INKing Success Stories

When Shakespeare defined All the worlds a stage and all the men and women mere players, he had perhaps forgotten to widen his talk on who is more important than the other. But time and again, stages are made around the world, men and women are invited to act and it is purely left to the audience to decide who has made a bigger impact on the society through their roles, no matter in which form and which part of the planet, and at times, beyond the planet.

The second edition of INK Conference, recently held in Pink City, Jaipur, tried to put up a great stage to showcase some of the greatest heroes and most of them are not celebrities in the common parlance, but have performed more heroic acts than the superstars. Many of them have conquered mountains literally and some have conquered death, some have given a million people a reason to live, and some have made efforts to provide the means for a billion people for their living. The conference that stands for Innovation and Knowledge (INK) was staged this year around the theme Power of the Journey, and true to its theme, the event in the small town of Jaipur took the 1,000 plus audience to some journeysfrom some short journeys limited to a geographical area of a small town to the longest journey possible to the space.

INK is all about identifying and recognizing new heroespeople who come from among us, says Lakshmi Pratury, the lady who designed the INK. She says these are the people who have dared to take a different path, one that is less traveled. They redefine success in times when everything is so myopic, during an era of a mad rush towards success. This attitude stands in contrast to the general trend that focuses only on resultsrather than enjoying the path that leads towards results, says Pratury, whom once Forbes considered as among the 100 most powerful women in the world.

A Platform for Thinkers

The annual INK conference, being held in association with TED, aims to fuel innovation and foster knowledge by giving a platform to thinkers and doers from a range of disciplines to share their stories. TED or technology, entertainment, and design is a global set of conferences owned by private not-for-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate innovative ideas. Every year, the TED-INK collaboration helps 20 self-believers or entrepreneurs, called the INK fellows, travel their long cherished path, most of the time, defying the conventional and reach their dreams that they have been chasing for so long. This years edition that spanned for 4 days, apart from the INK fellows, brought together a host of other speakers who have been no less innovative in their fields.

Ruchi Shangvi is one of them. As the first woman engineer at Facebook Inc, she helped build technologies for the social networking siteincluding the news feed and Facebook connectthat have contributed heavily towards making it the phenomenon it is. After the initial success, she quit the firm to return to India to marry a person of her familys choice, but only to return soon. She quit the company again in 2010, even as Facebook has achieved 700 mn users and is staring at one of the most successful initial public offers ever for a technology firm. I was getting complacent because of the success, she reasons. Sanghvi has now founded an internet venture called Cove along with other former Facebook employees. She is not ready to share more information on the idea she is working on. It will be in the area of consumer internet and will be platform-agnostic, is all she says. However she has already raised seed financing from private investors. I wanted to give it one more shot, do it all over once more, she says referring to the thrill of creating something from scratch.

Deepak Ravindran of SMS Gyaan is another speaker and a great example of the power of the journey. In his journey, along with his friends, he tries to answer questions on myriad topics like Why are the birds so angry in Angry Birds? Why is the apple half bitten in the Apple Inc logo? Why is the popular sandwich called a hot dog when there is no dog meat in it? How to impress a girl? Ravindrans SMS Gyaan seeks to address just about any query through the text service of the ubiquitous mobile phones, keeping the privacy of peoples various dilemmas. The idea was born when Ravindran, 23, realized that most people in the country dont have the luxury of Googling for information, but are equipped with a mobile phone. He tried his luck to use the power of mobile phones to provide answers for any question under the sun.

The venture that was born from the helpless condition of Deepak on not being able to answer his friends question on how to impress a girl while sitting at his college corridor in Kerala, is now bustling with success. The success of the venture, now available with most telecom service providers, is ascertained by the fact that its research and development team in Bengaluru processes 500,000 queries in a day. SMS Gyaan went live in March after a short-testing phase. Ravindran, who hopes to clock a turnover of `15 crore this year, says the firm has already broken even.

There is supposed to be a holy grail of sorts when it comes to content that the Indians like to savorastrology, Bollywood, cinema, and sexbut there are more queries about news or politics these days, he says. People are not afraid to ask questions anymore.

Enjoy the Journey

There was no dearth of inspiring examples in this edition of the INK conference and each of the 20 INK fellows narrates a story that all of us would like to put our names on. However the INK fellows were chosen after an exhaustive online process, where applications were sought from around the world.

Pratury, host and curator of INK, who is also credited with bringing TED to India in 2009, says the one thing that binds the INK fellows is their accomplishments. These people might not be glamorous figures, but what they are doing is having a huge impact on the society. They bring something out-of-the-box, a fresh perspective along with a sense of humility, and INK is just a platform for them to express themselves and share their stories, which may inspire others too she says.

Kalyan Varma, another INK fellow, gave up his job at Yahoo! Inc to spend time in the jungles as a wildlife photographer. He returned after a full year. My savings were getting exhausted, so I thought maybe Ill take up another job, he says. On coming back, he posted his pictures on the internet with the idea of sharing them with others for free.

Soon, cheques arrived at his doorsteps after film-makers made posters of his photographs or people sold paintings based on them. Today, he is a freelancer for leading magazines and channels including National Geographic and BBC. Give freedom to people and they will respect it, he says.

US based Ayesha Khanna loves to live in cities but in smart cities. She says that the 21st century and beyond would be dominated by cities and around 215 mn people would be migrating to urban areas in India by 2025. And todays cities can barely handle the burden of their current populations, says Ayesha Khanna, a technology and innovation strategy expert.

Speaking at the 2nd edition of INK Conference in Jaipur, she said that at this point of time, core services like energy, water, communications, transportation, and public safety are wasteful, inefficient, and decrepit. Even though cities occupy only 2% of the landmass of the Earth, they consume over 75% of the Earths resources.

The only way to prevent rapid urbanization from being an environmental disaster is to operate cities in a brand new way: faster, smarter, cleaner, she said to an enthralled hall of audience.

By referring to smart city, she told the audience that it will happen only when all parts of its infrastructure and government services are digitally connected and optimized and city dwellers become the stakeholders of the city. Giving some examples, she said the citys intelligent infrastructure is powered by three key technologies that share environment and citizen data constantly: Sensors, the cloud, and smart interfaces.

Sensors, tiny devices that can measure variables such as motion, sound, and bacteria, collect information and send it back to a central databasethe cloud.

The founder and director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, a research and advisory group focused on human-technology co-evolution and geotechnology in the US, said that in India, there would be around 7 smart cities developed in the near future that would stick to the guidelines of the smart and generative city concept.

Aiming High...

The 4-day conference had different sessions in which the speakers, doers, and thinkers across different disciplines and across the globe were sharing their experience, innovations, and knowledge. The story-tellers at the conference have defied their ages to become examples for all. The speakers, ranging from 15-year-old Aisha Choudhary to 80-year-old Anupam Mishra, narrated their real life stories to spell-bound the audience and instilled the confidence that age, cast, geographical location, and religion do not matter when you want to do something for the religion of the world-humanity.

The stories, equipped with testimonials, made the audience believe that sky is no more the limit, even you can reach the space, only if you want to reach there.

Anousheh Ansari, on September 18, 2006, made her point when she became the first female space explorer. Anousheh is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, a company that will unleash the power of the internet to all the consumers and dramatically alter and simplify consumers digital living experience. After spending 20 mn and putting 7 months of rigorous training, she created history to spend 11 days in space.

Madhumita Haldar, a 24-year-old IITian, while playing computer games, discovered that there is no word game for kids in the Indian language. Just a thought and she quit her job to set up her own company MAD Rat Games to develop Aksharit, a game-cum-learning tool for kids to know their alphabets in their own mother tongue.

There are no word games based on the Indian languages and children of NRI communities find it a little difficult in learning their mother tongues, so we launched this app, says Madhumita Halder, founder, MAD Rat Games.

Very soon, IT major Intel is going to launch applications based on Indian languages targeting the NRI communities on its tablets. Intel would be launching Aksharit, an app that helps children learn Indian languages through very interesting games, designed for kids for various ages in one months time. Google has already launched this application for its Chrome Book and Nokia for its N8 smartphones.

Speaking at the sidelines of the INK conference in Jaipur, this IIT-graduate said that within 2 years of launch, this game based learning product has been well accepted by more than 2,500 schools across 4 Indian states including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh.

Overcoming the Difficulties

The annual international conference also witnessed achievers from all walks of life narrating their stories of life at the event themed as power of the journey. Among the speakers who shook the audience was 15-year-old girl Aisha Chaudhary, afflicted with a serious lung disease, with her 5 lively messages she learnt from the ups and downs of her challenging life. She said that she was diagnosed with incurable immune deficiency disorder at the age of 6 months following which she underwent a bone marrow transplant and faced challenges in leading a normal life. Having cue-cards in her hand to remember points in the speech, she took the audience through her early days when she was wheelchair-ridden and destined to inhale oxygen with the help of a tube clipped to her nose. ...but there was a smile on my face, always. I saw dreams...walking in Londons market, dancing in my cousins wedding, and getting out of the wheelchair and it all happened. I walked in Londons market, danced in the cousins marriage, and now I am on my feet, she said with attributing all these to a strong willpower. She said that believe in miracles, live in the moment, opportunity in difficulties, dare to dream, and pets are the best medicines are the 5 messages she has learnt. You live every moment twice, once in your mind and once when you actually live it, she said to a standing ovation.

Among other speakers were American film and Opera director Julie Taymor, author Amish Tripathi, jewelery designer John Hardy, conservation biologist Claire Kremen, technology and global policy expert Parag Khanna, social entrepreneur Mohamed Ali Niang, and doctor-turned-social healer Prakash Amte who uses his medical knowledge and his life for the upliftment of tribes in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. A Magsaysay awardee Prakash Amte runs Lok Biradari Prakalp to provide community services to the tribal people and he has not kept himself limited to them but for the animals in the jungle as well. Aptly supported by his able physician wife Mandakini, the legendary Baba Amtes son says to dine with the lions in the jungle, the only equipment you need is love.