Prism - 2

In the second edition of Prism, we catch up with Mr.Mayur Bhuva, who has stepped into the sixth year of his entrepreneurial journey... It all began in January, 2013. His is a laser cutting factory that operates mainly in the B2B market. Mr.Bhuva, a native of Vadodara, graduated in Computer Science from Coimbatore, and did his MBA from Pune. After, running after the sales targets of giant MNCs spread across the sectors like mobile, sports, and white goods, for about nine years, Mr.Bhuva just said - enough! (Or was it 'I need more' ?)

1) You do not seem to have any experience/exposure of the laser cutting industry.. So, how?

That is a funny story. I was roaming clueless searching for a good business opportunity and that's around when one of our well wishers wanted to sell of this business.. they weren't able to manage it inspite of they being 15 years old in this industry. But I was somehow confident that I will be able to pull it off. Also more importantly, they didn't have any other buyer :) as everybody felt it was a sinking ship. So I jumped - into it. 

I would also like to add, before the major decision of quitting, there was only one person who supported me wholeheartedly... "MY DAD". He always said, 'A true entrepreneur is somebody who sustains himself and grows even when nothing is in his favour'.

2) So what were the two most important things you did to keep the ship sailing?

One - Kept my expenses low. Two - Invested whatever I could afford on building the best team.

3) The first 1000 days are said to be the most critical ones for a startup. How were your initial days?

I definitely agree to this. This is the time when I could differentiate my true friends from friends and true relatives from relatives. Every day of my initial days, at least once I got a feeling that this is too much and I made a mistake quitting my job. But the real fun and excitement of business is only after those 1000 days..the idea is to keep moving!

4) Do you miss your corporate job?
Not much, as I don’t get much time to think about it.

5) As an entrepreneur what has been your most embarrassing incident yet?

Frankly speaking there haven't been any such incident till date, ya definitely there have been some very bad moments, when we have worked round the clock for more than 4 days at a stretch and still ended up losing ... That's the time when you felt dejected. 

6) We can't do without this question - how much has your MBA degree helped in your journey?

Other then making me get my first job and good friends, I don't think it has helped me much. What I learned maximum was in the years after my b-school.

7) What is the best thing you could wish for your company in the next 3 years?

To go public :) You see, at the end of day I am a gujju.

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Mr.Bhuva can be reached at mayur.bhuva@gmail.com.

XII: A class apart

The school life culminates in the Twelfth class (XII Standard); no wonder the stress levels of the kids also peak around the time. I vividly remember those days; A good twenty years back. My Exam centre was St.John's Higher Secondary School, Palayankottai. It was like a do-or-die battle, especially for the kids like me who were a part of the great Indian middle class. The troubles multiplied if you were from a small town. Again, I belonged to that class too. The Board marks sealed your fate, forever (It was said).  At that point in time, I was also aiming for admission in an institute located near the deserts that selected candidates purely on the overall Board marks. So you can very well imagine the multitentacled beast I was trying to tame.

As luck (and a tremendous amount of effort) would have it, I achieved what I wished for. 

My sincere thanks to the person who set the question paper for French-II. Yes! French was my second language in my higher secondary. Manageable quantum of syllabus, potential for almost 100% marks, and an escape route from Tamil that had a vast reserve of material were the main reasons why students like me landed at the house of Madame Lutgarde that was filled with the most hateable cats of our district. Our school did not offer French, so those of us who needed the language to score well in Class XII were to endure those creatures in the teacher's house. On a second thought I would say the cats were actually okay, when compared to the stench of fish that filled the sun-soaked study. To compensate for the turmoil in her house, we were cooling off in school when our classmates were taking their Tamil lessons. 

We did not buy any books for French, as madame gave us the photocopied material. The first lesson was about Pierre, a boy who with the help of his mother tried to unclog a kitchen sink. I remember those lessons very well, not because I had learnt a new language in a short span of two years, but precisely because my school education had prepared me well in the art of memorising things. But one area that was tricky was that unlike English or Tamil, in French there are genders for even non-living things. For instance, sun is a male while the moon and the earth are females; the car is a female while the engine that moves it is a male, so on and so forth (In a way there is some logic to it, apparently). In Paper-II we were required to write letters. And my memory ammunition had only 4-5 letters in it. I just could not memorise more from the lot of 7-8 probable letters that we were given beforehand. So I thanked my stars when one of the letters that I had prepared showed up in the question paper. I quickly spluttered it out. Merci beaucoup le mister di setter de question papiere... hurraye!

A cool ambience at home and the company of great friends matter a lot during those harassing months of XII. But what mattered more was the salt you got in Chemistry practical exams, salt analysis. You are truly blessed if you get any of the coloured salts like Copper Sulphate or Cobalt Nitrate. And not God, but only your Chemistry teacher and the External supervisor can salvage you if anything resembling the common salt that makes a rasam perfect lands up at your desk. You need to carry out a battery of tests, that are named as preliminary test, group separation, confirmatory tests, etc. More than the tests themselves, the names of some of the tests give you and your tongue a nightmare; Sample this: Chromyl Chloride test. And, let me make a real confession here - I owe my 50/50 in my practicals to my Chemistry teacher; I had got one of those colourless salts.

I was so comfortable in Physics. Truly. I had put in some serious hard labour. I knew each and every line along with the spelling mistakes of the book by-heart. I don't know how many of you can do it, but even at this very moment I can recite Newton's first law of motion without any stammer. I had multiple teachers, and evaluators for my practice sheets. In fact, till this date I carry those skills I had acquired in 'answer presentation'. It is not enough to merely to know things, it is equally important to make people realise you know things. In most exams, an evaluator spends only about 3-4 minutes to assess your answer sheets. Your entire efforts of preparation and performance get judged in only a few minutes; an entire year's work gets about only 250 seconds of notice. I'm so happy that along with my Physics lessons, I was also taught the crucial art of 'dressing up' (what you don't know well) and 'presenting' (what you are thorough with). It comes handy at the workplace too. But a story needs to have a twist: among the subjects, I scored the least in Physics. So sad! E is not equal to mc squared.

Even after two decades of inspiring economic growth, with opportunities galore, I see the rote memory industry still flourishing. This is definitely not education. This is pain. The youth and most parents are still under the constant stress of various test scores. Some schools finish the Class XII syllabus about one year prior to the Exams, and the following year is spent on gearing up the kids for the E-day. Come on! Perhaps the elephant needs more time to learn a new trick. The kids are continued to be taught to ask 'What? & When?', rather than to question, 'How? & Why?' And we are not talking about the stars like a Nadella here or a Sundar Pichai there, it is more about why we Indians do not own an Alibaba or Amazon; and why we rank so low on the International IP Index.

Board Exams are very crucial, and hard work does not have any alternative, there is not an iota of doubt about that. But the whole question is about - at what cost and for how long?


Reference: 

• ASER 2017
• International IP Index

Prism - 1

Pilanipictures is starting off a series of interviews, Prism. 

We pose seven questions to eminent (mostly) and/or popular (again, mostly) personalities across various fields. Occasionally, we also cover mango men who wish to turn into celebrities or even those who are simply ready to respond to our seven questions. The queries are usually generic, but over a period of time they will get deeper and more interesting (evolution consumes time). But we are sure that the replies we get will unclog our minds and open our eyes.

The inaugural episode is by Sivam Sabesan, Managing Director India of CharIN e.V. CharIN, a non profit organization that is in the space of electric vehicles (EVs). Prior to this, from 2010 to 2017, Mr.Sabesan worked with Renault Nissan handling EV charging regulations. During the period he was also a member of SIAM’s Frontier Technology Group. Mr.Sabesan has been involved in policy decisions on EVs in India for close to a decade. He is acknowledged as an expert in EV battery packs and charging infrastructure. 

There is so much noise about electric vehicles (EV)... By when is the silent burial of the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) expected? 

I really don't see the ICE going away. Even if EVs become mainstream in a decade or two, there are some applications like Jet Aircraft and Long distance trucking, which have no alternative to ICEs. Electrification of the powertrain is however going to be much faster. You will see more Mild Hybrids and Full Hybrids from OEMs, but the ICE is still going to be around for a long time. The ICE has been written off many times before and it is still around 120 years later. So even though the EV revolution seems to be upon us, it is by no means a foregone conclusion 

Is it true some of the Indian majors like Maruti Suzuki is going to produce only electric vehicles (EVs) from 2020?

No. Maruti Suzuki has announced that they will launch an EV in 2020 and they will launch more hybrid versions of their powertrains. But no OEM has yet announced that they are moving to fully electric vehicles yet. The key qualifier is the term 'fully electric'. Most press releases confuse the term 'electrified vehicles' (meaning hybridization) with fully electric vehicles.

We see battery-operated vehicles in places like railway stations, parks, etc. Is it the same EV technology that we are talking about?

Conceptually yes. All Electric vehicles have a motor, a controller and a battery pack. Road going EVs would have a different component specification but would still use the same components.

What is the impact of the EV revolution on the oil kings like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela?

The EV revolution, like every other revolution will have its winners and losers. But even a significant penetration of EVs would hardly slow down our global requirement for oil in the near term. Post 2025, there might be a realignment of oil supply and demand, but not just yet. In the near future, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have more to fear from internal politics than EVs. 

What are the new employment opportunities that the EV sector would bring us?

Advanced materials, electronics and computing sectors will gain. But again, automotive technology has been changing pretty fast over the decades, so this is only a continuation of the trend.

For an average urban user, with say about 20-25km drive a day, how do the total costs of ownership compare between the existing cars, existing EVs and the future EVs?

For the average user, an electric vehicle is still very expensive compared to a normal ICE vehicle. That is largely due to the cost of the battery pack. However, battery packs are becoming cheaper and EVs should become more affordable in the near future. In addition to the cost advantage of operating an EV, they also offer significant improvement in driving comfort in the city as well as significantly lower maintenance. We therefore expect that a lot of consumers will switch to EVs, when they afford it and most of them will permanently say bye to the IC engine

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Mr.Sivam could be reached at India@charinev.org