BOOK SPECIAL................ MAKING DREAMS WORK

BOOK SPECIAL 

MAKING DREAMS WORK





What if you decided to do what you love, start your own business or switch to a career that's more fulfilling instead of working at someone else's desk all day?
You Can Make Your Dreams Work, a book by Shalini Umachandran, tells the stories of 15 such people who started on conventional routes but slowly gathered the skills, resources and strength to create their own paths.
Edited excerpts of four stories featured in the book:

RAGHU DIXIT

Notes from the Road

Raghu Dixit wanted to be a professional dancer but settled for the stable option of microbiology, which he threw away after a few years to chase the dream of being a rockstar. He's now frontman of contemporary folk music band, The Raghu Dixit Project, which has performed around the world. Fans include Chris Martin of Coldplay and The Queen of England

To this day, Raghu's songs are simple things of joy. The tunes are not complex and his voice is usually the centrepiece of the arrangement with skilled instrumentalists providing additional layers. Raghu's entire song will have just two or three chords; a song with four chords would probably be considered complex. The lyrics are simple too -often just a few carefully crafted lines, repeated over and over, or the philosophical words of Kannada poets such as Shishunala Sharif. `I don't have any qualms about the genre of music. I love metal, rock, Carnatic, folk, anything. Since I've never learnt music formally, I don't care about a jingle or a classical piece. My natural instinct is to sing, like a farmer in the field, free and simple,' he says.

`Most Indian bands fail because they are not willing to work hard. They want the money and the fame but aren't willing to work for it. They think playing on stage for one and a half hours is work. That is the result. We rehearse eight hours a day. You are worth being on stage because of the work you have done before. I learnt discipline and commitment in the corporate world, but it's difficult to implement that in a band,' he says.

After the Roots tour in 2008, The Raghu Dixit Project was empanelled as an artist with the government's Indian Council for Cultural Relations, and did a five-country tour of south Asia, and appeared at the Rajasthan International Folk Festival. On tour in Asia -Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Russia -Raghu realized, quite literally, that there was a whole world out there. If countries whose primary language was not English could relate so well to their music, they would probably have a bigger impact in the western world where they would be able to communicate easily with the audience. It was time to look west.

In 2009, Only Much Louder got them a slot at the two-day Lovebox festival in London as well as a showcase spot in the Gibson showroom. `I took a real chance. I knew we'd probably be on stage all of ten minutes for two performances, but I decided it was worth the risk and spent my money to get the band to London,' says Raghu. They were a hit at Lovebox -where the headliners included Duran Duran -and have been going back every year since. In the audience at the Gibson guitar store was Paul Knowles of talent management agency Jenral Group. At the end of the show, he signed on to manage TRDP in the UK. The experience changed the way Raghu looked at building his brand. The audience for his music was abroad, and courting that fan base was critical. He wanted to be a rock star, but that would happen only if more people all over the world heard him -and that wasn't happening.

Raghu handles his band like a tightly run company, keeping track of expenses and incomes; living frugally like the CEO of a bootstrapping company sans a salary or car, still using autos to get around Bangalore.

`Everything I earn goes back into my music.

If you have ideas of going abroad and per forming and all that, it's a huge investment,' he says.

`It is very much like running a business.

There is plenty of frustration and uncertainty. I get angry when people call me lucky. It's been hard work. People feel jealous of me; it should be the other way around.

I should feel jealous that they are living a comfortable life without worry ing about where the money is coming from and where it is going.'

VIKRAM BHAT

Learning to Teach

Vice-president of an equities firm on Wall Street to vice-principal of a school in Bengaluru -that's the switch Vikram Bhat made after 10 years in New York City because he wanted to see every child have a shot at entering college. After a few years teaching in schools run by NGOs in India, he went back to college, got a B.Ed and now works at My School, which takes children from low-income families

Vikram started by making the children draw their dreams on paper and introduced to the class values of love, trust and respect. `My mentor, Sabitha Raghunath, who was the principal then, supported me in planning and execution for science but I felt a bit unsure about teaching English. I started with a prose lesson `Packing for a Picnic' and felt quite good about it. I talked about my life, why I had decided to start teaching, about the places I had visited and the people who were important to me.' Vikram is charming and quick-to-smile, showing a great deal of love and warmth while dealing with every single person who crosses his path, from security guard to next-floor neighbour with whom most people just have a nodding acquaintance. While teaching a class, there's a perceptible change -the easy assurance makes for a relaxed yet brisk classroom manner; the characteristic smile and warmth is in place but there's an edge of authority and a firm hand to show who the boss is.

This is the classroom behaviour that Vikram's mentor Sabitha later described as `walking the thin line of love and discipline'. Vikram gives a great deal of himself and expresses his fondness for the students through his attitude and gestures yet commands and demands respect as their teacher and guide. One of his students from Parikrma, Nandini, later explains how Vikram-anna sparked her interest in English and poetry by reading Wordsworth and Walt Whitman to the class `with feeling plus full meaning'. After class, he would play football with them, read to them or, most memorably, help them put together a morning assembly inspired by the British theatrical percussion group Stomp, after they told him they wanted to create their own music.

Most people who meet Vikram are carried away by the nobility of what he's done but it's soon apparent that his sense of purpose is tempered by realism and a sense of humour, which keeps him clear of being a sanctimonious goody-goody. He's always enjoyed cracking complex problems, and the classroom is the kind of place that presents a new one every day. `I love what I do and I enjoy it but people often forget that teachers are also like everyone else. There's no missionary zeal. Teaching is hard work, and unless your teachers are paid competitively, you're never going to attract and retain good talent,' he says.

When Vikram started teaching at Parikrma, he found himself blindsided not just by the amount of energy it drew but also by the variance in the abilities of the children in the class -some class six students were reading at the level of second graders. After ten years at a fairly sedentary job, Vikram was unprepared for the demands of being on his feet all day. He lost six kilos in the first two months. `You just don't expect that kind of physical stress. Managing classrooms takes a lot out of new teachers.' Another unexpected challenge was being confronted with value-based questions: Why shouldn't I beat others, what's wrong about stealing? `I worried a lot about whether I would be able to connect with the kids, if they would listen to me and if I would be able to teach them anything. I still worry about that last one,' he says.

The shift was a slow one, filled with moments of doubt, frustration, despair and absolute joy. `I came with very high expectations. When you make a move like this you, come with a lot of impatience about how quickly you're going to find satisfaction, and how you're going to fuel the kind of dramatic transformation you see in films. It doesn't work that way,' he says.

ROHIT SINGAL

Playing For A Living

Rohit Singal spent ten years as a doctor before giving in to his real love, information technology. He set up Sourcebits, one of the first Indian companies to build products for Apple, in Bengaluru in 2006. Their best-selling product was Night Stand, which turned the iPhone into a clock, and earned the company its first million within two years of operation.In 2014, he sold the company in a multimillion-dollar deal, and moved to San Francisco to focus on his first love, gaming. Now, as founder of mobile gaming studio Wandake, he plays games for a living

It was through gaming that Rohit discovered his love for technology while he was in Rohtak's government medical college. `It was primarily my parents' wish that I study medicine. I was not mature enough to take my own decisions and they were so proud when I cleared the all-India test,' he says. `We were a middleclass family and medicine was even shinier than engineering. So both my younger brother and I became doctors.' Rohit's wife, Pooja, is also a doctor.

Rohit's father, an engineer with the National Highways Authority of India, bought a computer when Rohit was in his third year of medical college. Rohit began tinkering with it -taking it apart and rebuilding and playing games like Diablo and Age of Empires. `This was around 1996-97, when there was no internet in Haryana, but I would experiment and modify to create new things,' he says. Rohit constantly doodles on an electronic slate, a Boogie Board, while he talks -drawing, scrawling words, underlining and boxing them, only to erase and do it over, starting with a new idea. It is this restless need to keep creating new things that drives Rohit. It is also the reason why he couldn't stick to the field of medicine.

`In medicine, there was no scope to do things differently, no need to analyse. Everything is documented and you have to follow set practices. Experimenting, in fact, can be very dangerous,' he says. As a child and as a gardener, Rohit had loved the idea of grafting -bringing together two varieties of plants to create a third, new one -and cross-pollination. Medicine, he realised to his dismay, gave him no opportunity to innovate.

After gardening, dabbling in technology seemed the only way to learn new things. `I could create more by myself, whether [manipulating] an image in Photoshop, using an application to create a 3D object, or writing a solution. That excited me,' he says. `I still love to try new things and it has made us stand apart. Eventually, when we started Sourcebits, we built programmes and applications that did not exist on the Apple platform. We were the first Indian company to do that.'

He was thirty when he rented Sourcebits' first office -a parking lot that had been converted into an office near his alma mater in Bangalore. `I felt proud that I was finally doing something on my own. We were like every American start-up working in a garage, only I didn't know it then. The difference between us and them was that we paid rent for the garage, `12,000 a month,' he says.

While his wife supported his decision, his father, G.R. Singal, was quite upset by the fact that his son had veered off course and tried to talk him out of it. `I kept telling him it's going to be fine. He grumbled, but accepted [what I was saying] and would drop in at the office to see what we were up to. Maybe he thought I could try this for a couple of years and then go back,' Rohit says. `I was very clear that this would be my life.' And for the next eight years, Sourcebits was his life.

The original plan was to create medical software that doctors could use without the help of technicians. Once he hired his first two employees, his ideas changed. `I had never interacted with engineers or designers before. Once I did, my brain started thinking beyond medical applications,' he says.

The first application the tiny team built was Fun Booth, which allowed users to add masks, fake moustaches, hats and other props in real time to photos and videos taken with a webcam. They spent six months on development and it hit the market in November 2006. The focus was on design and user interface, hanging on a couple of lines of simple code -just the kind of simple elegance that the Mac community loved. At its peak, Fun Booth clocked about 5,000 downloads a day and, close to a decade later, is still listed among the top-100 Apple apps.

`We didn't think: Who will use these products, who will buy, how will we make money? We just wanted to make them and thought someone like us would buy,' says Rohit.

MAHESH AND SURESH RAMAKRISHNAN

Suited to Work

Mahesh and Suresh Ramakrishnan train underprivileged men and women in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to craft bespoke suits that retail on Savile Row in London. The twins fell in love with fine clothing while they worked in the corporate world in New York, and have now built their own world-class brand, Whitcomb & Shaftesbury, based in Chennai and London. Their clientele includes heads of state and global chains, rock stars and sports legends

On Savile Row, suit-making is an art perfected over 300 years. The earliest tailors made uniforms for the military, where the purpose was to create outfits that would make the army look indomitable. So the shoulders were squared, the chests broadened, and the overall look was one of might and authority. The tailors, with their fine understanding of body structure, became experts at camouflaging flaws to create a look of uniform strength. Over time, the military greatcoats were shortened and refashioned into the modern suit with a short jacket and trousers. And it was the English who perfected this art of fitting and kitting out men.

Since then the Italians have learnt the art of tailoring and have cut the trade into two spheres: they are the masters of mass-produced, readymade suits using lightweight material, and the English have remained the smaller artisanal makers of custom clothing. It's this tradition of perfection that the brothers are now teaching to underprivileged men and women in India.

In his final year at Wharton in 2003, one of Suresh's projects involved developing a business idea. `My proposal was to set up a fine tailoring business with a social aspect. Mahesh helped develop the idea and, at the end of it, we thought: Why not try it for real?' Suresh says.

One of the things they decided on from the very beginning -and the unique feature of the project that caught the attention of Suresh's professors at Wharton -was that they would build a company that integrated the best elements of the systems, processes and values that they had experienced in their corporate life. `From manufacture and order systems that eliminated surplus to the creation of a unique labour force which would one day be recognized across the world -these were ideas we worked hard to combine,' says Suresh.

Both were motivated by the desire to do something that they could look back on and be proud of in twenty-five years. `We wanted to create something that the world would notice while making a real difference in people's lives. Yes, we were making an impact in our own lives, but how were we really helping others not as fortunate?' says Suresh. `That was one of the major drivers behind us deciding to build a company based on human beings rather than machine labour.'

With suit-making, the business would always be small and niche. `But it was a good way to prove that skills and quality can go hand in hand in India. The people who get tailored at Savile Row are the cream of society -social, political and economic leaders. Who better to prove it to?' says Mahesh.

The idea was to create a line of suits in the Chennai workshop that would meet the exacting Savile Row standards. The Classic Bespoke line follows the same fitting process as the Savile Row Bespoke. Customers are measured and fitted in London, and the cutter creates the pattern there. The pattern, cloth and trimmings are sent to Chennai for assembly. The assembled suit is sent back and forth, between London and Chennai, for the customer to try, and changes are made for a perfect fit. It may seem a bit complicated, but the result is a Savile Row suit at half the price.

The moment they told clients in London that they were planning to sell `Made in India' suits on Savile Row, they caused a bit of a scandal. `No one would believe the quality could match up. They thought it was impossible,' says Suresh. Many regular customers who swore by their British-made suits told the brothers that they would never wear suits made in a small city in south India. But the brothers believed they could make a go of it.

The author is a journalist with The Times of India Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India

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