June | 2009 | k a u n t e x t

I have this idea, of starting a social design firm.
This comes after the repeated rubbing in of the ‘young and budding’ idea: that you’re never really going to do the kind of work you want to do unless you start off on your own.

After having seen how things are in the development sector one realises that there is a lot for scope for growth.I remember having this conversation with a friend, Nisha Susan, actually when she had just come back to Bangalore after a Mass communication degree at Symbiosis in Pune, and joined APSA, a group that works with street children in Bangalore; she told me about how she didn’t see herself working in any other sector, “after having you grown up in India, how can you not?”.I still see the wisdom in her words.

I find myself at varying spurts of energy, dulled sometimes by the deprivation and the poverty, spurred still by the resilience that comes from endurance which I have seen in all the people around me, and spurred some more by a rough idea of how things work in India currently.It’s a great highs great lows roller-coaster ride and that’s what I can promise… without the sentimentality and romanticism that could cloud our ability to see innovation in this sector.

So, what do we need?