hello from kalyan

i am kalyan, and i wanted to write this a lot earlier. but wiebke didn’t let me ;)

Ok, let me tell you a bit about myself, and how this started – i traveled a bit in 2008-09 for around 10 months across India, without much of a plan or a goal… the experience gave me perspectives that got me to start my social enterprise InteGreater with the objective of connecting people across diverse backgrounds, to work cohesively for a happy planet.

i want to focus my energies on creating a desired state rather than on eradicating poverty. A year and a half of research in collaboration with several people, led me to the concept of “adequacy”. Adequacy is a state in which all the living forms in a given region have optimum access to factors that ensure dignity of life.

In May this year, I was three months away from launching my first grassroots project, called ProtoVillage, a time bound attempt to co-create the state of adequacy in a remote village cluster in Andhra Pradesh, a southern state in India. Around that time, I met Wiebke who was traveling through India looking for stories on social entrepreneurship.

We met for, what on hindsight appears to have been a super prolonged lunch, that almost stretched to dinner… just that the waiter didn’t want us there anymore ;)

We realized our common interests in rural development, and it immediately looked like we were going to work together on something. The next day, we met at a few places ;), and I briefly mentioned my idea for a trip across rural India, and called it the sunshine journey. The idea was simple – go around the country meeting people who are doing amazing things that can be replicated, and document it all.

The idea got us so excited; we committed ourselves to taking it further, beyond casual discussions. Over the next few days we added a number of layers to the idea, and a vague idea called the sunshine journey gradually metamorphosed into a credible project called The Glass Half Full. 5 months ago, it looked like a dream, and now it’s a project that we are counting down days for… My contribution so far has been very limited, except in terms of conceptualization, owing to the fact that I’ve been living and working in ProtoVillage since August, and I am super proud of the way Wiebke almost single handedly got us here.

There are still a few things that we need to sort out, before we hit the roads, but having done this distance already, what lies ahead looks easy!