The evening’s activities began with a crowded minibus journey with people sat on each others laps and standing across each other. It was obvious from the complete lack of fuss that the group had clearly already bonded and felt comfortable in extremely close quarters. Discussions on the bus mainly revolved around mine and Alex’s new haircuts. During free time we had taken a trip to the hairdressers where we were both offered, but nobly declined a strangely expensive ‘fruity massage’. The haircuts were great though!
On arrival at the restaurant we saw Richard for the first time today, dragging himself from his sick bed. The general consensus from looking at him was that he should have just stayed in bed (just joking Richard - kind of).
Evening started with an interesting talk from a self made businessman, budding social entrepreneur and politician in the making, Mr Mishra. Between the ages of 20 and 40 he set out on two 10 year plans to become a rich businessman. He had set up 3 companies, and sold them all by the time he was 40 and had made his fortune. He is now on his next 10 year plan to engage in social enterprise and next in the pipeline is to be Prime Minister by the time he’s 60.
He described his priority to secure jobs for the growing numbers of rural youth unemployed due to agricultural decline. He ended his speech with a generous offer of support to UnLtd India, saying “if anyone in the room wants to start a project then approach me later or give me a call and I’ll find you the money, support and consultancy to make it happen”. What a great guy!
Next we had a talk from Bert Cherian. He took us to the ‘level next’ and taught us about mapping our path to power and success. He is using his business consultancy skills to advice social entrepreneurs to make a success of their ventures. He gave us a copy of his book and offered some words of wisdom. Naturally, his book is on sale in all good book stores.
Before dinner we heard from various other incredible social entrepreneurs: Vikram was from an organisation called ‘I think I have a solution’, which is a social consultancy company and he edits an e-magazine called Sutra. Then there was Ramesh from ‘Unity’ which offered a 3 month vocational training course for the urban unemployed. Finally Joy from ‘Makkala Jagriti’ gave an account of her community development programme for the youth which took an interesting child centric approach.
The networking began over diner – so watch this space! Very interesting to see sparks flying, and I can’t wait to see which sparks turn into fires over the next few months.
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