Passion, Purpose and Promise

Inspiring Women Entrepreneurs

I am in the finale for India 20 under 20! Yay! I have the finale coming up soon.

Here I am going to talk about what I had to do for the finale. We were all given a challenge to find a problem and create an impact with our talent. In my last newsletter I talked about how the local entrepreneurs are struggling due to the shift to the online market. That is what I took my problem statement to be. Now, it was to find a solution and create an impact. I decided to talk to two women entrepreneurs and tell their story to the online world. I went out there with the idea of making an impact however, I came back with an impact on my own self.

I reached out to Trice so I could become aware of women entrepreneurs in my area and you all could check them and their products out as well.

Trice is a platform that enables and recognizes social initiatives within a community of residents. This is done by allowing the community to engage and transact with each other. In doing so, Trice triggers a local economy based on trust, mutual respect and sense of a shared responsibility towards society.

Trice connects you to local vendors, home cooks, etc in your area and helps you place orders to them.

The first one I talked to was Shalini who runs Sudiksha Flowers. She sells flowers and puja items. She had some orders to deliver in PBEL City so I decided to meet her then and ask her questions and perhaps get some footage. Unfortunately for me, there were people around and I couldn’t stop her from doing her work so I decided to go with her to deliver a order and while doing that try to ask her questions and record her. it would have been difficult to get her attention in this much Chaos and also that I had not met her before.

However luckily for me, she was a lovely lady who readily answered all my questions. She told me she started doing this at the beginning of the pandemic to help support her family. She started by doing personal orders and delivered to 1-2 people in my community. However, one of her customer really liked her service and reached out to Trice to bring her on board. Since then she has been getting 10-12 orders a day. This is just the power of platforms.

I then asked her if it is enough. Even though she had a mask on, I could feel her smile when she said yes. This made me realise that it takes so less for a human to be contented with their life. Most of us have everything and still want more, and here is someone who has less but still is satisfied with it. She said she is happy that she is able to earn with the work she is doing. Then I asked her if she would want more orders. She again smiled and said if she gets more orders, I would be happy to do it. She is not expecting anything but if she is given work she is ready to work hard. This is such an important lesson for all of us. We get so stuck in our expectations at times that when we have to actually work., we can hardly do it. We all need to keep our head down, keep working and when you get a chance show what you can do.

I then met up with Anupama Karthik. She runs Young readers Den, a children bookstore. She runs her business from her house.

The first word that comes to my head when I met her was - Passion. Every time she spoke about books and children, it showed her passion for both those things. Her eyes lit up when she showed me a book from the shelf. Her love for books is out and loud. Her influence was so strong that even her toddler came out with his collection of his favourite books and wanted to talk about them. She strongly believed that every child should imbibe the habit of reading in them. She says that they have such brilliant imaginations already and just looking at pictures in the books would unlock unlimited possibilities for them. I had gone there for a 10 minute interview ended up doing an hour discussion on the different books that made out childhood and our favourite books. You all know about my love of books, so it was a conversation I couldn’t resist.

These two women are very different while one is running her business for her livelihood , the other is running it for passion. Both of them have different stories and lives. However I believe the world should know both of them. So I have started this.

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I want teenagers to put out stories of their local entrepreneurs on Tynkrr. We need to help them gain access to the online market and we can do it with the power of platforms.

Thanks for being A Part of My Life!