As part of Entrepreneurship course, Prof. Munish Thakur invited Mr. Vinayak Lohani,founder of Parivaar. http://www.parivaar.org/
He is IIT kharagpur, IIM calcutta, Infosys alumni and hails from MP. It was 8:00PM, after 9-10 hours(with breaks) of classes, It was a guest lecture for which our brain could not resist to imbibe more. I had heard of him before that he was the first student in IIMC's history to withdraw from placement process, a full 1 year ahead of placement season. His simplicity and humbleness was visible in his attire. Some times it is hard to imagine a B School alumni in Kurta Pyjama, One of the many stereotypes that we associate with B-Schoolers.
Coming back to the lecture, He told chilling stories of prostitution, migration of workers and malnutrition in WestBengal. He reminisced how he thought of starting some thing of this sort. He enumerated difficulties that he had to face while starting the venture.
It was his motivation and internal capabilities that led to his birth of successful venture for a residential school for poor and orphan children.
Mentioning about conditioning of society, He talked about Singur case and quoted Amartya Sen,that " If Tatas believed in Market forces, why did not they deal with markets (farmers) for acquiring land for Nano project". He was critical of people like us who are getting conditioned to work only in certain kinds of environment.
It was a nice break from daily pressure of cases, readings, resume and placements and hearing a sage like him.
