Sarita Kashyap – A Single Mom Who Feeds Her Number of Children Living on Street

 

An automobile salesperson for 17 years, Sarita Kashyap did not have enough funding to start a non-profit organization but she had the intent to serve the poor and needy with her limited means. Life had offered her various struggles but Sarita was determined to not dwell in the sympathy of others. Instead, she started her own Rajma Chawal stall with her limited savings. In her own words, she is not an efficient cook. She knows to make only a few dishes in the kitchen but one thing that she does not lack is her self-confidence and readiness to tread on any path ignoring the inhibitions implanted by society.

After leaving her job in the automobile sector in 2019, she indulged herself in the field of Network Marketing for some time and lost all her savings in that. She could not be successful in that field because it needs her to resort to dishonest means, which were against her ethics. When she started her makeshift food stall - Apna Pann Rajma Chawal, she did not even have enough utensils to make food and carry it from her home in Meera Bagh to Peera Garhi bus depot in west Delhi. She travels in her scooter, which has a portable table and carriers, where she carefully places large drums of steaming Rajma-Chawal. Sarita loves driving and wishes to buy and drive a jeep someday, which, according to her, can be used both for her personal and business purpose.

Kashyap starts her day at 4 a.m. After finishing her household chores, she prepares Rajma Chawal, salad, and chatni for around 100 people. At around 11:30 a.m., she starts operating her stall at Peera Garhi Bus Depot. The stall runs for around 3-4 hours. As she sets up her stall at the bus stop, the local slum children wait at one side of her stall to feast on delicious rajma chawal in aunty’s stall. Due to the taste of her food, her kind behavior, and welcoming manner, and her honest initiative to feed hungry road children, rag pickers, and homeless people, the entire food is consumed fast, and generally, by 2 pm, Sarita closes her food stall. She manages the operations single-handedly.

Within four months of its commencement, Apna Pann’s food has become well known in the locality and hungry customers line up at the location even before Sarita arrives. With half-plate priced at Rs. 40 and full at Rs. 60, Sarita’s Rajma Chawal is a delicacy accompanied by homemade chatni and onion salad. Her daily income was around Rs. 3,000-Rs 4,000 before lockdown. She spends a larger portion of it on providing free food to street kids. She feeds her customers and hungry road children waiting in separate queues at the same time.

Feeding the underprivileged motivates Sarita to go on with her laborious daily duty. “I sell a minimum of 100 boxes a day out of which almost 60 percent is sold to paying customers and the rest is served for free to the children and homeless people,” says Sarita. Inspired by her selfless act, many people donate money to feed hungry people on their behalf. Kashyap has also been trying to educate these street children through some basic tutoring. She admits the difficulties in doing so, but she is determined to help them dream a better future. Thanking social media, Sarita says, it has played a huge part in her success. After leaving her job, she used to follow lots of motivational speakers on social media. When she started the food stall, she did not have enough resources to feed enough street children as she needed to survive and save money for her college-going daughter with that income alone. With more people assembled in her stall due to her work being promoted on social media, Sarita is now able to feed a good number of hungry people for free at her food stall.

Apart from providing free food, Kashyap plans to empower women by providing them with an opportunity to set up their own food stalls. Sarita is working on the idea to supply her homemade food to unemployed women who would then set up their stalls which will function on the same lines as hers. It will give a sense of fulfillment to her to see more and more women feeding the hungry while being able to earn. She is now planning to start a home delivery segment of Apna Pann Rajma Chawal soon and is working on acquiring the prerequisite food licenses. “If you can’t do the great things, do small things in a great way” – West Delhi’s Sarita Kashyap is a living example of that.

 

Sridhar Vembu, the Man Behind the Success of Zoho Corp, the Largest Software Product Company in India

 

 

Sridhar Vembu founded AdventNet with his siblings and Tony Thomas, in Pleasanton, California in 1996 to make software products at a time when IT services were the rage. AdventNet acquired the Zoho.com domain in 2002 and morphed into Zoho Corp in 2009 to reflect the transition from a software company serving network equipment vendors to an innovative online applications provider.

Headquartered in Chennai, Zoho has over 60 million users worldwide and counts Whirlpool, Ola, Xiaomi, Levi's, Amazon, Philips, and Zomato among its clientele. According to Friday Magazine, an online publication, the company continues to be bootstrapped but commands a valuation of nearly $1 billion.

Vembu graduated out of IIT Madras in 1989, completed a Ph.D. in Princeton, and started working as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm. After two years, he co-founded AdventNet with two of his brothers and three friends. At the time of launching his company, he noted that in spite of having a number of talent, India never produces any software products. He felt that in order to be economically advanced, India should start producing software and take up complex tasks. Vembu moved to the US in 1997 to build sales and marketing for Adventnet. However, Zoho had their product development and product management departments always in India. They kept building the products out of India from their early days and build these complex technologies from India. This was the differentiating factor between other companies and Zoho Corp.

Zoho university was formed in 2004 and later known as Zoho Schools with an aim to train and onboard students with skillsets and abilities. Students of this university receive a free-of-cost education and are provided with a stipend of ₹10,000 throughout the tenure of their two-year course. The university focuses on the eagerness to learn than their previous skills. The Zoho School was started with six students and two professors but today more than 800 students have graduated from these schools and are employed with Zoho Corp. Out of the 9,300 employees of Zoho Corp, 875 are students from Zoho Schools. 15 to 20 percent of their engineers do not have any engineering degree. They are all trained in-house. Zoho Schools that are going all digital now have allowed them to bypass colleges and secure a decent livelihood.

Zoho is now able to provide cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and more than 40 apps for online accounting, human resource and inventory management, and more. Their products like Zoho Desk, a customer service software, were built out of the Mathalamparai office, as Vembu believes that we need not be in the urban hubs to develop world-class products. His vision encouraged more people and facilities to shift to villages as the tier 1 cities already started to face major challenges. The pandemic reinforced this belief of the Zoho founder as people moved to their hometowns to continue operations from their small towns and villages.

The 54-year-old entrepreneur moved to Mathalamparai, a nondescript village near Tenkasi, in 2019. From Tenkasi the company has built advanced products like Zoho Desk. Zoho has earned its reputation of being the first software product unicorn. Forbes valued Vembu’s 88 percent stake at $1.83 billion in 2019. In the same year, Zoho reported profits of ₹516 cr. on total revenue of ₹3,410 crores. The company recently has 50 million users globally for its apps. The most recent of which was launched before the Covid pandemic and is suitably called Zoho Remotely.

Nine years ago his company purchased 4 acres of land in Mathalamparai village which is 650 km away from Chennai to begin operations from the village.  Vembu’s days begin at 4 am when he completes calls to the US offices and goes for a long walk or swim in the village well at 6 am. Strict to his village life routine, Venbu goes for a walk in the morning and evening and keeps his gadgets turned off for a few hours, as he interacts with villagers and enjoys village ponds and creeks, teaches in Zoho schools, and rides an electric auto-rickshaw during that time. Vembu steps out to the fields to grow paddy, vegetables like brinjal, okra, and tomato, and fruits such as mango, coconut, and watermelon.

Presently, Zoho has two rural offices in Tenkasi and Renigunta in Andhra Pradesh with 500 of its 9,300 employees globally working out of these. The company has a larger plan for its 8,800 India-based employees working out of non-urban India.

Sridhar Vembu said in an interview that his motivations to go rural are two-fold: “One, I want my employees to live in these villages because it brings a lot of cross-fertilization of ideas.  Once some high-earning people come in, they bring in good and bad habits.” After the mentoring and coaching of the staff in the city, Zoho recruits the pass outs to work from their village. With this great idea in mind, Vembu has gradually moved back to his rural and agrarian roots over the past 15 months. He was recently conferred with the Padma Shri award, the fourth highest civilian award in the country, by the Union government, and is appointed as a member of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB).