Inspire Someone Today
Inspire Someone Today
E165 | Who Am I Making Invisible | Change Makers - Vishal Talreja
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E165 | Change Makers Series - Ft. Vishal Talreja
Start with a quiet truth: change that lasts rarely shouts. It begins with seeing what we’ve trained ourselves to ignore—poverty on the commute, a child shut down in class, a system running fast but leaving people behind. In this conversation, we sit with Vishal from Dream a Dream to unpack how life skills, empathy, and systems thinking can shift the odds for young people growing up with adversity.
We go deep on why social-emotional learning matters as much as literacy and numeracy, especially when trauma has delayed key developmental milestones. Vishal shares the surprising lever that scaled their impact: not more programs, but more caring adults. That insight led to training tens of thousands of teachers and partnering with state governments to embed a daily happiness and wellbeing curriculum across public schools. The work stretches from classrooms to policy, from personal agency to public systems, and it’s grounded in a simple promise—every child deserves dignity, safety, and the chance to thrive.
The stories bring it to life. Pallavi, once a shy teen mocked for playing football, returns as a life skills coach and then organizes her neighborhood to convert a garbage mound into a public play space. Prasanna, raised around violence, learns to channel anger into sport, mentorship, and photography, later finding hard-won empathy for his father’s past. We also examine the limits of resilience when structural barriers—caste, class, gender, and access to devices and data—block progress, a lesson sharpened by the pandemic. That’s why this journey includes inner work: confronting identity and power, building trust with bureaucrats, and co-creating context-first solutions rather than pushing one-size-fits-all fixes.
If you’re drawn to education reform, leadership, or social change, you’ll find practical takeaways: how to scale without losing soul, how to avoid burnout by designing for rest and celebration, and how small actions—like asking teachers about kindness or meeting a stranger’s eyes—can shift culture. Listen, reflect, and share with someone who needs a dose of grounded hope. If it resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what small shift will you try this week?
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Opening Themes And Host Welcome
SPEAKER_01Had never been to Mumbai before. So one of the things, moments that struck me was just the level of visible poverty around me. That I could go from home to work every single day, and the poverty is just around me. And I realized that very soon I could just be wearing invisible blinders and ignore the poverty around me. And when I realized that when that was happening, I didn't want that to happen. So then I started engaging with why is there so much poverty on the streets? Why are there kids on the street? This is actually Sujita gave me a beautiful insight in those days. She said there's one approach of a leader, which is my approach, which is that I have a vision on running towards secretion. And I don't care whether someone is running as fast as me or not. Then I turn back and I see that the team is way behind, and then I'm literally dragging it. So at one level I'm running at 100 meters, 100 miles an hour kind of speed, but another level I'm dragging the team towards my vision. The other approach, which is her approach, it is that you start with where the team is at and you work together and you walk together. So it's not so much that you need to reach a certain destination, it's more important that you're walking together.
Introducing Vishal And Dream A Dream
SPEAKER_00Not everything that matters needs to be loud. Some conversations help you pause, some help you see differently, and some stay with you long after they end. Welcome to Inspire Someone Today, my dear listeners. A space for honest conversations about life, wealth, and the choices that shape who we become. No quick fixes, no borrowed fraternity, just real stories, thoughtful reflection, and the quiet courage to live with intention. This is Inspire Someone Today, where conversations are human, reflective, and meant to stay with you. Change doesn't always begin with action. Sometimes it begins with awareness. In this episode of Inspire Someone Today, I sit down with Vishhal Tardreja, someone who learned early that good intentions aren't enough if systems remain unchanged. From working closely with young people growing up with adversity to building ecosystems that nurture life skills and inner strength, Vishal's journey is a reminder that lasting change starts within and then scales outward. As part of our change maker series, this conversation isn't about fixing the world overnight. It's about seeing differently, designing thoughtfully, and taking responsibility for the systems we shape. No slogans, no shortcuts, just a humane, reflective conversation on what it really takes to make change endure. It's an absolute joy to have Vishhal grace over this uh episode. Vishal, let's begin and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Srikant. It's an honor to be here with you.
SPEAKER_00For someone hearing about it for the first time, Vishal, what is Dream a Dream?
SPEAKER_01Dream a Dream is a nonprofit organization, or NGO is more popularly known, based out of Bangor in India, focused on working with children and young people growing up in adverse circumstances and helping them build the capabilities and life skills needed to thrive in an increasingly fast-changing world.
SPEAKER_00And what has been uh Dream and Dream been able to do so far till date, Vishal?
SPEAKER_01Uh Dream Dream was started in 1999, so a little over 25 years old. Uh in these 25 years, uh we have uh directly worked with over 400,000 kids in Bangalore from the age group of six to about 23, helping them develop life skills through our various programs and helping them making more meaningful transitions into adulthood. In addition, over the last decade or so, we have been working with uh various state governments. We currently work with seven state governments across the country, helping them introduce curriculums, pedagogical changes, and assessment practices, all gased towards holistic development of every child going into the government school system. Uh, and these partnerships with the state governments have helped us reach about 1.8 to 2 million kids. In addition, one of the things that we've been working on is how do we mainstream the idea of life skills? That in addition to uh academics, numeracy and literacy, life skills are also a very critical foundational element for every child to learn and master if they have to find their own pathways to success and build their own ideas and definitions of success in a world that's changing very fast. So we have, we can say over the last two plus decades, managed to mainstream this idea that life skills are equally important. And we have now seeing many organizations across the country integrating life skills, social emotional learning interventions in the constituencies that they are working on.
Adversity, Developmental Milestones, And Trauma
SPEAKER_00It's an interesting date, Vishal, making life skill as mainstream. And this is definitely coming out of a need that you want the students, the kids to thrive in an ever-changing environment. Pure academic skills will help, but what will add an edge is that life skill. Could you elaborate a bit more on that the criticality of having that? And it's just not for kids going to government schools, it is for kids across all age groups, across all different mediums of schools, isn't it?
Personal Journey: Finland, Mumbai, And Dignity
SPEAKER_01So we define life skills broadly as any kind of skills, capabilities, behaviors that every individual needs to deal with demands and challenges of daily labor. So, like you rightly said, this is a skill that we all need, we all develop and we all have to navigate life's complexities. Life skills become critical in the case of kids growing up in adverse circumstances for a couple of reasons. One is that the pace of change in the world is increasingly fast and uncertain. There's enough evidence and research around in the world which says the kids in the schooling system today are going to enter jobs and careers that are not even being invented yet. So, in that case, we can't necessarily prepare cases for specific job markets or specific careers, like maybe our parents did for us, that you study, uh do well in college, uh, become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, and you will be set for life. That's no longer true. Uh, there are other studies that say that young people growing up today will have multiple careers in their lifetime as an adult, uh, which means they need to have the capacity to adapt, be resilient, be willing to change, shift, unlearn, really. Now, this is relevant for every child, irrespective of the backgrounds that they come from. The key difference, okay, it's coming from adverse circumstances is that in the early years of growing up, in the first five to ten years of growing up, when children experience any kind of adverse circumstances, this could be uh lack of food and nutrition in the this could be neglect in the family environment, it could be in extreme cases exposure to violence, abuse, displacement, extreme poverty, war, any and all of these adverse circumstances lead to children not achieving developmental milestones that every child needs to achieve at a certain age. So, a good example of that is that if you have a child, an infant who is learning to crawl, they will not suddenly start running. They will learn to crawl, then they learn to stand up, then they learn to walk, and then they learn to run. Each of these are developmental milestones. And if you have no infants or kids in your own home or around you, you will see that when they achieve these developmental milestones, everyone around them celebrates. Everyone around them knows that at a certain age this milestone needs to be achieved. Everyone knows that the age of 12 months, 14 months is when the child starts developing language skills, starts speaking. If they don't, then you're worried why is it not happening? Adverse circumstances cause trauma. And trauma results in children not achieving their developmental milestones at the right sensitive period, which leads to what we call failure to thrive. Now, the most common example of that in extreme poverty conditions is the key difference in height and weight. So if you take a 13-year-old from an international private school, make them stand next to a 13-year-old from an impoverished community in backlog, going to a government school, you clearly see a height and weight difference. But it's not just limited to that, it's also limited to emotional regulation, emotional maturity, is limited to other developmental milestones. Now imagine when a child growing up in adversity has had a failure to thrive, and then at the age of four or five, if they enter the school environment, they're entering a one-size-fits-all school environment where every child, irrespective of the adversity and the impact of that adversity, is expected to learn the same things in the same way at the same pace. Because that's how it's designed. But the child is not geared up for that learning. So then the gaps just keep increasing and increasing and increasing, and finally resulting in at some point the child giving up or the child getting disengaged. Now, some of these uh collapses in developmental milestone can also be seen as adults in behaviors. So, for example, if a child has been abandoned in the early years, they grow up with confused attachment, which means if they're growing up in a care zone, they will make relationships very easily. When strangers come, volunteers come to meet them, they come close to them very easily. Now, if this is not addressed, then at 18, 19, when they go out into the world as independent adults, they might end up in abusive or violent relationships. So it's very important to recognize that the impact of adversity leading to failure to thrive is a critical component that is distinguishing children growing up in marginalized backgrounds in poverty from other children growing up in supportive environments. Life skills plays a very important role in bridging that gap, helping children overcome these failures, catch up to developmental milestones, and also engage positively with learning, including even gaining height and weight over a period of time, which we have seen in our own work, in our own research with young people. So that is why life skills become extremely critical.
SPEAKER_00So, apart from being a founder of Vishal, why is this work deeply personal to you?
Stories Of Agency: Pallavi And Prasanna
SPEAKER_01Well, I started this work at the age of 21. So this is all I've known in that sense. Uh, but I didn't design my career for it. Uh, I grew up in a typical middle class, lower middle class family environment where my parents told me education is the key to success, education is the key out of poverty. So I was all geared up to do well, join a corporate uh ladder, and be successful. But at the age of 21, just after I finished college, I got a chance to go to Finland on an exchange program. Uh, my first trip abroad, the first kid in the family to travel abroad. I took up the opportunity, and that was for the first time I saw a very different world. Finland, because of a strong social welfare economic system, has very high dignity of labor and uh a sense of respect for every job, every human being. Uh, so I could become friends with a security guard at a five-star hotel, a bartender at a local bar, to a software engineer, to a professor at the university. Uh, but each one of them had the sense of dignity and respect about who they were and the roles they played in society, which is not so true in the environment I grew up in. Even though I grew up in a poor neighborhood, even within that, because of caste and class differences, there were some cases that I was not allowed to play with. There are some cases that I couldn't be friends with. And I believe that was the that's how society functioned till I saw what was possible in Finland. And I liked this idea of every human being treated with respect and dignity. Uh so I came back to India with this idea that I wanted to do something in India that promotes this idea of respect and dignity. Talked to a bunch of fans who were already thinking of some ideas who work in communities. Twelve of us got together and dreametry was born. But none of us believed that it could be an independent organization itself. Uh, we were all getting into our careers, uh building pathways. But running Dreamating as a voluntary organization for a couple of years, we realized that there was potential in the RDM. And we reached a place where we realized that one or more of us need to take a step forward and start building in, or we'll have to let go of the RDM. Uh so I was going through my own personal dilemmas around should I build my corporate career and go after what I had initially planned, or should I move into Dream Dream full-time, learn from my mistakes, learn about the work and build this up. After a lot of trepidation, I decided to move in full-time. And uh that was it. Then I've not looked back. But the idea of respect and dignity for every human being is what grounds me to this work.
SPEAKER_00So this was the moment when that concern became a commitment, or was there a moment that really said this is it, this is what you're committing to this particular cause?
SPEAKER_01Uh there were many moments. I was while Dream Dream was uh running in Bangalore. I got a job to work with an investment bank in Mumbai. So I moved to Mumbai. I had never been to Mumbai before. So one of the things, moments that struck me was just the level of visible poverty around me. That I could go from home to work every single day, and the poverty is just around me. And I realized that very soon I could just be wearing invisible blinders and ignore the poverty around me. And when I realized that when that was happening, I didn't want that to happen. So then I started engaging with why is there so much poverty on the streets? Why are there kids on the street? I started volunteering with local organizations in Mumbai, uh, spending time with founders, spending time in the field. The more I understood, the more questions I had. So one was that moment when I realized that I am drawn towards trying to understand the complexity of the challenges. I'm drawn towards finding a solution for it. And I'm drawn towards the idea of that every human being deserves respect and dignity, and they can't live their life on the streets the way we were doing.
SPEAKER_00And in that process, you have authored quite a few white papers. You're also an author of a couple of books. One of it is When We Thrive. What a beautiful uh title of the book. Is there any story that kind of comes to your mind that uh helped reshape how you saw possibility?
Losses, Complexity, And Rethinking Support
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, all the stories in that book are like that. One of the stories I can talk about is uh this young woman, Pallavi, who came into our program and she was probably 13 or 14 years old. One of the few young women who chose to join our sports program and wanting to play football. So she had to go through much bullying and laughter in the community because she chose to play football, which the community was considered a boys' game. But she was also an introvert. She was very quiet as a girl, hardly spoke. I remember meeting her the first time. She wouldn't even uh look up to me. It was always down, which was amazing at football. And then she got an opportunity to go to Brazil during the football world club that was hosted there as a young leader. There she had a chance to even host a workshop for other young people from all parts of the world. And she got a chance to see a couple of matches as part of the World Cup. And that truly transformed her. So when she came back, she decided to join us as a life skills facilitator. Started working with other kids in the community as a trainer and facilitator as a life skills coach. But the amazing thing was that she realized that the neighborhood she was staying in was getting gentrified very quickly, which means from being a slum neighborhood, because it was closer to the city, it was being sold, and big, big buildings and apartments and commercial complexes were coming up. And the poor communities were being pushed further out of the city. And there were no public spaces for children to play in. As a young 22-year-old, she lobbied with local politicians, political school leaders, principals of local schools, parents, uh philanthropists living in that community, and managed to convert a garbage mound into a play space for children, a public play space for children. And that for me was the real possibility. That when young people build life skills, start to build a sense of agency and ownership, uh, they don't just use it for their own success. They use those skills to also transform the communities. And she managed to do that. And today, in that community, in addition to working with us as a facilitator, she's very well known as a young leader whom the community can reach out to for any challenges that they're facing in the community. Almost making our role in the community redundant, which is exactly what we want.
Burnout, Leadership Evolution, And Wellbeing
SPEAKER_00That's exactly what you wanted to, right? What a powerful story. And you kind of in a nice way close loop on that life skill bit of it, which we started off earlier. So that life skill is not something that you kind of prepare that will aid you in such a job, but that will help you, that stays with you for life. That's why it's called as a life skill. Any other such stories that come to your mind that kind of talks about the art of possibility that you're very proud of what your words from Dream of Dream has been able to accomplish?
From Programs To Systems And Government Scale
SPEAKER_01Well, the other story from the book that is very powerful is of this young man Prasana. Now, Prasana grew up again in an extremely poor neighborhood in Bangalore, uh, riddled with uh substance abuse, drugs, uh, local gangs, crying. It still is that neighborhood. He somehow managed to escape that situation, landed up in a residential school run by another with whom we partnered and we started working on life skills programs with him. Prasana came from a relatively violent family background where his father was an alcoholic and used to beat up the kids, beat up the mother. So Prasana always carried this sense of anger, and he believed that the only way to resolve conflict in life is to use violence. Which is what he also did in school, which is what we did in the programs, we can do this. Uh but we realized, having understood that these. Behaviors that come from uh environments and can be shifted. We helped him channelize a lot of his violence and anger into the sport. We used to play field hockey, or programs that we used to run. He ran for almost 11 years. And he became one of the best hockey players we had in the team, but also helped him then learn to resolve conflict with more peace-building efforts across school life. Again, at the age of 18, he reached out to us and said we joined a dream as a life skills facilitator, did very well, then became a trainer. But his real passion was photography, so then he joined our communications team. And today he's part of the communications team, a dream as a photographer, as a videographer, makes some beautiful movies about our work. But the story, the real sense of possibilities, is when he was a life skills facilitator. One day he called me and he said, you know, I need to talk to people. I've had an insight and I want to share it with you. He came up to hospitals, we sat down and he said, uh, you know, when I was a kid, and then my father used to beat me up, uh, I used to get very angry and I used to wait for the day when I become big so I can stand up to my father and hit him back when he tries to hit me or my mother or brother. And he said, and I realized today as I was running a life school session with the kids that my father didn't have the childhood that he deserved. He probably didn't have the support systems that I got as a child, where I couldn't channelise a lot of my anger and change my behaviors. So I'm not angry with my dad anymore. I understand where he comes from. I still don't believe his behavior is right, but I understand where he's coming from. Now that level of empathy for a young man of 2021 being developed and to see his dad's story from a whole different light was for me this amazing sense of possibility that young people can truly transform the world.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And with both of the stories, what have been able to highlight, Vishal, is with the right intervention at the right time, there is a possibility that you can amend what has not happened and make a positive difference to the community? Absolutely. Yes. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing that. While Finland gave you a perspective, Mumbai gave you a different kind of a perspective. Was there anything else, any kind of disappointment that genuinely shook you? That made you to kind of be the person that you are today?
Covid, Inequity, And Shifting Systemic Mindsets
SPEAKER_01Well, the work itself is filled with failures, right? Because you can't necessarily one is not always able to support every child. We have lost children to suicide, violence, to drugs, to uh even to police atrocities. Uh and we've been part of those stories. For me personally, again, because I didn't necessarily come from an education about this work, but it was something that I just kind of stumbled into. One is I didn't uh I didn't recognize the complexity of the challenge, that there are layers to the challenge. For me, it was a very simplistic approach that let's work with this, let's bring some joy into their lives, let's play sports, do arts, and kids will do great. But as I got entrenched in their lives and their stories, you know, start realizing how the system parents children from certain backgrounds to try if you belong to a certain caste or a religion or a minority group, they all star stacked up against you. And then there are complexities with the families themselves, the complexities in the neighborhoods you're living in. And then there are complexities that come as children grow up, right? Suddenly you realize at the age of 14, 15, in the first seven, eight years of our work, as we saw the kids we worked with at the age of eight, nine, ten, when they hit 14, 15, we started losing them. And we were right, why are we losing these kids? Why are these not, why are these kids not continuing in school and why are we not continuing into our programs? To realize that uh while most of us who come from supportive family backgrounds have to think about our future at the age of 18, 19, 20, 21, these kids had to start contributing to their families at 1415. At 1415, either they were asked to drop out of school and start working, start earning, or the families were scared for the case, so they decided to take them away from school and keep them at home till they get married, which was something that we had not obviously understood in the context we didn't know. So then recognizing that if we have to continue to support these kids, we have to have a whole set of different interventions at 1415, and that we also have to start working with therapies, and that at the societal level we have to shift narratives around uh kids, the kids coming from different backgrounds, uh narratives around caste and class and uh religion. So we've lost quite a few kids, and uh it's been a difficult journey in that sense, which and continues to be a journey where we actually continue to challenge some of these old narratives around capability accountship.
SPEAKER_00I kind of uh understand the enormity of this. And in a very heavy work like this, how do you sustain yourself emotionally? Now we are much better.
Building Trust With Bureaucrats And Context
SPEAKER_01Uh now as an organization, we have internal support systems, we have mental health support for all our team members. Um we have uh cultures of uh well-being within the organization itself, of support, of rest. Uh so now we are much better, but we didn't start off like that. Again, I had never run an organization, never built a team, never been a leader of an organization. The only thing I understood was that there's a complex challenge and we need to solve it, we need to address it. So personally, I used to, in those early years, work seven days a week, work like 14-15 hours a day. I would come up with ideas at like three in the morning and send it out to the team and expect responses at six in the morning. Uh I was very driven. And I didn't believe that my passion or drive will reduce over time. But it did. So I did burn out. But more importantly, what happened was it it didn't help the people who came and worked with us. It almost felt like we don't care for the people who come and work with us, and we are expecting them to also work 14-15 hours a day, give up their lives, give up their relationships, and just be as committed to the cause as I am. That expectation was not the right expectation. Uh so we didn't do very well in offering emotional support to either myself or to the team members or as an organization, which meant that a lot of people would work for a couple of years and then they couldn't do this work anymore. The emotional burden was just too much. Uh the expectations were too high. And what was sad is that even though they had done extremely good work, they're left with this sense of feeling like failures. Which again, as a culture, we didn't necessarily build enough support systems to celebrate successes. My approach was always that when we hit a certain milestone, instead of taking a pause and celebrating that milestone, I was already looking at the next summit to climb. But over the years, I've learned uh learned to shift my approach as a leader. Uh, learn to understand that this is a marathon, not just one marathon, this is multiple marathons. And uh multiple marathons means that there needs to be periods of rest, rejuvenation, nurturing. There needs to be a more sense of celebration at the end of every marathon. So that I've learned only in the last maybe seven, eight years.
Ecosystem Influence And Global Narratives
SPEAKER_00Let's pause here for a moment. You may have noticed one idea quietly settling in. Something that doesn't need an answer. Just awareness. Inspire someone today has always been about conversations that stay with you beyond the episode. Sometimes they continue reflection, sometimes in action, and sometimes in community. If you'd like to engage beyond the podcast, there is an IST community where these conversations are carried forward thoughtfully. And if you prefer your own quiet space, the book inspires someone today, gathers many of these ideas for slow reflection. Let's continue. While you know you have a mountain to climb, there's so much out there to do. And it is only natural that you run that race like 16, 18 hours kind of stuff. And it's also very telling to say that you had a realization. You didn't kind of brush it under the carpet saying that this is how it is, but you realize you did something. Was it a pivot moment for you to move from programs to systems kind of an approach? It was. Yeah. Well, two, three pivot moments.
Managing Pivots: Trends, Pauses, Mentors
Letting Go: From Micromanager To Trust
The Many Visions Of Change In Education
Two Micro-Experiments For Listeners
SPEAKER_01One is at the 10-year mark, we had worked with about 10,000 kids directly in Bangalore. We were a small, uh, credible organization based out of Bangalore doing good work. But the question we were sitting on is that if it's going to take 10 years for us to work deeply with 10,000 kids, then how will we ever reach 130, 40 million kids that are growing up in poverty in India? Uh so the first pivot was to recognize that we need a leverage. We need to understand what is the leverage uh that will help us reach more kids. Uh, for that, we had to go back and understand that if we strip away everything that we are doing in our programs, in our life skills development programs, and pick one leverage point, one core idea that can be scaled out, what could that be? And what we discovered, which our children helped us discover, is what the young people valued most in our programs was the sense of care and respect they received from the adult in the relationship. So it was not the snacks, it was not the sports, it was not the arts, it was not the uh exposure to opportunities. It was that every time they encountered an adult from Dream a Dream, they felt cared for, they felt respected. Empathy. Yeah. Uh so we said, okay, so we've got millions of teachers in the country. What will it take for us to unlock this level of empathy among teachers already in the education system? Uh so we spent three years developing a new pedagogical approach, worked with clinical psychologists, child psychologists, partners from different parts of the world to build a design to work with teachers. Initial pilots were uh not so successful, so we went back to the drawing board, see where our own biases and prejudices were coming from, uh, worked on ourselves, went back into the field, and it started to work. So, over a period of a decade or so, we worked with about 70,000 odd teachers uh across the country. But then we realized that even as 70,000 teachers, we're not able to hit 130 million kids. So the next favorite point was, of course, to work with the government. But we realized that we want we have to be ready to work with the government because when you work with the government system, scale is just expected. Are we ready? Are we ready for that scale? Do we have the teams that are ready for scale? Again, realized that as an institution, we had also hired people who were invested in working with one child at a time or a group of children. So the mindset was around direct work. But now, if we wanted to leverage to working with governments, that you're then working with your bureaucrat or the school principal, or you're working with a thousand schools at a time, it needs a very different mindset. It needs a different skill set. So we also had to redesign our org structure, to redesign how, what kind of people we hire. At the same time, not letting go of where our insights are coming from, which is the direct work. So we decided not to scale our direct work, but keep it, keep it at about 10,000 kids a year, continue to work with about 2,000 teachers a year. So we continue to get access to the system of uh the community of teachers, but start shifting the gas towards working with government systems. So that was the other big pivot, a big breakthrough for us when we started working with the Delhi government and with a group of other nonprofits and a team from the Delhi government, a group of mentor teachers from the government. We had design and implement the happiness curriculum, which was a well-being-focused curriculum that the government introduced for 800,000 kids from kindergarten to grade eight, every day, 35-minute happiness and well-being classes for 800,000 kids. It's a big breakthrough for us, right? However, COVID gave us a very different debate. COVID happened, everything shut down. What we realized is how the systems of inequity, the systemic barriers, the structural inequities that exist in our society because of caste, class, religion, identities, gender, they played out. Kids who had developed the life skills had gone out into the world and gotten jobs and were on the part of thriving, suddenly lost jobs. With no support systems, with no severance. So when we came out of COVID, we realized that empowering young people with life skills so they can go out and negotiate their way into the world and thrive, is one side of solving the problem. The other side of solving the problem is we also have to remove these systemic barriers and structural inequities that exist in our society. Unless we do that, there'll be some kids who will have the resilience and the willpower to fight through the system and succeed. But the majority of the kids will not. For example, in COVID, again, no, if you were born into a lower caste when schools started virtual classes, you didn't get access to those virtual classes. Because your parents did have access to a smartphone. Or if you had access to a smartphone, the data got over very quickly. So you couldn't do the lesson plans. When schools opened, instead of creating spaces for children to kind of come out of the trauma, heal, reintegrate back into a regular life, what happened was children were pushed straight into catching up to academics, catching up to the syllabus that was lost out of. So these systemic barriers exist in our society. So over the last five, six years, a big part of our work has been around how do we help people in positions of power recognize that because of the identities that I carry, who am I leaving out? Who am I making invisible? Because of the biases and prejudices I carry, who am I making invisible in the system? For that, the first work we had to do ourselves within ourselves. So for example, I had to encounter my identity as an upper caste, upper class, cisgender, heterosexual, Hindu, male, in a position of leadership. Over 25 years, if this has been my identity, and these are the powers that have carried into my identity, who have I made invisible because of this? Whose voices have I not heard? Whose context have I not understood? What have I not understood about these systemic barriers? How have I crossed some of these systemic barriers? What are my belief systems that are preventing kids from adversity to access the same opportunities and succeed in the same way as I did? So these are the questions that we have to dwell with. So we as a team of 100 people have gone through multiple uh learning spaces where we have had to look at our own identities. Through that, then understand that when I'm talking to, say, a policymaker or a politician or a bureaucrat or a school principal or a teacher, how am I using empathy, helping them encounter their own identities and encounter their positions of power and shift some of these barriers?
SPEAKER_00Heavy but wonderful perspective to have is whom am I making invisible? That's so profound, so telling. So, how are they now bringing in elements of how do we have those kind of realizations to thousandx vishals than just one? Yeah. And to those realizations, how do you kind of bring it to the mainstream? What's the thought or what's the work that's being carried out on that uh front?
SPEAKER_01So one is in the work that we do with governments, state governments across the seven states we work in, how do we build deeper relationships with people in positions of power from a space of empathy? And through building these authentic relationships. So, no, typically, what an NGO does when they want to partner with the government, you say, okay, here's my program, here's my curriculum, here's my intervention, take it and take it to a million kids in your system. We say that's not going to work. What I have to be able to do is build a relationship with the bureaucrat so that I'm able to get them to a place where they can authentically share what is the core challenge in their context, what is holding them back. How are certain powers at play that are preventing them from creating the changes that they want to create in the system? And how do we support that? Because what we've also come across is that there are amazing bureaucrats around the system, there are amazing policymakers, there are amazing school leaders, there are amazing teachers. But no one's really listening to them, no one's really understanding their own understanding of the problem, their own context. No one's even understanding that, okay, you you probably know in this particular block or district or state, this is what the problem is, this is what the solution is needed. But everyone is bringing solutions from outside and saying, do it now. So kind of shifted gas.
Closing Reflections And Inspire Message
SPEAKER_00So now the relationships are contextualization. Yeah. Contextualizing the problem and the solution to that particular problem rather than making it very generic. Is that how uh I kind of read that? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And sometimes that takes a year and more, right? Because uh, you know, even the bureaucrat is in a hurry saying, just give me your solution and let's roll it out. We're like, no, we don't have a solution for you. Let's build this relationship, let's deepen the understanding, let's spend time on the ground. Maybe a year later, if we do recognize that there is a solution that's aligned to you and what we can bring, we'll do something about it. If not, then we'll walk away. We're not force fitting a certain solution into the system. But in that one year encounter of deepening the relationship. With the bureaucrat? Am I able to shift that bureaucrats' lens of themselves in the way they understand their through empathy?
SPEAKER_00Wonderful. Just stretching that conversation a little further, is that what took Vishal, the builder, to the creator of ecosystems now?
SPEAKER_01Honestly, that was not so much my work. It was uh really the work of Suchetta, who's the current CEO at DreamAdrain. Uh she took on uh the role of the CEO in 2018. Before that, from 2013 to 18, she was the COO. Uh so this vision of shifting system mindsets is really Suchetta's idea, and I've really just been supporting that idea. So one of the things that I contributed in that journey was uh after the transition of the leadership, uh the board kind of gave me an opportunity to design my own role and say, you know, for six months to a year, explore and see what you want to do and contribute, how you want to contribute. Uh so what I did was uh build some of these uh narratives and ideas into the global uh education transformation space. Again, a big realization was that a lot of the education transformation narratives come from the West, come from the global north. And many systems in the global south just take them on without really again contextualizing how it works in our context. So I took on the role of then shifting some of the narratives in the global north, challenging some of the narratives, being in spaces where I could contribute and bring uh insights from the ground from India into the global spaces. That's when then the writing of papers, doing research, contributing to global policy uh came in. While Suchada was building a team to shift systems internally in India.
SPEAKER_00And I draw pilots to what your journey has been to the corporate world, uh, is there have been multiple pivots, there has been leverage, like you kind of said, you kind of looked into it, and from a very process-oriented kind of stuff, you move to a system, you move to a platform kind of stuff. Somebody wading through this in a corporate world, what is your month of for them to manage these pivots? How did you prepare yourself to manage those pivots? A, you need to identify the pivot in the first place, and B, have the necessary stuff to kind of manage that pivot. So, what would be your take on that, both of it? Identify and then prepare.
SPEAKER_01Let me reflect on it a bit. I think there were two, three things that worked in my case, which was more, I'm saying more personally in my case. One is uh my ability to recognize and understand trends uh beyond an institutional framework. So my ability to kind of step back and look at at the meta-level what was happening in education, to be in spaces where I could listen and understand what was happening. So, for example, life skills and social emotional learning was becoming a mainstream idea even globally around 2014-15. So Lego Foundation was bringing it into focus, many organizations in Latin America, OECD was beginning to talk about it, Harvard was beginning to talk about it, Yale School was beginning to talk about it. Uh there were foundations in the Middle East that were beginning to talk about it. So I kind of said, okay, now this is the moment that is happening. The shift is happening. But the education conversations are going into recognizing the foundational requirement of life skills, social emotional or I could bring a lot of that energy back into India to then support with our government partnerships, to support with our narratives in India. So that was one ability, the ability to step back and see. Second was at a personal and organizational level, our ability to take pauses. We didn't see our journey as a linear growth journey that you keep growing, growing, growing. We always saw a journey that there are periods of speed when you're growing, and then there are periods of stillness when you pause, when you consolidate, when you understand what have you learned, what worked, what didn't work? Are we still relevant in the lives of young people? And if dream dream is not relevant in the lives of young people because we no longer understand the challenges in a fast-changing world, then do we even need to exist? And so every few years we asked ourselves that question Is dream dream still relevant in the lives of young people in a way? Is what we're bringing to the table still useful for the ecosystem? Uh so those pauses I think were very important. Uh and sometimes it will be a full year of pause where we will not grow, but we'll just sit back, dialogue, do reflections, go through processes using uh art to understand what was happening to us and to the world around us. That was the second piece. The third was uh the role of mentors. Uh I had mentors in India, I have mentors globally. I had mentors who were from the education field, but also mentors who are completely disconnected from education, but in completely different fields. And those helped me understand again how the world is shifting and what's happening in the world. Again, where are we in relation to the world? How are we relevant in relation to the world? Uh so that was the third piece I think that helped me be uh ready for these pivots and be able to go into these pivots. Some of them also we kind of stumbled into as we started building.
SPEAKER_00But that's a good take. So you pause, you kind of look at it, look at signals that is kind of driving some of these changes, and also see people who have gone down that path as well. The role of uh mentors. Yeah. And as things should have had your responsibilities didn't kind of become less and less, but it became more and more. Yeah, they did. As the scale of the operation organization became and in this process, what was hardest for you to change internally for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's another good question. So in the first decade as a leader, I was a confused micromanaging leader. Uh in the second decade, I had to build the skill to let go. Build the skill to trust, trust my team, trust the culture, trust the institution building process, which was very difficult for me. To not have access to information about what's happening in every single focus area that we have, not be involved in every single decision that's being taken across the organization. Those were the difficult things to let go. And then I had to work on myself saying, where is that lack of trust coming from? And of course, it was deeply connected to my own experience of education, which deeply taught me only competition, didn't teach me teamwork or collaboration. Uh, I was in a school environment where the teachers themselves said that you need to do better than the next guy if you want to be first in class and you don't share your notes with the other person, you don't share your learnings and knowledge with the other person. So distrust was very much built into my DNA because of the school system. So then learning to trust that we are in this together. This is actually Sujata gave me a beautiful insight in those days. She said there's one approach of a leader, which is my approach, which is that I have a vision on running towards that vision. And I don't care whether someone is running as fast as me or not. When I turn back and I see that the team is way behind, and then I'm literally dragging it. So at one level I'm running at 100 meters, 100 miles an hour kind of speed, but at another level I'm dragging the team towards my vision. The other approach, which is her approach, it is that you start with where the team is at and you work together, and you walk together. So it's not so much that you need to reach a certain destination, it's more important that you're walking together. Because if you're walking together, it's likely that you will achieve more. You will get further, and you will take everyone along, and you will learn along the way. That there are others also who have ideas and visions and can contribute to your own journey and learning. So that was for me the big shift that I had to make.
SPEAKER_00Wonderful. And you can kind of see that evolution, right? From being a micromanager, now being that kind of a leader who completely enters the team and the team rallies behind him. Yeah. Wonderful. So, Vishal, in all of this journey, if there's one insight that your journey has clarified for you about change, what would that insight be?
SPEAKER_01I think the most obvious insight, which everyone knows, is that it takes time. Change takes time. Especially when you're working with uh human lives. But I think the more difficult insight is that everyone has their own version of change. Everyone has their own vision of change. So someone out there believes that we need to double down all our efforts on numeracy and literacy for children. And have children go to school at the age of three. So they are ready for like actual school at the age of six. Uh, there are someone like us who believes that you know life skills are important. There's someone else who believes that no, we need to take teachers away from the equation and use technologies. And that's the way we'll be able to reach every child in the remotest path of the country. There's someone else who believes that the teacher is score to learning, and no learning will happen without a deep, committed relationship between the child and the teacher. Someone believes that AI is the way to now transform education. That in the last one here, every single conference, global matchmap, has had AI and education and is going to be the failure of education reform in the world. And someone believes that, you know, with the kind of inequities we're dealing with, AI is not going to solve for the inequities or the mindsets of inequities that we carry in our society of class, caste, gender, religion. So how do you address that? So each one is coming with their own vision of education. And sometimes they go into conflict. That's been our struggle too. And the learning has been that an institutional approach to such large-scale ecosystem exchange will always have limited impact. Because institution will have to have its own agenda. It's driven by who gives it funding, it's driven by my own understanding of what the problem is and what changes needed. How do we move away from those institutional identities to more humanistic, ecosystemic identities, which help do which help us kind of let go of our agenda, our identities, our belief system, and build a more broader shared purpose?
SPEAKER_00Which is the holistic agendas, holistic intent. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. We shall we always leave our listeners with a micro experiment that they can try for themselves. For all the listeners listening out there, if there is a micro-experiment that you would invite the listeners to try, what would that be? Can I offer two? Of course. Okay.
SPEAKER_01One very simply that if you have a child in your home or in your extended family. And if you get a chance to go to a parent-teacher meeting, say if you're a parent, no, yes. So instead of asking the school or the teacher what my child is learning, or whether my child is getting homework or how my child is doing in their examinations, if you could shift the question and ask the teacher, is my child learning to make friends? Is my child learning to be helpful? Is my child learning to be kind? Just fact shifting question. It will force also the teacher and the school to kind of sit back and say, okay, what is really the purpose of education? Is it the completion of a certain syllabus or is it about building human beings that will shape our society 30 years from now? So that's the first experiment that I'll invite parents out there to do. The second is something that I've lived by since I started this work. It was through an encounter with the beggar, with a child who has a beggar on a traffic signal. When we see someone begging at a traffic signal, whether it's a child or an or an adult, we kind of look away. We feel awkward. Sometimes we might give money, sometimes we might not. But the tendency is always to kind of look away, to not look at uh what is what one would call decay in our society. Something that's not nice about our society. And my invitation is that whether you choose to give them money or not, look at them, make eye contact, acknowledge them as a human being. Because that is a that level of dignity, respect that is why they are on the streets, why they're beginning, we don't know. But they are a human being sharing this wonderful world together. If you could just look them in the eye, get them a smile, even if you're saying, I'm not going to give you any money, but I'm just going to look at you and acknowledge you as a human being. That makes a huge difference.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely make a whole lot of difference. Thanks for sharing that uh powerful micro-experiment, uh, Vishak. I hate to kind of uh draw curtains to this wonderful uh conversation, but all good things need to come to a close. This show is all about creating ripples of inspiration before you and I sign off. What's your inspire someone today message to all the listeners?
SPEAKER_01Uh let's all take a pause in this uh in this world that's pushing us towards more and more and more and more and more speed and more consumption. Just let's take a moment for ourselves and let's take a pause and celebrate this beautiful world we live in.
SPEAKER_00That's the message out there, my dear listeners. Let's celebrate in the pause. Take a pause, take a moment to reflect on beautiful things around us. It can be people around us, it can be situations around us, it can be things around us. Let's appreciate what we have around us. On that note, we shall couldn't have asked for a better uh masterclass of change makers than what you kind of shared uh with me and my listeners today. Thank you so much for doing this and uh wishing you and all of your endeavours a wonderful 2026 and uh beyond. Continue to kind of create create those ripples of inspiration.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Srian. It's been such a pleasure to have this conversation with you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for spending this time with us. Conversations like this remind us that good doesn't always come from answers, it often comes from better questions. Not to grand gestures, but to everyday choices. That belief still holds now with a little more depth and a lot more listing. If something from today's episode stayed with you, carry it forward, share it, sit with it, or explore it further through the IST ability of the book inspire someone today. Until we meet again, stay curious, keep inspiring, and inspire someone today.
