Sundarrajk's Weblog

Another book on entrepreneurs. Covers a gamut of varieties from Bindeshwar Phatak who started the Sulabh Sauchalay to Shreesh Jadhav an IIT graduate who gave it all up and joined Belur Mutt as a Sanyasi and runs their educational arm.

In between the likes of Shaheen Mistry who runs the Akansha Foundation which teaches the under privileged in Mumbai and Arvind Kejriwal’s Parivartan which gives an idea of how this man discovered and used RTI to benefit the common man and why he is so popular in Delhi.

There are some real eye openers like the one about Dinabandhu Sahoo who helps the fishermen in Orissa harvest seaweed in Chilika lake and earn a livelihood without destroying the ecosystem.

A very inspirational one is Dhruv Lakra who runs Mirakle Courier completely manned by deaf and dumb. Really a miracle.

And we have Madhu Pandit Dasa who runs Akshaya Patra feeding hundreds of thousands students midday meals in and around Bangalore from Bangalore ISKCON.

On the whole an eminently must read book to understand what different people in India are achieving and what drives them.

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The book is about women entrepreneurs who have succeeded or are in the process of succeeding in their ventures. The book is in three parts; the first part is about women from wealthy families who have grown their own ventures without financial help from their family; the second part is about women who have succeeded in the face of adversity; and the third are the ones who have succeeded, thanks to their education.

The books has a strong smell of feminism. Many of the entrepreneurs in the book. In many places it appears that the women are enjoying the revenge of bettering the menfolk for having suppressed by them for thus long in the human history. Unlike the opinion of W. E. B. Dubois who says that the Africans should learn to live equally, not by exacting revenge, with the white folk, the women seem to indicate that women must exact revenge.

Having said that there are some very insightful statements. Here are couple that I liked.
A good life is like a good meal – don’t put too much on your plate. Only as much as you can eat, and what you enjoy.
Corporate life is 20% really work you enjoy and 80% is reporting bureaucracy and politics.

There are were also many that smells of antagonist feminism. Here are some that I absolutely disliked.
1. In my view women can make better entrepreneur than men because women have more patience and they have more ability to multitask.
2. I think perseverance and patience are two things that all women are naturally born with.

One common theme that runs across is that the entrepreneurs succeed if they have support from their family, not just the parents, and husbands but also from in-laws. This should hold good for the men too and that is why the adage “Behind every successful man is a woman” (Limited to wives or mothers). In a similar way will we say “Behind every successful woman there is a man”. At least after reading the amount of support the husbands extended to the successful women?

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