Cliches are part of life, no doubt. Entrepreneurship is one of those. No matter how much is spoken about the necessity to be out of the box and innovative, it has become cliched to a great extent where everybody tries hard or at least project to be out of the box and ironically being out of the box itself has become so predictable that there is nothing 'out of the box' in it. I will call this category as 'out of the box within the box'. When you conceive and start something, people immediately try to analyse that 'innovation' with the parameters set in the 'out of the box within the box'.
When I was studying in college, I had a group of friends from different streams of specialization- economics, commerce, maths, physics, visual communication, etc. I was also lucky enough to listen to some really informative debates. However, as a natural trait, I was very attracted to thinking deep about simple stuff that I came across and linking all possible things I could think of. I realized I was too obsessed with doing that and found myself only a listener in the debates that my friends used to have, and never really contribute. When I wanted to air my opinions about these simple things, I would get very a disinterested response from my "intelligent" friends as "unimportant" or "very basic", etc.
Nevertheless, this motivated me to form my own discussion group to discuss these simple things in life - things like Simplicity, Breakfast, Kitchen, Statue, patience, etc. We, then, had a group of 5 friends who would regularly discuss these things, when we meet at my home in Kodambakkam. It aroused my passions for these topics because I was getting enlightened and felt very creative. Again, knowledge was too cliched to the set parameters of acquiring it, while I believe that majority of the knowledge and wisdom arise out of observation and randomness. Moreover, my colleagues at college used to attend seminars given by big speakers in popular subjects and visit libraries to read books on popular subjects. Even today, one would find that these simple topics are not available in the public domain that easily.
In my opinion, books are but a recording of the knowledge of a person or a group of persons. They represent a very minute portion of our universal thought. Every second, we think, we experience, we analyse and we emote too. Yet, most of our thoughts are innate and are never shared or brought out. This encouraged me further to discuss topics of everyday important. The more I discussed these topics, I began to introspect because every time I rounded up a discussion, my perception of that particular topic would have been totally different from where I started. That helped me change a lot about myself.
College was over, but I was determined that I should not let the group die. I used to invite all my group members to meet every weekend . Slowly, it began to die. Maybe the old connect died or our priorities shifted out to other things, but the fact remained that we could not meet and I was disappointed. But my cousin, Prashanth was the only one to support me then. He loved the idea and we both decided that atleast the two of us would meet up regularly. There were days when just the two of us used to meet every weekend.
It was then we decided that we had to widen our circle. I realised a very important lesson in my life then - that you have to be focussed on the objective over the people who are participating. Partially, this is because in a random idea like this, attrition is very likely that no matter how people are close to you, and hence you have to focus on people that are interested.
We conveyed the idea to a few other friends and we roped in a few more people, but we had to deal with the problem of irregular participants. A few members would come once or twice and then never come at all! We were very new to managing this forum and in an anxiety to not let the idea die, we decided to get populist and try "marketing" Sit more. We were facing a situation of utter confusion.
Because of my strong inclination towards social change and Gandhi, I immediately tried to attach the group to labels like "Social Change" and "Civil Society". We christened the group "Society for Intellectual Thinking", with its abbrevation as "SIT". The conviction to market was strengthened further, when we got some press coverage as an "unique interesting group" in the city. A lot of people joined the group on seeing the article.
We initiated some "Social Change" moves. As we progressed, we realised that no matter what you say about service and changing the society and consider it innovative, there was an "established" innovation that was accepted to "social change" and it was an established conviction that anyone who is talking of social change had to do, rather than talk. While our main theme was "self-introspection", we were not able to convince people on what "action" we intended to do. We were debased in many situations. This was a phase when I was unsure about the group myself. I would attempt at creating narratives to convey the objective in a way that would be convincing to others and more so, to myself. This moved me to a direction-less state. To prove that we were serious about what we were doing and to show people what we were discussing, I began to jot downminutes of the discussions and create official records of the same.
Yours,
Srinath Varadarajan
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