Poor India, Hungry India!!

I had a friend who studied from London, one of her classmates who was British always wanted to visit India. So she planned an entire month long vacation starting from Mumbai.

The day she landed my friend picked her up from the airport and took her home which was a 45 minute ride. That was her first experience of India, seeing the harsh reality of what most Indians live through caught her by surprise. She couldn't believe how people lived in such small spaces with so much chaos and dirt around. For her this was beyond what she imagined, she had heard about the good parts of India but she wasn't prepared for India in it's entirety with its people, the smell, the noise, the heat, it was nothing like she expected. She was so depressed by what she saw that she booked a flight back and went back the next day. She just ran away in the next possible flight she could get.

This story had a lasting impact on me. I have never been outside India, this is my home but I never imagined that what we call home could be a nightmare for someone else. I have to admit though when I was in college I was like this Britisher who thought that going abroad was the solution. I could run away from all these problems with one decision. Take a flight and all of this would be behind me.

As I matured I realised that even though there were many issue with my country I still loved this place. It's not great, it's not perfect, but this is home, this is where everyone I love lives. This is part of my identity. The truth is I can either run away from these problems or look at them as things to improve on. So when I started my career I realised that I can contribute to solving these problems or I can complain about them. It wasn't a question of changing the world, it was rather a question of how I looked at the world. It was a mindset problem.

Every successful person had their fair share of problems but what set them apart from the rest is their mindset. The mindset to look at problems like puzzles to be solved rather than something to weigh you down. We call this a growth mindset or an entrepreneur's mindset. As an entrepreneur if you do not have this mindset, you might not survive. You will face problems everyday and you have to look at them like opportunities to get ahead of others rather than stumbling blocks. This mindset is what helped me look at India with a different light.

We have a country which has many problems. Or we can say we have a country which has many opportunities. Opportunities where we can build solutions to change things and improve lives for the people around us. Opportunities to define how this country will look in the near future. The pandemic was the wake up call for most of these builders who realised that it's time we took matters into our own hands. No more complaining or waiting for the government or someone else to come in and solve our problems. We can do that.

The reason we have a startup wave is not because there is suddenly better funding or better facilities being available to startups, it is because we have more people with this growth mindset. More people who are willing to stay back and solve problems even though it is not sexy. It is hard work, it is tough, there are many roadblocks but they want to solve these problems. Because like me they call this home, and this is where we want to be. Our mindset has changed from complaining about our country to actually getting down to changing what we don't like about it. It's not perfect, but complaining about it won't change a damn thing. We can either work on improving it or we can run away from it. We can change our destination or we can change our mindset.

The choice is yours.