Gandhiism 101: Learning to Be the Change

My five months with Teach For India were a lesson in pursuing one’s mission at all costs – in this case, education reform. Ultimately, it was less about how and more about why.

“School visit! We’re doing a school visit!” It was Thursday, September 12, my second day in India, and Shaheen Mistri, the CEO of Teach For India, was matter-of-factly rounding up stray people in the office for an ad-hoc trip to a nearby school.

A minute later I found myself unceremoniously piled into a borrowed car with seven near-strangers. Most of them worked for Akanksha, a non-profit which Shaheen had founded as a college student 19 years earlier, and whose office space Teach For India shares. As we pulled onto the road, the Mumbai traffic closed in tightly around us. Moments later, I began to sweat profusely in the torrid heat, which had arrived long before the sun’s peak.

Under normal circumstances, I might have been annoyed that my clean, pressed work clothes were being spoiled – at this point I was still living out of a suitcase – but I was distracted by the palpable excitement in the car. A minute later we pulled up in front of a four-story brick building, nestled amidst colorful street vendors and slum homes. As I crossed the street to enter the school yard, I tiptoed around the yawning, puddle-filled potholes to avoid ruining my shoes.

Once on high ground – a narrow, gravel-covered corridor between the school building and street – I noticed a half-dozen neatly dressed, barefoot boys watching me approach. Clinging to the fence as they were, they gave me the feeling I was a zoo animal being observed at close quarters.

Suddenly, there was Shaheen, charging past me and into her element. I watched as she effortlessly won the boys’ affection and then asked them for directions to the principal’s office. (Shaheen later explained to me that for her, interacting with children is about renewal; it’s her way of staying connected to the mission.)

I followed Shaheen into the school, mentally dusting off the cobwebs created by life in corporate offices and assuming the teacher persona I’d acquired at a summer job a few years back. I hoped it would be enough to overcome the cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic differences between me and the children.

As soon as I walked into the classroom and saw 40 glowing, curious, welcoming faces, I knew I would be just fine. I kneeled down alongside a student in the front row. Having already gotten my dress pants dirty, there was nothing left to hold me back. I was dusty, sweaty, and beaming ear to ear: I knew I had made the right choice in coming to Mumbai.

Joining the movement to transform education
I had come to India to help launch Teach For India. Inspired by Teach For America in the United States, Teach For India recruits outstanding college graduates and young professionals to teach in under-resourced schools for two years.

In that classroom, I observed the reality behind the dour statistics I would use a hundred times in the next five months: In India, the average class size exceeds 40 students and one in four teachers is absent on any given day. In addition, teachers depend on counter-productive methods like rote memorization and corporal punishment.

It’s no wonder that, as a result, less than 50 percent of children reach 5th grade, and only one in ten pass the 10th grade. Many argue that these numbers simply reflect the fact that parents pull their kids out of school to help feed the family. On the contrary, if you aren’t learning anything in school, why would you go?

Working with Teach For India was my chance to combat the vicious cycle between lack of education and poverty while experiencing a host of new people and places. I had this opportunity thanks to a Non-Profit Fellowship Program sponsored by my company, Oliver Wyman, which gives consultants a stipend and time off to work with a non-profit organization of their choosing.

I wanted to accomplish three goals through my Fellowship: first, to live in a developing country; second, to work in the education sector, preferably for a start-up; and third, to learn from a social enterprise guru.

In sum, I wanted to get outside my comfort zone and make an impact, while beginning the journey toward becoming a social entrepreneur myself one day.

When I first spoke with Shaheen on the phone about joining Teach For India, she discussed how the first few months would require the small team of six to accomplish virtually everything at once: launch a massive and sustained recruitment effort; establish elite corporate and graduate school partnerships to help legitimize the organization and provide a source of talent; create a teacher-placement strategy and find one hundred openings; develop the teacher-training program; and raise money. In no uncertain terms, she explained that the team would be working under extreme uncertainty and pressure, with little supporting structure. I’d have to be ready to handle anything.

Shaheen’s comments sounded like an invitation to a great adventure. Social enterprise was still the romantic concept I had encountered in a college classroom a few years earlier.

On the ground things played out very differently. In my first year of consulting, I had learned to work in stressful, politically complex and dynamic work environments. Those skills were quickly stretched in every way over five chaotic months of passion and perseverance.

Living in a world of contrasts
If my overarching goal was to one day become a social change agent, the first step would be to venture out of the ivory corporate tower and into the field. India was the natural choice: home of one of the world’s richest histories and cultures; a modern success story with booming growth and six billionaires; and yet still suffering from stark poverty (400 million people living on less than US$1 per day).

My life in India was full of contrasts.  I stayed on one of the wealthiest streets in Pune, Boat Club Road, but each night I would walk by its homeless inhabitants, sleeping on the sidewalk. For days on end, my eyes would sting from the pollution in the air, but only an hour away rise magnificent, pristine hills where I went trekking with friends. For work I often visited Pune’s IT parks, shiny corporate office buildings on massive, manicured campuses teeming with talented engineers. The blue collar workers and day laborers – street sweepers, construction workers, maids, and servants of all kinds – they are ubiquitous and equally numerous, though after some time they begin to blend into the landscape.

This sense of contrasts was amplified by my appearance and identity as an outsider. Being asked five times a day – “Which country are you from?” – was assuredly a mark of the friendly culture but became a nuisance and an unwanted reminder of my otherness.

During the last few days of my trip, I visited a college friend, Anoop Singh, who had moved to India after we graduated from Duke University. Despite having grown up in Greensboro, North Carolina, Anoop stuck out more than any other student at school, with his bright turban and thick beard set atop a tall, broad-shouldered frame.

Anoop’s religion, Sikhism, originated 500 years ago near the Pakistani border in a city called Amritsar, renowned for its central place of worship, the Golden Temple. When Anoop offered to take me there himself, I quickly accepted.

As his driver zigzagged around two-wheelers, lorries, and oxen, Anoop explained that Sikhs wear a turban and grow out their hair because it sets them apart. He talked about how there was never any point trying to fit in while he was growing up, and how this facilitated his acceptance of his true identity. It taught him to distinguish appearance from substance.

The Golden Temple was indeed spectacular – an ornate white marble structure plated in gold, set at the center of a massive, shimmering blue pool (Amritsar means “lake of holy water”).

Yet what struck me most was not the place but the stark role reversal from back home.

At the end of our evening we did seva, “service,” rolling up our sleeves and helping serve the free meals that are provided 24-7 at the Golden Temple. (Welcoming strangers is a fundamental practice of Sikhism.) In those two hours of back-breaking manual labor, I got more than a few confused looks from Sikh visitors who would have sooner expected a unicorn than me standing before them with a ladle in hand.

On my way out of the mess hall, I lost Anoop amidst a sea of turbans. When he found me a minute later he commented: “Don’t worry – it’s impossible to lose sight of you in here.”

I probably stuck out as much on my last day in India as I did on my first. But friends like Anoop allowed me to experience Indian culture with an authenticity I could never have found on my own.

Working to build a legion of leader-educators
I first explored the ironclad link between education and economic development while I was at Duke, and I even spent a summer teaching nearby at Student U in North Carolina. But I was itching to do more.

Teach For India’s goal for year one was to place 100 Teaching Fellows in primary schools in low-income areas of Mumbai and Pune for two-year assignments. The 100 teachers would be the first of thousands essential to the mission: To create a movement of leaders who will eliminate educational inequity in India.

We set out to recruit from the ranks of the country’s top universities, graduate programs, and corporations, going head-to-head with the Harvards, McKinseys, and Goldman Sachs of India. Our target pool was idealistic and hard-working young Indians with demonstrated leadership potential. We estimated that in order to achieve the desired caliber for our 100 Fellows, we would need to receive 1,200 applications – by February 1, 2009.

The concept was solid. We had the backing of a major funder, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. We had Shaheen Mistri as our visionary, charismatic leader. And we had two decades of successful precedent in Teach For America. Moreover, a dozen other copycat organizations were sprouting up around the world, and Teach For All had recently been founded with the express purpose of sharing best practices from Teach For America and its younger UK cousin, Teach First.

The execution, however, was not as simple. Our six-person team would have to persuade the best and brightest young Indians to give up hard-earned opportunities at world-class institutions to join a profession that is viewed in India as a last resort. And we were asking them to make this commitment through an unknown, untested non-profit organization.

We were the first to admit that the success of Teach For America in the United States meant almost nothing given the additional complexities of India.

For starters, Indian education is a structural nightmare. In Mumbai schools, classes may be taught in any one of five local languages – in the same building. To simplify matters, we chose to launch only in English-speaking schools, but even in these schools, many teachers have minimal English skills. An untold percentage of them are completely undocumented and can only be found by wandering through neighborhoods and asking. Teachers’ starting salaries, between Rs 5000-8000 (US$100-$130) per month, are essentially unlivable.

The societal barriers are even more formidable. Many government officials refuse to admit there is a problem with the education system and view Teach For India as an affront. This eliminates the primary and most logical source of sustainable funding: the government. Moreover, teaching is regarded as one of the lowest-caliber career paths one can take; Shaheen often quotes this statistic: “Teachers in India come from the bottom 20 percent of college graduates.” No one wants to take a job that pigeonholes them as “the bottom 20 percent.” Aggravating this problem, Indian parents are notoriously risk-averse, and often controlling of their children’s choices. This meant we were recruiting not only future teachers, but their parents as well.

At Teach For India’s first, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants recruitment presentation at S.P. Jain, a business school in Mumbai, one student brashly interrupted Shaheen’s presentation: “This is India – I don’t think people will be willing to take such a risk.” Shaheen looked the young man in the eye and in a sweet tone gave him a dose of her merciless, dry wit: “Like I said before, this program isn’t for everyone.”

As hard-charging as the launch team was, and despite Shaheen’s experienced leadership, none of us had faced these challenges before. We were being asked to deliver results far beyond our bandwidth or qualifications.

At a high level, our recruitment strategy had three prongs: recruit at select colleges, recruit at top companies, and generate awareness though a mass media campaign.

One aspect of my job was to develop partnerships with companies and ultimately get their employees to apply. To wit:

At first, this level of effort translated to tens of hours of work for a single application – an untenable ratio given our timeline. Every Wednesday morning our recruitment team spent an hour on the phone to share progress and lessons learned. We looked at the data. We brainstormed and debated. We experimented, failed, and experimented again.

Our approach was never refined but it was always relentless. One week at a time, we moved the mountain.

Today, Teach For India has 95 truly exceptional Fellows, hailing from the country’s finest colleges and companies and selected from an applicant pool of more than 2,000.

Learning from the master
Raj, one of my mentors and a previous project manager of mine at Oliver Wyman, explained to me: “India is a unique theater of development in that it has the potential to completely transform in the next 20 years. So, in a way, your work could contribute to ensuring that change will come in your lifetime.” Shaheen Mistri is at the heart of this transformation.

Shaheen is one of the gutsiest and most passionate people I’ve ever met. She is from Mumbai but grew up around the world, as her father’s successful banking career took the family to several continents. She landed at Tufts University for her freshman year of college and traveled to India the following summer, returning to Mumbai.

True to her intuitive nature, Shaheen walked unabashedly into a slum and started to teach English to a handful of children. At the time, she didn’t speak Hindi or Marathi, the two local languages, but she felt a powerful connection to the children and found a way to communicate.

Shaheen never returned to Tufts. She persuaded her parents to let her transfer to a local college and managed to convince the headmaster of the prestigious St. Xaviers College to admit her despite having missed the application deadline. At age 18, she started an after-school program for slum children, Akanksha (“wish” in Sanskrit). Nineteen years later, Akanksha sets the standard for education non-profits the world over.

Shaheen’s career and leadership style have been shaped by one principle: compassion channeled into action. The effectiveness of her approach is a direct result of its transparency – what you see is what you get.

First, she cares. Whether she was telling recruits at the Indian School of Business gut-wrenching stories of injustice or helping me sort out a conflict with a friend, how much she cared showed on her face and in her voice.

Next, she simplifies. When she explained her philosophy of performance evaluation to me it had just two components: does this person care passionately about the mission and does this person deliver results? (Shaheen never hides her feelings – people tend to know exactly where they stand.)

And lastly, she executes. One of my fondest memories is spending an afternoon with Shaheen doing a grassroots marketing campaign. We drafted a letter, looked up every media contact we could find, and sent out nearly 50 emails. Afterward, Shaheen said she wanted to do a text-message campaign but it would cost too much – so we crafted our own text-message slogans and sent them off to every contact in our phone books, one at a time.

Fight evil with good. Take action. Apply now to Teach For India at http://www.teachforindia.org/. Pass this on to help build the movement of change.

I hesitated to hit “Send” when I reached the fourth contact in my phone book, Amira, a new friend I had met just the day before, afraid I’d come across as too serious. Then I looked over at Shaheen vigorously shooting messages off to her A-list contacts – some of them CEOs and Bollywood stars. I powered through the rest of my phone book without pause.

Over the course of my Fellowship, I met a number of other exceptional entrepreneurs. There’s Brij, who is pioneering the concept of same-language subtitling at Planet Read, helping millions of people around the world learn to read. There’s David, whose Indian School Finance Company will provide debt capital to high-performing but poor private schools that can’t afford to build needed classrooms and girls bathrooms. There’s Prameet, who is training a network of women as a sales force to distribute in rural villages a cooking technology that’s an efficient, affordable, safe alternative to dangerous yet predominant biofuels. People like these give me confidence that India will achieve its transformation.

Looking toward India – and beyond
Just two months have passed since I left my nascent life in India and returned to Boston, and already the sights, sounds, and smells of India are fading. For those visceral experiences I will have to go back. However, of more importance is what has stayed with me.

For one, my world has shrunk. Only a year ago, India’s booming cities were distant and faceless. I couldn’t locate Bangalore or Chennai on a map. Now friends in New Delhi will offer their couches as readily as those in New York, the next time I drop in for a visit. Equally, terrorism on the other side of the world was far from my own life and my comprehension. The many evenings I spent with Indian and Pakistani friends alike in the Mumbai localities targeted in the November 26, 2008, attacks have forever altered that.

Second, my paradigms of risk, loss, and challenge have shifted. Was taking five months away from my job a risk? Would I lose a step in the race to the top?

The throngs of malnourished and ill street children I passed at traffic lights on my way to work put those worldly concerns out of my mind. Life will continually bring emotional and physical stress, like the pressures I faced in my first months in India, but my experiences there has helped to frame such challenges in a new context. I possess the ability to positively impact the world, simply by choosing to do so. This choice is itself a privilege.

And third, my definition of the term “emerging economy” has been rewritten. The India discussion of the last decade has revolved around its incredible GDP growth rate, and I used to wonder what these numbers really mean. What does 8 percent growth look like?

Crowded, colorful, loud, friendly, exhausting, beautiful, dirty, vibrant, diverse, spiritual, poor – one can use any number of words to describe Mumbai, and India in general. But if I had to pick just one word to describe my India, it would be vivacious. India is more alive than any place I have ever seen, and the pace of life is breathtaking. That is what 8 percent looks like. (Even today, the World Bank is projecting a 4 percent growth rate for India in 2009, rising to 7 percent in 2010.)

Thus, the true value of my first encounter with India was how it enabled me to move past the abstract numbers discussion to experience India’s dynamic landscape through people like Shaheen, Brij, David, and Prameet.

India’s vivacity can’t be understood with the intellect alone, just as Indian cuisine can’t be understood by reading a cookbook. Sooner or later, you’ve just got to take a bite.


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