The journey into self-love and self-acceptance must begin with self-examination. Until you take the journey of self-reflection, it is almost impossible to grow or learn in life. – Iyanla Vanzant
Self-reflection is an important practice that can help individuals improve themselves and their lives. It can also help individuals to gain clarity on their goals and priorities, and make better decisions that align with their true selves. Overall, self-reflection is a powerful tool that can help individuals to live more intentionally and meaningfully.
Today, we celebrated Ullas -The Young Achiever, 26th Annual ‘Can Do’ workshop 2023 at Music Academy, Chennai.
The workshop saw over 1,100 Teenagers from class IX from government and corporation schools selected through proper tests. Over 5,000 students took the test from over 200 schools in Chennai.
This workshop is named the ‘Diary of Dreams’ Workshop, where we encourage students to write their dreams in small personal diaries handed to them among 1100 other students.
This is the beginning of their journey of Design Thinking to drive higher performance, followed by 20 Life skills workshops. Each Summit has five Workshops conducted by Polaris/Intellect Employees, Ullas Alumni and college students.
Transformation of villages can happen when villagers own the change and work together. In the above movie, Sidharth Tripathi, a government bureaucrat works with the tribal community and the change is visible.
Complete alcohol-free tribal community
Family income increases 3 times from 3 crops per year vs. 1 crop per year. This is because of water conservation.
The education of the tribal women and then building SHG where banks are comfortable giving loans up to 5 lacs creating nextgen entrepreneurs.
Curiosity of villagers to learn scientific agriculture and crop diversity like Shimla Mirch etc., increased income further.
Youth participating in sports, this way they stay away from drugs and alcohol.
Both forest conservation and water conservation i.e. ecology drivers built in.
We visited Aram Kera villages in February 2021 and were amazed to see how Personal Development with minimal cost can drive 50 to 100 times the economic viability.
A very interesting dialogue is happening where different Perspectives are emerging.
As per ‘Design The Thinking’ – Thinking mind has six rooms – Imagination room, Learning room, Doing room, Effective room, influencing room and Giving room.
Our mind lives in these six rooms throughout the day. The more imagination leads to the desire to learn more. The more learning gets applied to doing the more experiential learning. Through experiential learning, one learns to become effective as a team member or leader, leading to influencing others. Giving or teaching is the greatest way to increase learning capacity.
The measurement of learning capacity, suggested by a few people through standardised tests, is a good way to Judge. One other way to measure learning capacity is to ask a person to write down a number of questions which come to his mind about a particular problem, not answers. Germination of the right questions may help determine his/her learning capacities.
Today we are starting ‘Das Lakshan Parv’ – Paryushan which means Celebrating 10 Virtues of being a good Human.
Each day we go deep into one virtue where all the scholars of the philosophy speak about that virtue. As per Anekantvaad philosophy of Jainism – All perspectives of Specific virtue are appreciated without one prescriptive book.
I have been listening to various scholars over many years. I am sharing my understanding of today’s virtue – Forgiveness. It’s a partial knowledge and full knowledge of the virtue will be completed by you and your thinking. This summary may provide a trigger for your experiences to reflect on forgiveness virtue.
The story I am about to tell traverses the fascinating world of a young boy and his journey to adulthood. And during this journey, he tells a riveting story of discovery – of his journey and self discovery. It’s about a young and determined individual who faced financial obstacles but remained committed to achieving his goals. Interwoven in his journey, we unravel how the world of technology unravels.
Murari Lal was just like any other boy growing up in a bustling locality in a vibrant city. He imbibed the vibrancy and had his playful side. But there was another side to him, too. At the tender age of 10, Murari was captivated by the mesmerising world of video games. However, a price tag of Rs.2000 hung heavily over his dreams, a sum far beyond the confines of his modest pocket money, that amounted to a mere Rs.50 per month.
But the money did not seem to be an obstacle in achieving his dream. He remained focused on his important goal. He was determined to be smart with his money and found help at the local Ramlal Bank to start his financial journey. He saved Rs.20 from his monthly pocket money, resisted the temptation and deposited whatever money he got on festivals in that account to make his dream come true.
Time passed. Festivals came & went. The temptations were all there. But his dream & determination was greater than all of these. After patiently waiting for two years, Murari’s hard work with money paid off, and festivities brought in extra money, Murari remained determined. He felt proud and satisfied when he had Rs.2000 in his hands. It showed he didn’t give up and was smart with his money. This was just the beginning of Murari’s journey to learn how to handle money well, and he never forgot this important lesson.
When he was 13, he had to buy groceries for his family. This allowed him to learn even more about managing money, and it happened at a local store.
With his mom’s shopping lists, Murari regularly went to the nearby grocery store. But there was a surprising twist: the store owner didn’t immediately ask for payment. Instead, they sent someone to collect the money at the end of the month. Murari realised that this system was similar to how credit and credit cards work, which got him thinking about the complex world of finance that he would soon learn about.
As Murari’s life story progressed, taking him through college and into the world of startups, his journey blended perfectly with the growing world of technology. He named his business ‘Murari Lal & Co’ and approached RamLal Bank to seek financial assistance and was introduced to how RamLal bank can extend a loan to him against the machinery he would procure and purchase orders he got as well as help him manage his month to month cash requirements by giving him money against the invoices he would raise to his clients.
On the 25th of July, I had the pleasure and privilege of having dinner with Mr Ibrahim Thiaw – Under Secretary General of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
In a very personal, affable and friendly manner, the Under Secretary General was keen to learn about the best practices happening in India to combat this global crisis. Very quickly, he focused on the term desertification – its origin, its definition, the causes , the consequences and potential solutions to redress this burning issue.
As I understood from him, the UNCCD is the global voice for land. It promotes practices that avoid, reduce and reverse land degradation and is the driving force behind Sustainable Development Goal 15 and Land Degradation Neutrality.
The design thinking driven approach towards Holistic and Sustainable development of the rural communities where Mission Samriddhi is working was wholeheartedly appreciated and endorsed by His Excellency.
He was quite poignant about the constraints and pressures on food production and supply lines due to the rapid increase in consumption patterns on account of a huge middle class in India and China. Industrialized agriculture with excessive usage of chemical fertilizers, indiscriminate water usage and its misuse and climate change have all resulted in soil and land degradation. Newer ways to farm including natural zero tillage farming, a focus on biodiversity and a conscious attempt for behavioral change towards sustainable living was his key message.
Interestingly, he felt that more than Governments and policies – if Businesses adopted Sustainability practices wholeheartedly and people in the street speak about it and do something about it, the impact on society would be far more effective with a faster rate of reversal of desertification. The plethora of knowledge and insights on soil conservation and agroecology that is rapidly re-emerging in India – he felt must be shared in a structured manner with the rest of the world.
In the end, I was quite humbled when he compared with Andre Hoffmann ( Swiss Environmentalist, Philanthropist and Vice Chairman of Roche) in the way our thought processes are similar and was keen that I participate in next year’s World Economic Forum. Thank You Mr. Ibrahim.
24.7 is the foundation date of Polaris/Intellect group 30 years ago. Aptly, ‘24 by 7’ became the DNA of members of this group who continuously think, work and achieve designing and developing better technologies for their customers across the globe.
The 30 years of collective community power translates to 10957 calendar days and over 1.5 billion hours of design, innovation and execution of a vision in global Financial Technology. A vision that is jointly shared with our customers.
I must record my gratitude to all customers who trusted Polaris/Intellect from 57 countries to connect their dreams to drive better banking for their customers.
We started our journey at the beginning of Banktech Wave 3 when the era of distributed computing and relational databases was just emerging over the Mainframes and Mini computers era. We proudly participated in providing cutting-edge technology in building the first high volume Credit Card processing application and Core Banking application on the distributed architecture of small Solaris machines and Oracle DBMS for Citibank. A unique achievement which was unheard of in that era. And then we never looked back.
In a short span of 7 years, customers from Singapore, Australia, Middle East, Germany, Switzerland, UK and US started placing their trust with our technology teams. And top 4 of 10 North American Banks, top 6 of 10 European Banks, top 9 of 10 Middle Eastern Banks, top 7 of 10 Indian Banks and top 5 of 10 South East Asia & ANZ Banks place their trust on Intellect when it comes to technology.
The process of shared visioning and imagining the nextgen through ‘Lakshya’ (our visioning exercise across the organisation) helped the group to transition smoothly to Wave 4 and now Wave 5 ahead of its competitors. Today Intellect’s launch of eMACH.ai is a new paradigm in choreographing and composing contextual experiences at double the speed.
My gratitude to all associates (employees in industry terms) and partners, past and present, of this 24 by 7 movement, who helped in building a strong culture of small communities (teams) who asked the right questions and found the right and appropriate solutions, wiring them in our customer complex ecosystems. The culture of smart communities focussed on deep functional and technology research, product engineering, customer transformations, and life cycle support spread across 25 countries makes me proud today.
Our resolve of bringing transformation through ‘Mission Samriddhi’ in rural India and building the spirit of ‘Can Do’ in children through ‘Ullas Trust’ is our way of contributing to society and expressing our gratitude to the roots from where we have emerged.
On this important day, I feel humbled by the power of dreams, entrepreneurship and communities. A very Happy Foundation Day to all my associates, customers and partners and I look forward to our continued journey together.
just completed a 2-day trip to Jharkhand and would like to share my learnings with my LinkedIn group. I would encourage all of you to share your personal learnings/ insights in this forum.
Key learnings:
The nutrient value of grains and vegetables has fallen substantially in the last 100 years as per recorded data. The iron content in spinach as published by nutrient data has reduced to one-fifth since 1914. It is attributed to lesser microbes and soil content because of chemical farming.
The nutrient value of native seeds is higher as per Siddarth Jaiswal’s study.
The protein content in Bhutku Rice is as high as 11.5 percent along with B1, B3 and B6 vitamins and phosphorus,
Saw Amrit Krishi’s bed and learnt 5 layer farming on the same bed (Amrit Krishi is a system of Natural farming (an advanced form of Organic farming) in which no external bio-input purchased from the market is used. The product is from native sees which are grown in virgin tracts using natural concoctions of native cow dung/urine and biomass by tribal farmers of Chakuliya in East Singhbhum district of Jharkhand. The grains are processed using traditional methods and checked manually.)
Carbon content of Amrit Mitti is 6 to 8 times higher than normal organic soil.
Layer 2: on Ground crops like cabbage, Brocolli etc
Layer 3: Bushes crop at higher levels like Brinjal, Tomato etc
Layer 4: Creepers on Bamboo sticks wired in the Center of Amrit Mitti bed
Layer 5: Leafy Vegetables in the remaining space in a broadcast fashion.
The concept of layer 5 is very interesting. As per Amrit Krishi theory, Sunlight is the only energy source for the growth of plants which needs ‘designed distribution’. Normally in empty spaces, weeds surface. If we sprinkle leafy vegetables in the empty spaces, it prevents weeds to grow and we get one extra vegetable.
Anil Pradhan, founder of Young Tinker Foundation from Bhubhneshwar, has taken a team from schools in villages of Odisha all the way to NASA, and we at Mission Samriddhi have been privileged to mentor him. The team consisted of students from 9th to 11th grades, who were trained to create a functional Rover from scratch in just 6 months.
Using CADD, they built all mechanical parts and carefully selected lightweight materials to stay within the weight limit for the rover. I am amazed at how these students were able to learn such fine engineering sciences in such a short period of time. They are now competing in a global competition with resources 50-100 times greater than their own.
This achievement is beyond the limits of conventional learning and a testament to the hard work and dedication of Anil Pradhan and his team. Congratulations to all involved!
Hello, my name is Arun Jain. I am a design thinker living in Chennai, India. This is my blog, where I post my thoughts, technology trends and tips about the fintech world and many more.
