Bon voyage — Part 3

Gist of my personal experiences from Jagriti Yatra 2019

5 min readJan 12, 2020

Introduction blog (Part 0)
Bon voyage — Part 1
Bon voyage — Part 2

Day 8 (01/01/2020) — In train, ChairCar sessions:

Happy New Year!!! And welcome to the new decade. As far as I remember, this is the most exciting new year celebrations. Celebrating and dancing with school kids in a small village in Orissa, entire railway platform decorated for celebrations, dancing madly in a moving train and wishing every known/unknown person “Happy New Year” was obviously crazy. Though I didn’t involve so much in partying, a philosophical me had a small question in mind:

Just because the day changed in calendar, what’s the purpose of partying too much? As in, what we have achieved so much to celebrate?

With these thoughts, I slept and woke up late as the entire day is planned to be in train. We were given an exercise named “BGT — Biz-Gyan Tree” where the objective is to formulate a business model within 2 days by observing the problems faced by villagers in Deoria, UP and pitch it on Jan 3rd. So, we had an introduction session on that exercise explaining conditions present in Deoria and the discussions with respective groups started. My experience in a sentence was:

Everyone tries to be a good speaker but no one tries to be a good listener

But it’s an excellent exercise for someone who want’s to start a startup as there are many perspectives and we need to listen, understand, discuss and come to a common conclusion. So, having finalized on an idea, I slept and can feel the gradual steep in temperature from 35°C to 15°C within a couple of days and waiting for worse to come ahead.

Day 9 (02/01/2020) — Nalanda (Bihar):

Concentration areas: Education, empowerment, finance

I was trembling with cold when we reached Nalanda, Bihar. We visited the ruins of the Nalanda university, a symbol for world education center. We explored the place for about 3 hrs, looking into the monasteries and meditated for sometime. One can easily get connected to the serenity and the energy associated with this place.

Some of us trying to meditate and pose simultaneously — Nalanda ruins, Bihar

After this, we went to Rajgir International Convention Center (RICC) and had a group picture post lunch.

Then we had some sessions from industry people and the keypoints are:

Spreadsheets, search bars which are famous today (by Google/Microsoft) were not the first ones to come to the market. But they observed from their competitors, learned from their mistakes and improved. So, sometimes it’s okay to release something late in market and in the meanwhile, learn from the mistakes made by your opponent
Internet saathi — A project by Google and Tata to reduce the online gender gap in rural India

We heard from Nixon Joseph, President and COO SBI Foundation on how he started participating in marathons at the age of 45 and completed about 35 marathons of 42 kms each. It’s not required for him at that age to do marathons, but why he is doing is the big question mark. If it’s for fitness, he can simply go to gym/yoga. What I believe is that one should push his/her limits as far as possible and make today’s life a bit more challenging than yesterday’s. As we succeed in accomplishing it, we feel internally happy, satisfied and motivated.

So, with these thoughts, we boarded the train and the BGT discussion resumed as tomorrow evening we need to pitch the idea. Two main points I learned while discussing are

Tolerate and accept (during conversations, listen patiently and accept what others are saying)
Convince or confuse — While pitching, if your idea is small and very clear, convince audience/panel members. Else, make it more complicated by using jargons and confuse them.

Day 10 (03/01/2020) — Deoria (Uttar Pradesh):

Concentration areas: Pitching startups

We reached early in the morning to the village of Deoria and it’s about 10°C. In this biting cold, we had field work where we went to local farmers and talked with them about their methods of cultivation. It’s a very remote village where families are satisfied with their earnings of 1 Lakh/annum. While we in city are dissatisfied (and sometimes complain about life) with 1 Lakh/month earnings. That’s the irony of life. After talking with them for about 3 hrs, at around 4 PM we started preparing our startup plan (related to agri-tech) and presented it at 7 PM. The weather is extremely hostile as the temperature dropped to 5°C and it started raining heavily while we are presenting in a small ground with paper charts in hand and depicting information on that.

Yatris pitching their ideas albeit heavy rain and cold climatic conditions — Deoria, UP

This is a unique experience and definitely one can’t get much more challenging platform to learn how to pitch a startup. Post dinner, we had few culturals and the night stay was arranged in local school.

Day 11 (04/01/2020) — In train, Chair Car sessions:

We visited a banyan tree early in the morning where JagritiYatra (JY) has it’s foundation roots and at around 9 AM started boarding buses.

Banyan tree where the foundation roots of JagritiYatra has started in early 2000s — Deoria, UP

We boarded train at about 11 AM and most of us are very tired. So, after taking some rest, I attended a Chair Car session on “Critical healthcare decisions about dignity in life and death”. In short, it’s about the decision to be taken for treatment, conversing about the last days of life and planning “How we want to die”:

“Going through painful treatment and extending life for few years” vs “Forgoing treatment and having a peaceful death within a couple of weeks”

Later, I attended another Chair Car session on “Pitch clinic (Selling your ideas)” where the presenter shared tips on how to pitch a startup. The day ended with some funtime in Chair Car and me worrying about the climatic conditions of Delhi, the next stop.