THE PASSION PROJECT : PART V | Aniruddh Mishra
As far as I can retreat to retrieve into depths of my mature mind, there has always been this one obsessive idea that has propelled me through my professional life – “Why work doesn’t feel like work for some people?”. Some people seem to breeze through the weekdays, hardly waiting for the weekend to come and when it does, they simply carry on working, oblivious of the calendar constraints. Monday morning blues is not a relevant thing for them. They get up every day rejuvenated with a sense of excitement for the day ahead and what they are about to achieve. These are of course people who have found their passion in life that is now leading them purposefully in whatever they do. And yet, as we have these real-life examples strutting around, it seems like an almost-alien concept that doing something you love, professionally, is even a remote possibility. It’s just a myth they say, something out of a fantasy film they feel. “Nobody is that happy with their job”. But that is exactly the point. For these people, what they do isn’t a mere job, it is the joy of their existence. I have stumbled through life, trying to find that joy for myself. And while I still may be an amateur, I thought to seek out the experts who may help shed some light to find what we all are looking for. This series encapsulates those people who have not only found their passion but are living it. And I hope their stories will inspire you to live your purpose too.
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“In a world obsessed with making everybody dance to the same tune, you march to the melodies of your own.”
– Anonymous
It was like listening to the sound of scintillating Sufi.
Our colloquial language has been bastardized so much over the course of time that you almost never get to listen to any parlance in its purest form. It is usually a mix of your native tongue, the most recent repository of cool words and some dashings of Hindi, served on a plate of broken English. Especially in the era of Zoom meetings and Skype calls, westernized dialect has taken over our lives where we live somewhere between the sourdough bread we baked yesterday to the Netflix series we binge tomorrow, unwitting of other universes within our world. I come from a South-Indian household, brought up on a strict English education regimen. So, my only roots to Hindi are from my early childhood years and the sporadic conversations with my sister, apart from the scissored bits of Hindi words stitched over WhatsApp texts. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Hindi production, living in the pseudo-English bubble that I am in. So, it is equally very easy to forget that you are living in a country where almost 60% of the population speaks in Hindi and English, it turns out, is a far, far second with only just above 10% of the people parlaying in it.
But when you pick up the phone and hear someone speaking in this simple, honest tongue, it’s like listening to a forgotten melody on an old tape recorder. The nostalgia washes over, and you smile. That is until you realize that you have grown so far away from your roots that you can’t even string two words together. “So, I was calling to know more about you and your passion for this venture that you have started”, I blurted out in broken ‘hinglish’, realizing that maybe I should start taking his classes. The person on the other end of the receiver and the proprietor of the pleasing speech was Aniruddh Mishra, a double masters’ student from BITS Pilani and the founder & CEO of ApniClass, an online educational platform bridging the vernacular gap for the school-going children.
Aniruddh saw what was seemingly invisible to others – the imbalance that existed between the sheer number of students who depended on a solid Hindi foundational education and the severe lack of resources that were being devoted to the same. “I remember preparing for Union Public Service Commission Civil Services Examination (UPSC CSE) after my under graduation and not finding a single repository where I could get all my news from. English medium kids had a significant leverage there, having multiple channels of information that they could absorb from. But from all that I did read, I saw that there was so much useful content that could be disseminated. I just circled these snippets of information as and when I found them, thinking that they might make good informative videos in Hindi and left it at that.” But while the UPSC prep didn’t pan out, his circled remarks circled back to him, nudging him on a new path that they had opened up. “I think it reached a peak in 2018 when I saw this figure, that out of the 6.7 million kids from Hindi medium schools that registered for the Uttar Pradesh State Board examinations alone, over a million didn’t even turn up because of their lack of confidence in passing the examinations. That triggered something inside me and that is when I started ApniClass with two of my friends from college.”
While his colleagues take care of marketing and tech aspects of the company, Aniruddh works over the content and research parts. “I always loved teaching, but I never thought I would end up making a career out of it. The first time I ever taught was when I was myself a kid. Probably in 11th or 12th class, I had tagged along with my then tutor who used to teach underprivileged kids in his free time. I could immediately sense that disparity. You could see that good educational content in Hindi, or any other vernacular languages for that matter, was not as easily available on a digital platform like we were used to. That kind of misrepresentation of languages on digital really bothered me. So that seed was sown early on I suppose. Even when I was in college, I used to volunteer for a non-profit organization called ‘Nirmaan’ where we taught disadvantaged children for a few hours every week in a separately rented apartment. Gradually we helped them join private schools to get a more holistic education, but I could see that the problem was much bigger.”
Tackling this many-headed monster of educational inequality does take a lot of courage but things are seemingly looking up. “The pandemic situation really helped us help others involved in this fight too, especially as children are now relying on digital mediums of learning. Last year, Boston Consulting Group, who was managing a project for the Government of Madhya Pradesh on digital libraries, reached out to us for Commerce content in Hindi. Now, I had never studied, read, or taught commerce in my life but this was important. So, I sat and studied for myself to be able to disseminate that content in simple terms to the kid on the other side of the screen. The teacher became a student again”, he seemed to smile as he talked over the phone.
Going back to high school books and study again? That seemed like a headache in the least if not a nightmare. And yet Aniruddh didn’t bat an eye to do it. “What made you so persistent in your journey? Didn’t you ever become tired of this passion? Weren’t you enticed by the glamorous world of corporate with job security?”, I asked inquisitively. “Well, I am a simple person. I still ride a bike to work, I don’t have fantasies of buying a car. I know that even if nothing works, I can still maybe teach whatever I know and make enough money to cover my basic needs. I see the world through a much wider lens. The technological toys that are relevant now, in ten years’ time, we will throw them away to play with something else. So, it’s easy for me to be detached from the dazzle. What is more important for me is time. You have 24 hours in a day, and even if you use up 12 hours in sleep and routine activities, that means you have 12 hours every day to reinvent yourself, to make some difference. How are you using that? What will you do with your 12 hours today? That is what keeps driving me.”
But what about some of us who don’t know what drives us yet? How do we then make sense of our world? “I think then elimination becomes essential”, Aniruddh hypothesizes, “If you don’t know what you want to do, at least understand what you don’t want to do. I was very sure after college that I didn’t want to go into a corporate field. I knew what I didn’t want to do. Armed with that knowledge, I just plunged into exploring different things that I could do. Even now after starting a company, if I know that perhaps there are some things that I don’t understand or can’t do, I ensure that I pick up the slack in other departments and keep going from there.”
Aniruddh’s love of doing different things certainly is verified in the various other subjects that he is passionate about. “I know today I love doing what I do, which is teaching. But tomorrow, I also see myself doing something for the environment, something for gender imbalance, for racial discrimination, or for infrastructure. The question is, whatever you do, are you able to answer why you are doing it? Question that to yourself every moment and the answer will take you places that you may not have imagined.”
As we pause for a moment, I can hear his steps crunching on the road as he tells me that he is taking his daily evening walk. I admire his love for simple things even more. “I just try to make the most of myself. The world is not going to be with me for the 24 hours, but I will. So, what I think of myself is more important”, he says with a simplicity that is rare to come by. But that doesn’t mean to say he doesn’t care for the world. He does, he very much does. He is strong-willed enough to follow what he thinks is right and sensitive enough to appreciate others, like me, on the path that they are. Just like he doesn’t think there is anything wrong with the English language, but he will hold his ground and speak in the Hindi for an hour, proud to show that he comes from a humble background, even though the person on the other end of the phone is firing questions in English. Because the world may work on an English medium, but he is Hindi medium.
This is first in the series of The Passion Project. To know more about the author and the origination of this series, read here.
