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Ep 39 - Sheba and Ribhu share a coffee
87 Plays3 years ago
Presenting a soul conversation over coffee with Ribhu Vohra, Co-Founder, WasteLess, Auroville.
More about Ribhu is on his Linkedin.
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Transcript
Introduction: Welcome and Setting
00:00:02
Speaker
I'm delighted to have you in the podcast where all stories are welcome and the masks come off.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, Revu. Hi, Siva. How are you? Very good. Welcome to Soul Brews with Siva and Coffee and Soul. So delighted to have you with me, Revu. The pleasure is all mine, Siva. Wonderful to be here. And wonderful to see you. And there you are sitting in Oroville. I see the green, lucky, lucky, lucky you. There's so much of that right now. So thank you so much for making the time for this, Revu. Really appreciate it. It's my pleasure, Siva. Wonderful to see you.
Coffee Talk: A Shared Passion
00:01:01
Speaker
Good to see you too. Do you have your coffee ready? Yes, I do. Okay. Especially brewed at home because we don't have a coffee machine here. Yeah. So what I will do is also for myself, my coffee. Okay. Most of my soul do have the sound which I love. Cheers. Great to have you. Cheers. Ah, yes.
00:01:29
Speaker
Good coffee. Is this Mike's coffee you're drinking? This is Mike's coffee. Of course. And that's another story. Ribu, can I ask you to just hold the cup of coffee in your hand if it's not too hot? Now if you can just sit back. It's cold. All right. And you can just breathe it. Just the room. If you sit back. And just keep your eyes closed and see what comes to you as you
00:01:56
Speaker
Sit back and relax and think about this. Breathe this in. What do you see or hear?
Visionary Goals: Uniting for Waste Management
00:02:06
Speaker
I don't see or hear anything, but I feel gratefulness when I hear your voice and I'm sitting in this building, Shiva, because you were part of realizing this dream.
00:02:17
Speaker
And so I'm just grateful, grateful to be healthy, grateful to be here with you, have my feet on the floor of this office room and yeah, gratefulness. So, and you know, that's such a beautiful feeling and thank you for starting us off on that lovely note. So when you talk about when all this is here now, what's that about you?
00:02:44
Speaker
what is all this that is here now? So all this that is here like physically, I mean the office that we are in re-center with the vision of getting
00:02:56
Speaker
different organizations to work together in waste. So I'm the co-founder of Wasteless. But what we focus on education only, but just to focus on that one little component, that one little niche in waste management to teach children about the importance of waste management isn't enough alone. We need these other pieces of the pie to fit together. We need artists working on waste. We need efficient waste management companies.
00:03:24
Speaker
lots of innovative entrepreneurs kind of coming up with solutions. And so we had this dream in order of bringing people together under one campus.
00:03:33
Speaker
And you helped us kind of, you and Bina helped us kind of gather that vision and really bring it out of all of our hearts and we could see that it was shared. And so just physically feeling my feet on the stone on the floor and looking out the window, the light and the trees and seeing you has just made me really grateful because that
Educational Initiatives: Wasteless and Beyond
00:03:57
Speaker
dream has become a reality.
00:03:59
Speaker
I know it's so beautiful to hear that because I remember when it was we were talking about it and we learned a lot through that session that we had with you and we facilitated but you know there was a huge learning for us as well and I remember it was just a thought at that time recent
00:04:19
Speaker
getting everybody together just so that the people around who are listening know that Ribu works with waste, he talks trash as he likes to say and the idea is to really help at looking out at how to reduce waste and I don't want to steal his thunder and talk about it, I want him to speak about it. So tell me Ribu, what is it that you do in
00:04:46
Speaker
So we're deeply, I mean, we were looking for solutions in waste management and everything seemed a bit bleak. We started with cleanups, Shiba in 2010.
00:04:56
Speaker
small town, small village called Orville. And we realized that cleaning ups weren't going to solve the problem. It was like mopping with the tap on. We could continue doing this forever and it wouldn't bring any systemic change. And because we focused on cleanups, we needed to kind of create impact. So we automatically approached
00:05:20
Speaker
groups of people where there were large numbers so we approached schools so we could get lots of kids helping us clean up and that would make things clean up I mean would make the cleanup happen faster and would have a bigger impact and what we saw with children Shiba is that we saw they
00:05:38
Speaker
they had this openness, they wanted to do something good for the environment, they had a vested interest in their future and they could pester their parents like no one else could. So we thought that that combination, that openness, that eagerness to do something good with the ability to bring change home in a positive way rather than a negative kind of more, maybe a method based on judgment like Shiba, you are not doing good, you should be doing this, but
00:06:07
Speaker
children would bring it like, we should be doing this. I want to do this. And it was positive. So we naturally gravitated more away from cleanups and more towards creating content, educational games and content that inspire children to do this, to close the tap, to reduce waste, and to improve mopping, to find ways to recycle and compost. And that journey has taken us
00:06:35
Speaker
It was wonderful because what we realized is that we need to get involvement from children in designing these materials. And so that's what I love doing, is trying to get inspiration from children, from students and teachers. And how can we design this education experience?
00:06:54
Speaker
And you do a lot of work with different schools, right? And a lot of them are in Chennai and in different parts of the country as well. And the government basically has supported this a lot as well. Right and left. Yes, absolutely. So we do a lot of the research here in our surrounding area where we have a high level of control. And then once we create something that we feel has a powerful impact,
00:07:17
Speaker
and we measure this with different social impact tools, we share it. And it used to be physical kits and games are now increasingly more digital.
00:07:28
Speaker
And we changed our model. Actually, you guys were also helpful and inspiring us to do that is to start giving things for free instead of selling them. Because when we were selling our physical printed kits and games, basically only the private schools, the higher end schools were interested in it. And when we started,
00:07:48
Speaker
a free model where we exchange content for free in exchange for social impact data. So if you're a teacher we give you the materials but you have to tell us how students responded, what was their pre-knowledge, their post-knowledge after the program. It was more of a partnership. So now we have partnerships with through our various programs over 500 schools across India, some international and what's been. What a journey, what a journey.
Impact and Success: Curriculum Changes and Projects
00:08:17
Speaker
What's been beautiful about that, Siva, is that the data that we got back from students, understanding how they responded to certain experiences, helped us go to the Tamil Nadu government and convince them to change the way they teach children in their textbooks. So we're able to take those insights and then plug them in. So then the impact becomes much wider. So really, that's our goal now, from now on, is to work with the government to kind of
00:08:45
Speaker
change the way we're teaching children about these topics to make them more empowering and inspire children to change their habits. Yeah. That's awesome. And besides the Tamil Nadu government, are you also working elsewhere? Are you looking at other governments? I do know that you came to Delhi and had a chat with NCRT on some of the textbooks and stuff like that. How did that go? That didn't go so well. Not yet. I think we need to prove to them at scale.
00:09:14
Speaker
And so that's exactly what we're doing right now is at scale of a million or 2 million students. Is this working out? Is it linking? And that's what we're doing now with Tamil Nadu government seem to be much more open. Right now we're working on a project funded by the National Geographic Society.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a dream, dream donor. Yes. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. Let's stop a minute to celebrate that. Yeah, it is super. All right. Great. Great. We pitched a project with the international geographic society and it's an explorer grant. And basically we're, we're teaching, we're developing a curriculum for Tamil Nadu schools, but we'll translate it into Hindi as well. So it'll be in Tamil, Hindi and English.
00:10:05
Speaker
We're targeting government schools exactly because we've seen that this jump from government schools to these textbooks make a lot of sense. And hopefully later this year, if schools reopen, we'll be able to run it. But what was beautiful is that we managed to do the pilot just before kind of schools, COVID, the pandemic, closed schools, and Pondicherry.
00:10:32
Speaker
And again, like I was saying, we'd like to get this is what excites me the most is getting the input from students sitting in the back of that classroom and watching the teacher unpack this information and lots of your ideas that you come up with here in the office. They they don't
00:10:51
Speaker
get implemented in the exact same way. And actually you get so much inspiration sitting there and trying to understand, okay, how could I bridge this, the science that we want to the student's consciousness? How can we do it in a better way? And we realized that piloting, that testing these materials is super, super crucial. And it was a blessing. I think we finished,
00:11:17
Speaker
We have five schools. We finished our last school on Friday at 1.30, the last lesson. And we got the letter from the Directorate of School Education at 3, saying that schools had to be shut that Friday. So we were just in the nick of time. It was just a blessing to be able to do it.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's definitely an idea that whose time has come for it to have happened the way it has. It's amazing. I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that 10 years ago, I'm not sure. 10 years when you look at it from, you know, the, from a
00:11:58
Speaker
helicopter view, 10 years is actually nothing and you guys have really made great strides in that. So it's huge. The fact that you stuck with it, this has become such a, I know that because I've worked with all of you at Waste Less and it's a passion, it's a palpable thing, it's not a nice to do, it's a commitment and that is what is so beautiful.
00:12:24
Speaker
Rifu, tell me about your life. Okay, now we know about what you do, but what's it been like for you? I know that you've grown up in Auroville, you're an Auroville kid.
Roots and Return: Auroville's Influence
00:12:34
Speaker
And what's it been like? Tell me a little bit about your journey. Well, life growing up in Auroville is wonderful. I think there was so much, there is so much freedom. You were born here, right? I was born here. Yeah, about three kilometers that way. Yeah.
00:12:52
Speaker
And yeah, there was so much freedom, so much openness. I think with the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Mira Al-Fasa, the mother, there was so much focus on kind of that innate connection that children have to something deeper that we lose as adults, that we were given so much freedom to try different things. And I think that gave me a little bit
00:13:20
Speaker
I think it shaped me in getting a bit more responsibility in saying, OK, if I want to do this because this is my choice, I'm free to make that choice, then I'm going to give it my all. And so it was beautiful growing up. I think around my teenage years, I needed more structure. And I went to boarding school. And after that, I went to the Netherlands because I'm half Dutch. My mom is Dutch and my father's Indian.
00:13:50
Speaker
and the Netherlands was wonderful. I met Natasha there, my wife, and yeah, I think I remember telling her that, you know, I love you and everything, but in three years, we were in our first year of college, in three years, I'm gonna go back to my village in India, and I'm not gonna live here in all of it. So I think it was always clear for me that I wanted to come back, but to make a choice to be in an intentional community like Oroville,
00:14:20
Speaker
kind of following these values is not a one to make lightly. And because my parents made it for me, as I grew up here, I needed to make that choice. I was born here, that was a decision my parents had, but I really wanted to wait for the moment when I felt like, okay, I want to choose this.
00:14:39
Speaker
this lifestyle. And did that happen? Yes. Yeah. Well, do you remember it? Was it like a defining moment for you? Was it a moment, but it was a period in time. And it was a time when I graduated from uni and I was working in a corporate job for Shell. And I remember, oh,
00:15:01
Speaker
There was a certain excitement. Shell is a wonderful company to work for. They take really good care of me. I had fantastic colleagues. I learned so much. But at one moment, the values of the company were so different than my own values that every day, every minute, every email, every overtime hour,
00:15:23
Speaker
just felt like my life was going in a totally different direction than those values I held true to myself. And that didn't sit well with me. It felt uneasy. It felt uncomfortable. And no amount of money could take that feeling away. And so we...
00:15:45
Speaker
I think there was a certain moment, I think it was December 2007 or so that I went home and I told my wife, I told her, look, we had this plan, we were saving up money. One, because we had to borrow to study. The other thing is that we were saving up money to travel around
Shift in Focus: From Corporate to Social Enterprise
00:16:04
Speaker
the world, something we always wanted to do.
00:16:07
Speaker
and we had saved up enough. The plan was to save up for a year and we spent three years. So in year three, I went to Natasha and I said, look, I'm done. I need to leave. I'm going to start this adventure and you and me wherever I am at that time because she wanted some more time and she had a really good job.
00:16:28
Speaker
And she said, OK, give me four months to wrap up things and then we'll go. And the next day I went back to the office and my boss called me in and there was a big conference. We were in the head office at Shell. There was a big conference organized for four or five hundred of us. And the CEO comes there and he tells us that they're moving the entire HR organization where I was in. They're outsourcing it to or moving it to Poland and Bangalore.
00:16:56
Speaker
or Malaysia, sorry, in Malaysia. And, you know, I had this conversation with my boss and I knew I wanted to leave in four months. I'd made that decision the night before and my boss was telling me, you know, look, if you stay on till the end, that would be really nice. And, you know, you'll get a sign off bonus. So I was so happy. So that was maybe the defining moment that said, okay,
00:17:20
Speaker
And it just seemed to fall in, what you wanted to do, and it just seemed to fall into place. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's amazing. And then you came back and was easy to get back into our world. Was it, was it like a devil left or? No, I mean, things had changed. I think I had changed as well. Yeah.
00:17:39
Speaker
I was with my wife who had come to Auroville many times in the last 15 years but hadn't lived here. But I was actually a book that kind of convinced me that my values were so different than Shell's was Banker to the Poor by Eunice Mohammed.
00:18:00
Speaker
Oh, yes. Great book. Yes. Great book. And I thought, you know, my dad's a ceramic potter. My sister had a business knitting beach bags for a fancy Sydney surf web brand. And I thought, why don't why don't we, you know, give their local villages around orville access to capital and and then they can create their own enterprises and and we can develop much faster. And so after reading that book, I was so inspired by microfinance that I
00:18:30
Speaker
I picked up books all on our world trip this whole year, picked up books, tried to visit organizations to learn more about it. So when I came to Oroville, I was convinced I wanted to start a microfinance bank. And before I jumped into it, I wanted to make
00:18:49
Speaker
I wanted to see more about what it was like. What are the values behind that? What is microfinance really doing on the ground? I didn't want to land up in the same kind of organizational structure as Shell. So I actually spent, I think, three or four months, which was really easy, very relaxed, kind of going and attending a few of these self-help group meetings, visiting banks, seeing what they do, trying to understand more about it.
00:19:15
Speaker
And it was a bit disappointing because the more I understood, the more I realized that there was very little enterprise loans in our area.
Journey into Waste Management
00:19:23
Speaker
It was basically consumption loans and at rates that were double what the bank was giving. So it didn't feel like it was the story that Eunice was talking about. Perhaps demand is different in India, you know, we're already more developed in this area of Tamil Nadu.
00:19:40
Speaker
And with that disappointment, there was kind of a question mark. And along came my sister Chandra, who's the co-founder of Wasteless. And she said, Ribo, you're getting lazy. I had lots of savings. I would write two emails a day and feel like I was productive. I'd been traveling for a year. She said, you're getting lazy. Come and help us. Because they were struggling with a
00:20:03
Speaker
with a post tsunami relief and rehabilitation project to learn about waste management models that could be copied in these communities. And they wanted help. And once I joined them, that changed my life and my heart fell into garbage. That's it.
00:20:25
Speaker
That's an amazing story. So tell me some of the, you've given me the facts and how it was and what things changed for you. What have been some of the key influences in your life? And as you reflect on it, what have been some of the highs and the lows? I know, for example, you were amongst the first batches to go through in your schooling through awareness through the awareness through the body. Yes, absolutely.
00:20:56
Speaker
and stuff, you know, like that. And where did you
00:21:01
Speaker
how did those kinds of things influence you? So just talking about some of the things that stood by you that as you journeyed in your life, you're learning. So yeah, awareness to the body was something really a big influence in my life constantly and it still is. Natasha has an awareness to the body teacher. Yes, I believe so. That's fabulous stuff. Which is beautiful. Yeah, I think the
00:21:27
Speaker
quieting down and listening to yourself, listening to that little voice that's telling you the direction that'll make you happier, that's calm and centered and not based on greed or lust or something else, that connecting to yourself was a super, super skill to learn early on the ability to just center, basically. How old were you when this was?
00:21:56
Speaker
I think I was probably 12 or 13. And I still remember this example of, you know, you wake up in the morning and, you know, your toast is burnt, you stub your toe, you cut yourself shaving if you were shaving. It's a wonderful thing about the pandemic because I haven't shaved in a few months. You look very nice with a beard, but I miss your beautiful face table. Thank you.
00:22:25
Speaker
Thank you. It's so much time saving.
Influential Experiences and Teachings
00:22:28
Speaker
But as I was getting back to ATP, you have these certain days where things just don't go right. And it's usually a kind of cascade or like the perfect storm of a series of things, you know, and and you and what I look and Joanne, who are the founders of awareness to the body,
00:22:47
Speaker
They like to, and it's based on Sherbindo and mother's philosophy, but also a lot about on yoga, on tai chi, on martial arts, on dance. And a lot of it is how these different aspects of ourselves, she used this little like color chart, I think different human body. And she spread them out and she'd say, they're not aligned.
00:23:15
Speaker
And there was a simple, simple exercise where we had to close our eyes and listen to a sound really far away. And you can try this even if you're feeling like one of those bad days. So I hear a bird call far away and then bring your attention back to like the hair on your hand or your arm and try to feel the sensation of the fan is on. So I feel my hair is moving and I feel cool breeze.
00:23:42
Speaker
and then switch your attention back to something far away. And you do that a few times, and it's incredible how...
00:23:49
Speaker
you just, I feel more centered and I can feel like, okay, then I'll start my day. And usually when I do that, there's no other accidents that happen. And so being able to change your outer reality by focusing on that inner and that care or just the concern, the ability to listen and be able to do something was super, super influential. And another big thing I think
00:24:18
Speaker
for me was having parents, like my dad had studied in England, had done really well academically and came back and decided to be a handmade, I mean. And that's ungood, right? Unmade potter, yes. Yes, of course. And so he had made that choice. My mom was studying to be an X-ray technician, was an X-ray technician, and decided to travel overland to India and teach geography. And she's an exceptional photographer, exceptional.
00:24:47
Speaker
And she has photography, Lizbeth. And so there were so many people around me in Auroville at the time who had chosen their passions and not particularly linked to what they had studied or what they thought they wanted to do at 17. And when they were 35, they chose something completely different. And so there was a shift from, OK, do I still remember this in studying? And I was a little bit of a rowdy.
00:25:18
Speaker
But I would not be interested in certain subjects and then not focus on them too much. I'd get by. I wouldn't waste my time about facts of history because they didn't interest me. But if there was something I was really interested in, I would dive deep into it and really try to understand as much as I wanted. And it was curious.
00:25:40
Speaker
And that strive for learning, driven by interest, not by what the teacher said or what was in the exam. I didn't care, past, past, fine. But really driven by that passion, that definitely shaped me hugely. And it still influences my life today.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting to hear. Ribu, is there an adage you live by, or like a metaphor for life that you have, that you fall back on when things are rough? Or could be a couple. Yes. It's a long story now. That's all right. I have all the time. On this world trip, we went through Australia and
00:26:29
Speaker
And we had met a good friend of my mom's, Jan, who was living in Sydney and put us up in a beautiful apartment. And she told us about this amazing old lady who was protecting an island reserve off the coast in Queensland. And she said she saw this old lady and said, we must go visit Hinchinbrook Island. It was this island. And we must go see Margaret.
00:26:56
Speaker
And I remember thinking, do I really want to see an old lady? I'm 27, traveling through Australia. But if Jan says so, I'll go and meet her. And Jan said we had to book the island. We could walk through the island, hike through this majestic island. But we had to book at least a month in advance. And that was impossible for Natasha and I to do because we were planning every day as we went along. So we didn't book. And we landed up in, I think the town was Cardwell.
00:27:25
Speaker
And we called Margaret up and she came and she was a small little lady, pretty frail in a big SUV. She picked us up and we were driving a camper van. So we drove behind her into this swamp where she had this magical house.
00:27:40
Speaker
and she started telling us her story and how her husband and her had loved nature and he had passed on but they'd loved this island that was totally you know isolated from mainland Australia so it had all these unique species and it wasn't overburdened by tourism which most of the east coast is and how she was how she was fighting for it and
00:28:06
Speaker
And at one point the whole village or whole small town wanted to promote a development on the island for rich people to build houses and yachts and
00:28:19
Speaker
Margaret and her friend Ken and a bunch of environmentalists wanted to stop this because it was illegal. There was pristine mangroves and rainforests that were being cut away. But every time, and Jan had helped her buy a boat with a few artists, they'd raise money to buy a boat so they could kind of monitor the situation around the island. Every time they got into this boat and would go to Hinchinbrook Island, they would be stopped by fishermen or the local police.
00:28:47
Speaker
or someone because the whole town wanted that development. It meant a lot of jobs. And she had this feeling that they were using JCBs to dig away the mangroves and all that wonderful coastline protection to have a nice white sand beach that rich people would like. And she couldn't get there to get the evidence. So it was only hearsay and she couldn't do anything about it.
00:29:14
Speaker
And so at one point, and Shiva, this is a part in Queensland where there's signs all along the coast that you shouldn't go and wash your hands at the same part of the sea or clean fish at the same part of the sea because there's saltwater crocodiles. These are massive crocodiles. You shouldn't swim in areas which don't have that protection.
00:29:37
Speaker
it's not a sea that you swim in. And so what Margaret decided one day with Ken is that they were gonna swim. And I think it's like five or 10 kilometers, it's a far swim. They were gonna swim with a camera, take photographic evidence and swim back because a little head bobbing up in that ocean, nobody could see and they could kind of sneak in. And Ken said, look, this is suicide. I'm not gonna do this. We're gonna get eaten by crocodiles or sharks.
00:30:05
Speaker
And Margaret told him, you know what you have to do? You have to think butterflies. You have to force your mind to think not of crocodiles but of something positive. Isn't that amazing?
00:30:18
Speaker
And I get goosebumps every time I say it. This is my goosebumps. Because think butterflies. And they swam across. They took pictures. They used that evidence to change not only the future of Hinchinbrook Island, but every national park now, I think, has to have a 10-year plan so that none of these kind of political games can happen where suddenly a national park is converted into bungalows or tourism spot.
00:30:47
Speaker
And they revolutionized the way that island and basically other national parks are protected. And I think that's my adage because all along life, whenever something seems impossible.
00:31:04
Speaker
like Tamil Nadu government, we wrote these textbooks that I'm looking at right now. They're under my screen. My screen is gonna get lower. This one, so class seven, social science textbook. We wrote this 24 times, this chapter, 24 different drafts of the same content in a different way. And I think at draft 20, I was telling myself,
00:31:30
Speaker
We had three textbooks done. This is too much. We've wasted enough time. We have to quit. We don't have money. We can't pay the illustrator again. We can't go on. And at this time I remember sitting in the taxi to Chennai and forcing my mind to think butterflies and saying no.
00:31:52
Speaker
I'm going to meet the secretary of education. I'm going to demand that the next two drafts we're going to get it in and it happened. And so again, this ability of through our consciousness, through our minds, through our intention to be able to change external circumstances. And I use it all the time. That is so inspiring.
00:32:15
Speaker
you know, you think butterflies, I mean, what could be more beautiful? Yeah. And I tell my daughter Moksha, who's been recently scared of bad dreams and monsters, about the opposite is thinking mosquitoes.
00:32:30
Speaker
And it's oftentimes in this risk averse kind of climate where we live in, this is what we're thinking about. What are the weaknesses? What are the threats that are gonna stop us not looking at the opportunity and saying, wow, this is an amazing opportunity. We can inspire a million children if we just think butterflies, it's gonna happen. And when you have that attitude and this is what I loved about
00:32:56
Speaker
you know, that amazing advice that Margaret told us and this amazing story of how we, yeah, that nothing is impossible if you set your mind to it and if you can keep in your mind and your heart that that impossibility is a reality.
00:33:15
Speaker
then it's just gonna unfold in front of you and no crocodile is going to eat you at least. That's
Life Lessons and Philosophies
00:33:27
Speaker
amazing. So for someone, some people who are just starting out on their journey or similar kind of journey that you have had, is there something that you'd like, one of the biggest things you could have said is think butterflies. Is there anything else?
00:33:40
Speaker
You can tell. Yeah, I think now I'm thinking of older people who have really influenced me. Another one was my grandmother, Oma Mipa on my mom's side. She was, when her husband was taken away to labor camp during Second World War, she would wake up at five in the morning on a cycle with wooden tires and go bring eggs and secret messages to Jews hiding around her hometown and fearless. And I think
00:34:10
Speaker
later on life when I decided that I wanted to not, because I'd studied hospitality management and they were so happy that I was working in these five-star hotels and I would invite them for nice brunches and high teas. And I told them, look, I'm going to switch. I don't like it. I don't like hotels. I'm going to try something with an oil company. They liked the idea, but they were sad that, you know, I'd made that change. My grandfather was saying, you wasted your education. You could have done something else.
00:34:41
Speaker
She always said, and she always said, it's better to regret the things you do than the things you don't do, because you look back on life and you can't unchange those. So if you faced with that decision, you know, that path, that fork in the road, do I go this direction? Do I stay with Shell or do I quit and, you know, try follow my dreams and go live in Oroville and try microfinance? It would be a less painful regret
00:35:08
Speaker
to have chosen something and it fell on my face. Microfinance didn't end up to be what I wanted it to be. But it would be less painful than staying at Shell and wondering what if. And so I think there, if you're starting off, yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
remember that it's going to be less painful to regret those decisions where you just charge ahead and say, yes, I want to do this. I'm just going to follow it. And then to look back 50 years later when you're retired and say, what if I did that? So just take the plunge. Take the plunge. Jump off the fence. I think that's a big, big thing.
00:35:49
Speaker
And combined with thinking butterflies, I mean, if I look at my life at Wasteless, and it's 10 years now almost, all the projects have just, there's always been this mist, and maybe that's a terrible business model, and I'm not a good example. So I'm not like the other corporates on Soul Brews, but it seems like I'm walking down this path, but I can't see so far ahead.
00:36:16
Speaker
At Shell, I would be walking down the path and I could see five kilometers ahead. I knew, okay, job group, you know, next is job group six. And that comes with this bonus and we can buy the house and I can get this lease car. And at Wasteless, I can't see more than a year. And I think there, in the social space, it seems to be something a lot of my peers and my colleagues face too, because they're,
00:36:45
Speaker
you don't have a conventional business model. And so there, I think kind of having a trust and jumping off the fence and putting one foot after the other and just keep walking was super, super important. Yeah. I get that. And more than anything else, I think it's just the share. It's the courage.
00:37:13
Speaker
you know, living with things that are not ambiguous, things that are uncertain, yet following your passion, following a dream. And there must be times when it's hard, you know, other things beckon, but I'm sure they do to all of us, you know, and to stay the course that you've set out for yourself.
Aligning Work with Values
00:37:35
Speaker
I think that takes a lot of
00:37:38
Speaker
It depends on what the, yeah, I mean, perseverance, but I would say courage. In my case, I feel it's not courage because I was lucky. I struck gold. I found work that doesn't feel like work. I found something that I love doing. And so there's, there's of course things that you don't like doing within your regular work week. Like I hate emails. I wish they didn't exist.
00:38:08
Speaker
I think if you have the blessing and the luck to find work that doesn't feel like work, that feels like it syncs with your values, that what you feel is important and what you're doing are aligned, and that you have something coming back, then it doesn't feel like you're courageous. It feels like it's the only thing you're supposed to do.
00:38:36
Speaker
And okay, it means less money. Fine.
00:38:41
Speaker
It means some uncertainty in the path ahead and some level of trust. OK, but you're blessed with. I mean, the other alternative for me would be sitting at my corporate desk looking at the clock, waiting for 5 o'clock to come around. And that didn't feel like a good alternative. So yeah, it's interesting how this journey goes. But I was lucky. The heart and garbage now, it's not moving from there.
Dreams for the Future: Pollution-Free Education
00:39:11
Speaker
It's amazing and more power to you, Raghu, with all that you've set out to do with your heart and garbage. Thank you. You know, each one of us has something unique to give to the world, to humankind. And I strongly believe that you have your own little something to add to the tapestry. What is your unique gift to people? I don't know. I hope that we can, I mean, I hope
00:39:39
Speaker
what we're doing is planting a seed in these children, that some of them, one in a thousand, one in 10,000, that we interact with, picks it up and takes it forward, and does better than we do. And through this we, that the only place garbage will be and pollution will be in history books. That would be my dream. And if we can have that,
00:40:08
Speaker
That would be amazing. So that's the ideal contribution. That would be the ideal. And otherwise, I think it's just being true and trying to inspire other people to give their best. And I think
00:40:30
Speaker
with a lot of things with work. And again, this comes back to that maybe the upbringing in Orville and following your passion. But I feel that if you're able to concentrate your attention and a desire for quality into something,
00:40:48
Speaker
That material, that material thing has a certain power that's difficult to quantify. I mean, I just take like, I'll try to find an example from the textbook. I'm not sure if it'll be here, but if you're able to
00:41:09
Speaker
Okay, so this is a resin code chart that's talking about the different plastics, like this is pet, you know, what are common pet items. So this is a resin code chart and I think we had like our designers, we had maybe
00:41:26
Speaker
10 different versions of it, what color, what font size, what are we gonna put on there? But we as a team kind of spent I think a week or two really working on this content back and forth with designers trying to improve. Now we could have gone and seen what other education programs do or what the plastic lobby is writing on there, you know, resin code explanations and just copy paste it. And it would have,
00:41:55
Speaker
Perhaps the similar impact in terms of knowledge. But if you're really trying to find the exact examples for your target audience, trying to see, OK, what color do children associate with dangerous plastic? Let's put those on the dangerous numbers. What type of lines do they like? When you really get into the details and try to give it your all,
00:42:17
Speaker
then that information that somehow carries a certain power and so that's something we obsess about a lot at Wasteless and sometimes we go too far and I don't think the return is equal to what we put in but a lot of times I feel like when you really try your best and you really put everything into it and you push your design team and you push the content writers and you
00:42:40
Speaker
you re-interview scientists about everything, asking them difficult questions and trying to get them to think about these issues and how we should educate children, then you're creating the most powerful tool.
00:42:52
Speaker
And so putting that consciousness into something as simple as an A4 diagram with a poster. Yeah, that's super, super important. And I think you see that a lot with products. I love Apple and Steve Jobs obsessed about quality and certain details.
00:43:12
Speaker
you see that when people do that, they push something new and suddenly that keyboard that lights up when it's dark automatically, it's such a little gimmick, it's not really used by me so much but I like it and it gives me joy and it's my work tool and so I'm happy with it and so I think that if we can really infuse quality in everything we do, we create more
00:43:43
Speaker
We create more illustrious words there. More value in those things. So that's something I hope that we're also trying to bring out in the education space.
00:43:59
Speaker
is not only get children to design it, but really try to design the best possible content for them. So beauty is inherent in quality, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And thought. I think we do so many things unconsciously because they've just been done.
00:44:19
Speaker
you know in our latest program it's interesting Manas who you connected us with is helping us and I remember we have this so we studied the science at the perfect time during last year's lockdown for the Nat Geo project and there's so many scientists that I love and admire like hero worship around the world um Anthony Andrade in the US or
00:44:41
Speaker
Jennifer Lavers in Tasmania. These are, you know, some of the brightest minds in the space of plastic pollution, environmental sustainability related to plastic. Super, super sharp, amazing people who never wrote us back, actually, during normal times. Like, waste less at Oroville wasn't an email address they had time for. And so during lockdown, actually, everyone had time and we got to interview them. And so
00:45:10
Speaker
What we had was a tremendous amount of science and we tried to kind of distill it into the key aspects and I can't talk too much about it now because otherwise Nat Geo won't be happy. But what I was trying to get at is
00:45:27
Speaker
A lot of times from our perspective we're trying to bridge this gap between science and peer-reviewed science and students and teaching them the best available science today and in a way that inspires them to do something about what the scientists are learning and oftentimes we see that
00:45:44
Speaker
And in the pilot test we saw that there's just not enough class time to teach all this science and to give it to the students. And we're so passionate about it. So I automatically said, okay, we're going to start take home activities. And, you know, some of my teammates were like, well, that's just another word for homework. And Manas came to us and he's been mentoring us wonderfully through developing this program. And he said, you know, children don't learn from homework.
00:46:13
Speaker
And I remember, okay, every education program has some take-home activity or something you do at home, but children aren't learning from it. So why are we following that kind of cookie cutter rule? And this is exactly why we want to question everything we're doing. And if, you know, I remember I hated homework. It was something that, as I told you, I was a little bit rowdy. My parents would tell me about Friday night, I had to do my homework. And Sunday evening, I remember thinking, no,
00:46:43
Speaker
my homework and feeling really stressed about it and it's not how I do everything today but it's just that idea of giving students something a burden and maybe the quantity of science that we want to pour into this child's consciousness is too much.
00:47:02
Speaker
And maybe we have to decide that we have to find the essence of what might inspire this child and then give them that only. And if they're interested, they can learn more. But so this is interesting about questioning our ideas and really putting thought into everything we do. Because so many things are devoid of thought. We just automatically kind of, okay, it's been done this way. Let's continue doing it.
00:47:27
Speaker
And I think that's why a lot of the problems we have today are just being replicated because, oh yeah, that's the way it's done. This is the way we teach children about chemistry of plastics. And if we just keep repeating it, it's just going to go past their heads. So from what I'm hearing, there's lots of different things you're trying and nuances that you're looking at.
00:47:50
Speaker
that to ensure with the passion that it must go into the spaces that are spent to go. So people pick this up. Kids pick this up and do something about it. It becomes a part of the conversation, the vocabulary, the consciousness.
00:48:06
Speaker
And I get that how much you all are thinking about it and how in obvious ways I am subtle, how to get the message home. And that is clearly a big part of what you want to do. Ribu, it's been an absolute delight speaking with
Closing Thoughts: Narrative Change
00:48:28
Speaker
you. Is there something else you'd like to say before we sign off this, we close this conversation?
00:48:33
Speaker
No, everyone out there, your Shiva is super cool and you have to subscribe to our channel if there's a possibility. No, it's been a pleasure, absolute pleasure. Lovely to see your face. Lovely to see the recenter in the background of this little screen of my face here.
00:48:49
Speaker
And I'm so grateful for everything you do, Shivang. And for the journey that you've helped us, for this dream you've helped us manifest and for the inspiration you continuously give us and for sharing these stories. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
00:49:05
Speaker
Likewise, Revu. Thank you so much for making the time and it's always been a joy to speak with you and I really hope you've changed the whole narrative around waste one kid at a time and I'm sure it's going to happen. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your time and attention and for being a part of Soul Brews with Shiva. Until next week, keep the coffee swirling