2 BITS Pilani Entrepreneurs on MTV Youth Icon

It is a pleasure to be back to serious blogging after such a long break. I promise, dear E-Factor, that I would not neglect you and not take away your name (not yet).

This post is triggered by the euphoria that is prevailing at the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani right now. The Pepsi MTV Youth Icon has released 23 of the 30 nominees for this year's award.

We have 2 BITS Pilani alumni on it. And the reason for euphoria at CEL is the fact that both of them are entrepreneurs!

Siva Prasad [BITS Pilani+ IIM Kozhikode] is the founder of dhanaX, a micro finance based start-up. I have always loved the concept of Social Lending pioneered by them. And you know what? Abhishek Nayak, our very own CEL Anna, has worked with him in the past. And you know what? I would not be surprised if I see Nayak on that nominee list very soon.

Vote for Siva Prasad here

Sarath Babu [BITS Pilani + IIM Ahmedabad] is the founder of Food King and with healthy balance sheets is on the way to become a literal King in the organized food business. His story started selling idlis with his mother in Chennai before a Chemical engineering degree from BITS Pilani opened new vistas.

Vote for Sarath Babu here

Wish both of you all the best from everyone at BITS Pilani!

An interesting observation was the number of start-up people (like Natasha of Mama Mia) and social activists (Vishal of Dream a Dream or Devika of Mumbai Mobile Creches) on the list. I hope it means as a society we have more meaningful icons to look up to. Amen!

Foreign Maal!

Cross posted on WATBlog ,Desicritics and Whatever Things

I was going through Indianroomates.in, a website quite similar to its American counterpart Roomates.com which aims to help and connect (mostly) the youth seeking accommodation. One thing that really caught my attention was the picture of Indian youth on the homepage. As bizarre as it may sound, when was the last time you saw a non-NGO Indian website which had Indian faces? At the most it might have the token Indian or Black person to show diversity, but I think it’s quite rare to find only Indian people. In the beginning I felt maybe such a strategy is employed to show that that company is global (or at least aspiring to be global) but now it just seems like everyone is following the crowd. But then what about those companies which are purely based in India and don’t seem to be expanding outside India in the likely future. I say this because couple of the web based start ups that launched from my college and had noting to do with foreign clients had picture of Caucasian women playing with their Caucasian kids. It just doesn’t make sense. Why should a premier IIT-JEE (Not too tough to guess which one now) coaching institute which receives over a crore hits every year need to put a header picture of some American university students on its website? I don’t know where the problem lies. Is it that the companies ask the web designing team to put in those pictures (in case the work is being outsourced) or the company itself feels its needs such a picture. The whole point being that if your pictures don’t gel with your venture, you end up looking really stupid.

By the way it was really disappointing to see that the moment I clicked on a page at Indianroomates, it took me to another page. And this one had phirangs on it, smiling.

Here’s one solution. The issue of portraying yourself as something doesn’t need faces. It can be done through symbols as well. If you’re ashamed of putting in Indian people shaking hands (though I don’t know why that would be the case), then might as well show only the shaking of hands on your webpage rather than show a Chinese and a Kenyan doing so, especially if you’re a start up based in a small town whose main market is the nearby city.

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Another solution that comes to my mind, and Proto.in founder Vijay Anand also talks about it, is the establishment of an Indian photo stock. This is a terrific business opportunity for this market is currently untapped. There is a huge demand for Indian photos out there.