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/srivyal

I will update this post when I get the photos from my friends.

The book takes the reader through Kishoreji’s journey of building a great retail business in India from scratch. Author recounts on how he started as an ordinary cloth seller in Mumbai and eventually how he established the giant retail business spread over a few hundred cities in India serving millions of Indian consumers.

The unique and interesting point I liked about this book is: Kishoreji’s friends, relatives and employees of the company share their experiences about being associated with Kishoreji and give the reader a deep insight into Kishoreji’s personal and as well entrepreneurial abilities.

Kishoreji takes the reader through his childhood days, college life and finally how he had left the usual way of doing family business and started his own journey on a road called entrepreneurship, which most of the young Indians now are aspiring to travel.

Doing something that opposes the established system of beliefs is not an easy task. An entire chapter titled ‘Defying the Odds’ is dedicated to how he started Pantaloon Shoppe amidst very testing and difficult times.

He talks about building emotional connect with consumers. He emphasizes on how he brought Indianness to the business and how he studied Indian consumers with passion. He confided that even till today he visits some of his stores and observes the consumers to understand their needs and their thoughts.

KB emphasizes on relationships throughout the book: relationships with customers, employees, share holders and most importantly family and friends. He also emphasizes on building trust and the importance of mutual trust in relationships.

Kishoreji has even shared about his failed businesses. KB explained about how he tried to enter into movie making in the bollywood but could not produce a huge success there. In a whole chapter dedicated to his bollywood stint, he shared his learnings from this failed attempt of movie-making.

Its an inspiring story every budding entrepreneur should read. The book has something for everyone. If you are aspiring for a career in retail you have a lot to read from a man who built everything from nothing. If you are a casual book reader, even then you have a lot to appreciate and learn.

Finally, it costs only 99 rupees! Go and get a copy for you and I assure you that the time and money you spent is worth the effort.

Here are few inspiring lines I am reproducing from the book with all the due credit given to the authors.

I based everything on one philosophy ‘Rewrite Rules. Retain Values’. Chase your dreams but don’t compromise on your belief system.

Entrepreneurship is about thinking big, believing in your own ability and going ahead with huge risks even if you are aware that some of the ventures may not be successful. It’s also about making decisions, leadership, and about making your colleagues believe in you dream.

When one is young and tries to rewrite rules, he is called ‘mad.’ But when he is finally successful, because he dared to risk it, he is called a ‘maverick.’

By the time one manages to get out of the control of one’s family, one loses his zeal and becomes complacent with what has already been created.

Clinton clearly explains how each of us with the given resources and abilities can make the world a better place to live. Primarily Clinton talks about giving:

1. Money
2. Time
3. Things
4. Skills

Each of the chapters has many inspiring stories of individuals and organizations who are trying to change the world by giving. One can find the stories of men and women who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving.

Though the book is full of statistics and frequent references to Clinton Foundation, at the end, it really inspires the reader to consider giving something to make the world a better place to live. With the help of real life accounts of many individuals, the book clearly explains - irrespective of income, available time, skills and where one lives - how one can take part of the initiatives and take new initiatives to make this planet earth a more better place.

I have taken three stories from the book and explained in short about the people and their giving. Hope these stories will give you an idea about what is covered in the book and inspire you to read the book.

• McKenzie Steiner organized a beach cleanup with her friends in California at the age of six. When Clinton asked her why she did, she said “Sometimes animals die from people littering in the ocean….I felt better for helping animals and people coming to the beach to swim.” At the very age of six McKenzie Steiner found a way to give her time for a good cause. Children often dream things which we adults think are impossible our of various reasons.
• Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up in poverty and for the most of his childhood, lived in the family bus in Florida trailer park, even before getting a degree from Harvard Medical School, he vowed to devote his life to give high quality medical care to the poor. He is one of the founders of Partners in Health organization which provides health care for the poor. This story will demonstrate the incredible impact of one person with a fine mind, boundless energy and a passion for justice.
• The story of an eighty-seven-year-old black woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is one of the most inspiring stories in the book. Oseola McCarty was a local washer woman who gave $1,50,000 to the The University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students in financial need. For more than seventy five years she eked out for a living washing and ironing other people’s clothes. She dropped out of school in the sixth grade and never returned.

There are many more stories to inspire you and to show you that one need not be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet to change the world. Each of us can make those little changes that will help others to live more happily. ‘Giving’ is all about having a more kinder heart and understanding the difficulties of others and sharing one’s fortunes to bring happiness into others’ lives.

Will giving make you happier? If you have already given any of the offerings - time, money, things, skills - you obviously know that it will indeed make a person more happier than possessing any material things.

Overall, I found the book to be an inspiring read. Though the book is full of statistics and initiatives of Clinton Foundation itself, its worth the time spent reading this book. You finish the book with a positive feeling that finally the world is changing and becoming a more better place to live. Most importantly you will start considering how you take part in changing the world in your own little ways.

Thousands of middle class families in India dream of owning a car. This is the day to celebrate for all these families. The dream has indeed come to reality and Tata’s have kept their promise of making a peoples car.

Following are the pictures taken from ‘Tata NANO‘ website.

We may expect to see it on the roads in the second half of 2008.

John Wood was Microsoft’s Director of Business Development for the Greater China region when he decided to say good bye to the corporate world and enter the world of non-profits by helping the poor children in the developing world to give the lifelong gift of education. The core belief of ‘Room to Read’ is, ‘world change starts with educated children‘.

The defining moment of John Wood’s life had happened when he was trekking in Nepal on a vacation to escape from the work. One day, Wood met Pasupathi, resource person for that province and responsible for providing facilities in the schools of that province. Along with Pasupathi, Wood visited a school, which is supposed to be the biggest school in that area. He could not believe his eyes and was moved by the way school had been operating. He was confronted by the harsh reality that there were no books in the library that a child can read and the class rooms were accommodating more children than they actually can. After interacting with the school headmaster and teachers, he promised them that he would return with books and help the school build a better library. Then the headmaster of the school said, ‘Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.‘ In the book, he shares that these words had really changed the course of his life forever.

An year later, John Wood did exactly what he promised the headmaster and the teachers of that school. With the help of his friends and family, he was able to collect a large number of books and went to Nepal to distribute the books. But, Wood felt the task was not finished. There were literally hundreds of schools with not enough books and few communities did not have schools in the neighborhood and children had to walk for few kilometers to reach a nearby school. He thought, there was something more that he can do to address this issue throughout Nepal.

The following year John left Microsoft and established a non-profit to send books to Nepal. You should read the book to know how this small project to help build a library in rural Nepal school has now become a world famous organization with operations in nine countries in Asia and Africa. Ever since it’s inception, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by: constructing schools, establishing libraries, publishing local language titles for children books, girl scholarships and establishing computer labs.

‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World‘ is one of those few books which everyone will like to read. No matter where you live and what is your work, you are going to remember this book for a lifetime. The story is so inspiring and uplifting that you will start considering doing something to make the world a better place to live. Most of us have taken the education for granted, but that is not the case in the developing world where standard education is a dream for millions of children, and that dream will only come true when people like John Wood dedicate their entire lives to make that dream become a reality. Keep a box of tissues handy. Few of the lines are so moving that I was brought to tears while reading.

I finish this review by asking you to go and buy the book and share the story with your friends and ask them to read. I am very sure that you are going to like this book and every second is worth spent reading this book.

Videos you might be interested to watch:

• Room To Read - Leaving Microsoft To Change the World
• John Wood speaking at The Power Within

I am one of the very first consumers and I have ordered over a dozen books in the last two months from FlipKart. I am really impressed with the way they ship the books so fast and at no cost.

Following is the interview I have done over email with Binny Bansal who is one of the two co-founders.

When is flipkart.com founded?

Flipkart.com was founded on 5th Sept 2007. The website was launched on 15th Oct 2007.

Could you tell me about founders and their background?

Sachin Bansal (26) and myself, Binny Bansal (25), started flipkart.com. Both of us are computer science graduates from IIT-Delhi from the 2005 batch. Sachin worked at Techspan for 6 months and then at Amazon India for a year and a half. I worked at Sarnoff India for a year and a half and then at Amazon India for 8 months. We quit our jobs in September 2007 to begin our startup journey. And to clarify any doubts in advance, we are not related to each other.

How many days it took to launch the service?
It took us about a month and a half to start a basic working website with 50,000 titles. We’ve now grown our catalog to over 1 Lakh available titles.

Whats the total team size?

Primarily, there is only Sachin and myself. We also manage a small team which takes care of our back-end operations.

What made you to start something on your own?

We started flipkart.com because we ourselves felt the need for a good online book store. E-commerce sector is one of the toughest to get into in India. We believe that we can make a difference here. We wanted to create something which has a long lasting value and which we can be proud of. Also at this point in our life we can devote our entire time and energy to flipkart which is very important for any startup.

What are the biggest challenges you have faced while launching the service?

One major challenge was to get tie-ups with the major book vendors as we didn’t have an off-line book store. We have somehow managed to persuade them and now most of the vendors are supporting us.

The second major challenge was to get the approval for the credit card payment gateway. We didn’t want to use CCAvenue as their interface is really confusing. So we had to convince Axis Bank for the payment gateway and that wasn’t easy given the fact that we are a self-funded startup and we don’t have an offline presence.

What are your current challenges to scale flipkart to the next level?

The biggest challenge currently is reaching out to a larger set of people with minimum budget. Scaling the back-end operations will be a challenge too. We do plan to get angel/seed funding in the next three months to scale our operations.

What are your future plans for flipkart? Do you want to go beyond books and offer other products as well?

Currently we are completely focussed on books. We want to be number one in books first, get a big customer base and then look at the possibilities of offering other products.

Could you give me an idea about the market size for online book stores in India?

Market size for online book shopping in India is expected to be between Rs. 20-25 crore for 2007-2008. Market size of whole of book industry in India is estimated at 4000 crores and is growing at a very quick pace.

How are you marketing the service?

Marketing on a small budget is very difficult. A large part of our marketing is built into our low prices. We believe that if we keep prices low and keep the customer happy we can generate a lot of positive word of mouth which has much better ROI than spending that
money on regular marketing techniques.

But, we do have to reach out to people somehow and hence we are experimenting with pay per click online advertising. We are also going to start a marketing campaign in Bangalore targeted at people working in IT companies. The current goal is to reach as many enthusiastic online book shoppers as possible.

How are you building trust? How can a first time visitor trust your service?

We have clearly defined and listed our shipping and return policies on the website. Also, we think free shipping adds a lot to the trust factor. We also have a page on which we address the issue of secure online payments.

All this coupled with an interface that quick, clean and user friendly, and the positive reviews on the web from our early adopters builds trust for our service.

Do you have any off-line presence?

We don’t have an off-line presence and we don’t plan to have one in the future either.

What is flipkart’s USP compared to other online book stores in India?

Flipkart.com’s USP is simplicity, convenience and customer service. We’ve made searching and browsing for books as simple as possible. And there are a lot of features lined up for the future which would help you in selecting books based on your interests.

And one of our major goals is to maintain very high standards for customer support. The lack of customer service is one of the major reasons for the slow E-commerce growth in India. We want to change this perception and get people to embrace E-commerce due to the many benefits it provides.

If possible can you share some statistics till date?(books sold and number of visitors, etc)

We can’t share exact statistics at this point but we are growing at the speed that we had expected when we first started out and we also met the goal that we had set for the first 3-4 months.

Finally, what are your suggestions for wanna be entrepreneurs in India?

Take the plunge. The timing couldn’t be better. And very importantly don’t go at it alone. Have at least one co-founder.

It was a real pleasure interacting with FlipKart founders and I wish them all the luck. Being part of a founding team in a start-up is one of the very exciting and challenging jobs I can think of. Every transaction a customer makes will lift up your spirits to a greater level, every good testimonial you receive keeps you excited about the future and every day is a new day with new challenges and opportunities which will unleash the creativity and talent you have got.

Please use the comments section to let me know your thoughts about this post.

From my understanding, the website is the primary interaction between the general public and the team behind the ‘Mission Safer India’. But, as of now, the website is not too impressive. I mean it from a purely technical standpoint. Not with the service or any other aspect of the service. I truly believe that the website needs a makeover and following are my suggestions and thoughts.

1. Readability is too poor on few of the pages. To be specific the problem is with the images that contain a lot of text. Please see the exact image taken from the website as of writing this article.
   
   Images on the about us page are also difficult to read. Get rid of the images and use text instead. It is good for search engines and easy to read for the older people with vision difficulties.
2. Accessibility is not taken into account even at the very basic level. All the images on the home page are missing the alternate text which is a basic accessibility guideline and can be implemented very easily.
3. The user interface lacks the appeal and it looks very oldish in this Web2.0 world. As the service is going to be used by general public, who may not be very experienced Internet users, the user interface should be very simple and easy to use. Personally I think, website needs a complete makeover with accessibility and usability as the first priorities in design.
4. Follow latest web standards. Use xHTML and CSS. Its good for users and good for saving bandwidth and operating costs.
5. Do a complete redesign and make sure the website will be simple, elegant and easy to use. May be I can say as simple as using Google for searching!

These are my personal thoughts and I am in no way a guru in web design and usability. But I love designing simple and elegant websites and I spend a lot of time reading web accessibility and usability stuff.

I am writing this article not to offend anyone, but to share my thoughts. I strongly believe in the idea ‘Mission Safer India’ and I am sure its going to help a lot of people.

There is a mixed response for this move from the general public and experts. While Kiran Bedi says its a good move and made at right time, there are few other who are not convinced with the idea. ‘Those posing a real threat to our security can easily rustle up some counterfeit ID proof without much trouble,” says advocate, Supreme Court, Prashant Bhushan.

Only time will tell whether this is going to be another tool for the police to harass the public or this move is really going to make Delhi a more safer place to live. But, when people can get fake passports and visas, and cross oceans, what’s the point in imposing these kind of laws?

What about all those labor and other working people who do not have an identity card to show? Most of them are migrated from other parts of the country to earn a life. Is it the end for these people? Delhi police really have to think about the solutions to answer these questions before imposing this law. You cannot simply assume that every citizen in this country has an identity proof to prove that he or she is an authorized citizen of this country to live in or to visit Delhi.

From my knowledge, security needs to be addressed in a long term basis. Short term solutions like these are not going to help much and sadly they may cause more problems for the citizens.

Harnessing the latest information and communication technologies to provide more foolproof solutions like smart cards for every citizen are really going to help. Though these kind of solutions are budget heavy, they can successfully be implemented in long term.

Anyways, no solution can be foolproof, at least in the near future. We have seen this many a times. Educating the citizens to become more responsible should be the first priority.

IBNLive has an interesting story on fake identity cards: Fake identity cards for Rs5,500.