Friday, December 31, 2010

Jagriti Yatra Diary - Seeking inspiration from Swami Vivekananda

Dec 28 - We reached Nagercoil by the TJY train and then proceeded to Kanyakumari via buses. After a long wait in the queue to get on the boats, we finally reached the Vivekananda Rock memorial - not just the southernmost tip of the the Indian mainland, also the very place where he had spent three days meditating exactly 118 years ago :)

Acharya Sachidananda Bharathi, a Catholic by birth and an IAF pilot who had a near fatal crash before he explored his own spiritual beliefs and now advocates the second freedom struggle for spiritual unity and the regeneration of India. After his talk on the rock, we took a group pic on the steps of the rock memorial with all of us in TJY T-shirts, it was quite a sight, wait for the pic update :)

We then proceeded to the Vivekananda Ashram, where we had lunch followed by the televised panel discussion on 'Starting an enterprise - Making a difference' the panelists were Shaffi Mather, Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya and Vishal Talreja. Food King Sarath Babu, who was supposed to make the fourth panelist, we later learnt, cancelled at the last minute.

Shaffi Mather is into several for profit initiatives including - 'Dial 1298 for Ambualnce', 'Moksha-Yug access' into micro-finance, 'The education initiative', which is involved in e-learning and 'bribe busters'

V.P.Singh through EkGaon Technologies provides mobile phone based platforms for financial services delivery and personalised VAS for farmers and small entrepreneurs in remote under-served markets.

Vishal Talreja, of Dream-A-Dream promotes life-skill education for under-privileged children in Bengaluru. Their idea 'uncrumple a Dream' made me sit up in rapt attention. Shortly after the end of the session, he had already agreed to bringing the concept to Chennai via Bhumi :D Check www.dreamadream.org

We then returned to Nagercoil, we sat through an extremely boring presentation by group A on Thanal, my group then sat up till 3AM preparing for their parts for the presentation. The kind of bonding we had developed over the last few days was helping us shape something really crazy - we had lots of fun making it :D

PS: I'll update the blog with some pictures later

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