Looking back, I think I started normally. The immediate plan then was to continue with the activity I was busy with between 2001- 03 viz. track the impact of privatisation of government run-companies on civil society. This was to be done as a NGO, a registered society to speak which would be an interface between the industry and the public at large. Sounds good, isnt it?
It did for me. It still does, a cool five years later. Only that I did not understand or did not have the experience of visualising the painful phase of gestation/incubation of any 'smart' life-sustaining idea. The teething troubles, the tensions of growing up doing only what you set out doing... boy, that is indeed an experience to savour.
Somewhere in my earlier blog, I had said about my conflicting interests - interests which were supposed to be mutually repelling - the commercial and the developmental. I am tempted to end this line of thought by saying that probably I had filled in my mind with too much of woolly headed stuff and verbiage- something I am prone to. But it was not so easy to discard, especially when I had set out with my avowed objective of starting and running a NGO - which is due to complete five years of R&D-ish existence in May 2008!! Please note that I am not that heartless to call my NGO a still-born or something similar!!
Like any wannabe self-employed success, I too had my own evaluation tools. I had my mock assessments too! I encouraged rank outsiders in my system to ask me simple, elementary questions about what I was doing with my life, how I am going to propel my great dream forward and also the most important question - sustain it financially.
I fumbled and dragged on with my explanations as I encountered such blizzards - but I did have answers. I was having a corpus fund which I had saved/ partially financed from loans which I was rotating in the stock market ( well, this is a subject of a blog sometime later!!) and quite hearteningly the external auditors in my case were happy to let me go once I gave them a reply - the theory of cross subsidisation - where the proceeds from the stock trading will go on to sustain my NGO for a period of time till it becomes subsisting. Too good, is it not?
It can still work in the same manner, I am confident. But what happens when fence-sitters, gate-crashers and new friends who are part of the same profession come in and add their own dimensions to your dream? Friends, I encountered these visits and add-ons gamely because I was improvising on the act constantly.
You remember I had talked somewhere earlier about the Pied Piper approach... More of that later in the blogs ahead...
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