Reflection

Now that I’m back from India and eating solid food again, I’ve been asked by the university to answer a few questions about my experience.

Why did you apply for the Spark India program?

Firstly, I’ve never been to India before, and it’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. I never got the chance to have a gap year, and, as a third year, it’s pretty much my final chance to do some traveling before I have to join the ‘real world’. The project itself is also very inspiring, as unlike most other “gap-yah” type schemes, which are basically just a chance to have a facebook profile picture with some foreign children, Spark India actually offers the chance to gain real work experience with real businesses, and experience working in a very different economy to the UK.

Which organisation did you work with and what do they do?

I worked with Awaaz.de. They are a social enterprise using the power of voice to empower communities. In many parts of India, literacy rates are very low, and a wide range of languages are spoken, and so Awaaz.de uses call-centre-style technology (press 1 for a long time on hold etc) in innovative ways to provide solutions for businesses and communites. Some of their services include (but are not limited to): an iTunes for villages (where local bands can share their music), Indie Hindi Poetry, Farmer’s News (allowing farmers to share market prices and growing tips with a range of farming experts), and a range of business solutions for SME’s.

What challenge have you been working on and what you have learned?

I was working on an outreach program for local app developers. Awaaz.de connects with SME’s to provide them with voice optimisation for their business, but they are often asked if they offer any other software for more traditional business needs, such as accounting. Whilst Awaaz.de could build this software themselves and make a tidy profit, they instead were looking to reach out to local, small-scale app development companies in order to partner up and create software for businesses that serves all of their usual business needs, but with added voice optimisation. The idea is that Awaaz.de and the developers both manage to reach a wider audience, and the users receive a much better product. It was a tough challenge, and I learned a lot of new acronyms, but also that sometimes in business it’s best to just jump in with both feet and pick up the phone and get talking to people, because you never really know what kind of crazy adventures you’re going to have, and how this will lead you to creating stuff you’d never have thought of in the first place.

What was your experience of working in an international team?

It was fun. Certainly there were some bumps in the road (the IIM-A students work otherworldly hard and only usually have a very limited time available to meet up), but it was great to be able to see things from another perspective, and it definitely taught me a lot of things that I will use going forward. In today’s economy, we are having to work in an increasingly globalised environment, so to get first-hand experience of this was invaluable.

What have you learned from your experience in India?

That India is a crazy, crazy place, and that there are a lot of things, like pavements, that I take for granted. But also that just because something appears insane when you first see it (like the road system) It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. Some of the ventures we met during our visit were the most innovative social enterprises I have ever seen, and the students work significantly harder than we do in the UK. What India has achieved in the last 50 years is remarkable, and the rate of growth shows no sign of slowing down, something we could definitely learn from over here. The best way to put it into words is to borrow the turn of phrase of a taxi driver I met, who, upon seeing an entire herd of cows asleep in the middle of a major motorway, chuckled to himself and said “we are in India, my friend. Anything is possible.”

What has been your highlight of the program?

Aside from playing rugby with the cleaners, riding elephants, taming a wild dog, building a swimming pool in a first floor drainage basin, throwing a block party, having a water-fight across three lanes of traffic in two moving rickshaws, meeting and collaborating with some truly amazing people and just generally having a whale of a time, it was particularly nice to attend the conference we organised on the final day of the program. It was the culmination of all of the work we had done, and it was very rewarding to see business deals being agreed between our venture and the developers we had contacted, as it showed that all the work had been worthwhile, and that we had contributed something concrete and of value to the business, in return for all the knowledge and experience we were given by them.

Would you recommend Spark India to others and why?

YES. With a capital YES. Spark India exceeded all of my expectations. It was enlightening, interesting, useful, and fun. I had some of the best weeks of my life on the program. I missed my graduation to attend Spark India, and went further away and for longer from my family and girlfriend than ever before, but now that I’m back in the UK, my only regret is that I wish I could do the program again, every year, for the rest of my life. It really is that good. And they’re not even paying me to write this…