Interactive session at the ‘Connect the Dots’ event at Inorbit Mall Vashi on 10th October 2010. This is one question that always comes up!

Listing all events scheduled around the book in next 2 weeks.

All are welcome

MUMBAI
Date: Friday July 16, 2010
Venue: Oxford Bookstore, Churchgate
Time: 630 pm

Panel: Ranjiv Ramchandani (Tantra tshirts) and Sunita Ramnathkar (Fem) – both featured in Connect the Dots will be there to interact with the audience.

HYDERABAD
Date: Friday July 23, 2010
Venue: Landmark bookstore Banjara Hills, road # 12
Time: 630 pm

Panel discussion on entrepreneurship with:
Deepesh Agarwal, founder, GoCars (An ISB graduate who is currently operating his mobile technology start up from the Incubation Lab on the ISB campus).

Mansur Ahamed, founder, Tigertail Gaming Studios (An IIM Ahmedabad graduate who turned down offers from investment banks to start up his own venture).

Sundar Subramanian, co-founder Dimdim Technologies (An MS in Computer Science from Drexel University, passionate about working on cutting edge technology).

CHENNAI
Date: Saturday July 24, 2010
Venue: Landmark bookstore, Citi Centre, Mylapore
Time: 630 pm

Panel:
Mr M Mahadevan,  founder of Oriental Cuisine, from Connect the Dots 

Mr K Raghavendra Rao,  founder of Orchid Pharma, from Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

Sudarshan Anandkumar, co-founder of TING, a recent start-up.

Apart from the above I would be visiting a couple of colleges in each city. And if any of you would like to do a meetup over dinner after these events let me know!

You are all invited!

Hanmant Gaikwad (Jugaad section of CTD, founder of Bhatrat Vikas Group) will be present. I have also invited two local entrepreneurs – Saurabh Garg (co-founder, Four Fountains spa chain) and Ajay Aggarwal (IT entrepreneur and mentor to start-ups).

So we’ll have a small panel discussion & audience interaction – come, join in if you can!

'Connect the Dots' event in Delhi: Fri May 28

All are welcome.

We’re expecting the following entrepreneurs from ‘Connect the Dots’:
* Sunita Ramnathkar, Fem
* Prem Ganapathy, Dosa Plaza
* Ranjiv Ramchandani, Tantra t-shirts
* Samar Gupta, Trikaya Agriculture
* Hanmant Gaikwad, BVG

It will be an informal, interactive session so do come!

1) Date: Friday 14th May
    Time: 5-630 pm
    Venue: Infosys campus bookstore

Event open to all Infy employees

2) Date: Saturday 15th May
    Time: 3-430 pm
    Venue: Strand Book store

Event open to all.

Both events will essentially be ‘meet the author’ + interact with some of the entrepreneurs from the book (names to be confirmed by this evening)

Strand Book Store (address & directions)
1st floor, South Block
Manipal Centre, Dickenson Rd,
Bangalore – 42. 
Ph nos: 30577661-3

Strand book store route map

Why Strand?
I had a choice of other stores, of course, to hold this event. But when Vidya Virkar emailed me and introduced herself as the daughter of T N Shanbag, the owner of the legendary Strand Book Stall in Mumbai – I could not help but say ‘yes’.

As someone who grew up in Colaba, I spent some happy afternoons in that tiny store, agonising  over ‘what to buy’. Not that books were bought too often – libararies ruled reading habits!

Mr Shanbag was an amazing man, an entrepreneur before the word ‘entrepreneurship’ came into vogue. He passed away last year, but Strand lives on. The books business is now a big one, but size is not everything. In its passion for books, Strand remains a giant.

So do come to Strand this Saturday. Some of you wondered if there would be enough space. Vidya assures me that won’t be an issue. The entire floor will be cleared up and we would have 100+ capacity.

In case you guys are game we can all hop over for a coffee after the event. Sort of a tweetup/ meetup – whatever you want to call it!

Will update on events in Mumbai & Pune in the next post.

 I  am reading the first chapter of ‘Connect the Dots’  - Prem Ganapathy of Dosa Plaza… “Neenga yeludhuna content nalla than iruku anna puriyatha languagula yeludhi yen ippadi pandringa…”

Can you understand that sentence in Tamil?

Your book is also like that only… Can you pls give a book which written in Full English..?
 
Regards
M Suresh
Coimbatore

This is not the first email I have received on this subject, and it won’t be the last. So, let me explain main apni books mein beech beech mein Hindi kyun use karti hoon.

In the case of ‘Connect the Dots’, there is a slight technical reason. Several of the interviews were conducted fully in Hindi. Not that the subject did not know English but he was more at ease in the native tongue.

And that’s perfectly OK, I can translate the interviews. But some words and phrases lose their impact in translation… So I deliberately leave them as is.

But, the reason I use Hindi goes beyond that.

My style of writing is about making the written word flow, to reflect the way we speak in what we read. And none of us speaks the Queen’s English today; it’s all mashed up.

I started writing like this a long time before mashing up was accepted, at least by the media. My very first middle, published by a newspaper called The Indian Post in August of 1989, bore the title ‘Crazy about phoren’.

What word can you substitute for ‘phoren’ – ‘imported goods’? Not quite the same thing, is it?

Well, Indian Post had a very young and progressive editor by the name of Nikhil Lakshman (he is now the editor of rediff.com). Four years later, when I worked with The Independent (owned by the TOI group), it was rather different!

As a young management trainee I actually got an opportunity to create a youth page called ‘INDY’. The truth is, no one in the editorial team wanted the headache but who could say ‘no’ to the owner, Vineet Jain. So they gladly let me do it… and I did it my way.

INDY was a page of, for and by the youth and it broke unwritten rules, quite happily. Every Friday I would show the completed, fully composed page to the editor – Ms Dina Vakil. I often detected a slight wrinkling of her delicate nose, at the kind of headlines I chose.
 
But ‘INDY’ became wildly popular and equally important – Vineet Jain loved it. So the Oxbridge brigade had to live with it.

The same tradition continued when I started JAM. We assumed that a majority of our readers understood the use of a Hindi word or phrase or even an entire paragraph. If the writer chose to put it that way.

And I never had a single complaint on this front.

When I started writing ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’ I wrote it the only way I know how. As the words came to me. And yes, it included the odd phrase or even entire sentence in Hindi.

I did this because I was focussed on an audience of young Indians. And I believe 90% of this audience has functional knowledge of Hindi – and will get it.

To the remaining 10% my sincere apologies. I will say in my defence that most of the time… when I use Hindi.. it is not with respect to crucial information. And if I use an entire sentence I do try and follow that up with a sentence in English which means pretty much the same thing.

But yes, there are exceptions. The entire ‘advice’ page of the Prem Ganapathy chapter is in Hindi. The translated version, somehow, did not have the same earthiness, or impact.

However, I will definitely post it here for the benefit of readers like Suresh.

At the end of the day, I find almost every Indian newspaper has given up on propah English. But very few lament the loss of grammar and perfection in prose. Because we have accepted ki ‘we are like this only’.

I don’t think of it as ‘Hinglish’- just a reflection of our multi-lingual reality.

I am going to make a statement which may be controversial, but I truly think Hindi has emerged as a ‘national language’ over the last 15 years. Not because it was ‘imposed’ on people but because of pop culture. Especially Bollywood.

For that matter, most of us know a fair smattering of Punjabi now, thanks to ‘Hindi’ film songs.

The mash up continues; nothing is sacred anymore. Long live the desification of inglis. And the anglicisation of desis.

1. Where can I buy the book?

Bookstores everywhere.

Yes, I know the distribution has been a bit slow but I’m told you will get ‘Connect the Dots’ in Crossword and other major chain stores by the end of this week. Do let me know if that’s not the case!

2. Can I buy ‘Connect The Dots’ online?

At the following websites:

a) Infibeam: Click here.
Infibeam will ship the books to locations in India and selected countries including USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore.

b) Flipkart: Click here.

c) Indiaplaza: Click here.

By the way, all three websites are selling author-signed copies. Yup, I sat and signed a mountain of books to make that happen…

Rashmi signing 500 copies

And that’s just the first 500!

3. Yet another title inspired by Steve Jobs?

Yes, the title ‘Connect the Dots’ is inspired by the same speech at Stanford where Steve Jobs exhorted graduates to ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’. And I have acknowledged that right at the beginning of the book.

Why am I obsessed with Steve Jobs? Well, I just am. And now that I own an iPhone that might get worse But seriously, I was inspired by Steve Jobs a long time ago, when I read the book ‘Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple’.

Steve Jobs persuaded John Sculley, the President of Pepsi, to join Apple with these immortal words, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

That line remained in my mind, and served as a guidepost, when I stood at the crossroads in my career.

That said, I can promise you the title of my third book is not inspired by Steve Jobs

4. Is ‘Connect The Dots’ a sequel to ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’?

Yes, and no.

Yes, because so many of you asked why does ‘Stay Hungry…’ only featured stories of MBAs – that too from IIMA – I felt compelled to look at the completely opposite kind of profile.

My contention with ‘Stay Hungry…’ was that MBAs can be entrepreneurs and it was the objective (set by CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad) that the book should inspire young B-school graduates to consider such a career option.

Many of the readers however concluded that an MBA is what they should aim for, if they wanted to be successful entrepreneurs.

Anyhow, I thank them for their plaintive emails to me asking “what about us, ‘ordinary’ graduates”. That question set the stage for ‘Connect the Dots’ and I am happy to say that in terms of sheer variety of people I met, this book was a more interesting experience!

5. So, is ‘Connect the Dots’ as good as the first book?

Well, I certainly cannot comment on that. In fact I have no idea if the first book was ‘good’ either

But here are some reviews from early readers of ‘Connect the Dots’:

Have read 5 stories so far, and each one stays, cos it’s written so well, and the stories of each of the entrepreneurs are so inspiring. I also like that there’s no melodrama and all the interviewees seem to accept things for what they are (for example, Ranjiv Ramchandani when asked if he decided not to cut corners wrt the quality of his t-shirts says, nah it’s just that i was ignorant about the quality! Great read…

-Amrithaa on Flipkart

Click for more reviews at Flipkart here.

Rashmi Bansal’s new book – ‘Connect The Dots‘ is a follow-up to her hugely successful book ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’. The earlier book mentioned the inspiring stories of IIMA graduates. Connect The Dots is about successful entrepreneurs without the typical MBA degree.

The book has classified entrepreneurs in three categories:
1. Jugaad – Ones who have no formal business training and learnt by observation, experimentation and application of mind.
2. Junoon – Ones who are driven by passion and ideas which are ahead of its time.
3. Zubaan – Ones who are creative people with unique talent

The book has a biographical account of the entrepreneur and advice to other entrepreneurs – same style as Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. The selection of the entrepreneurs is interesting indeed which adds diversity to the book and the subject of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs behind success stories like Reva, Dosa Plaza, Su-Kam, Crossword, Tantra T-Shrits, Veta, Fem Care are featured as well as Film Director Paresh Mokashi and Wildlife Photographer Kalyan Verma. Though there are no formulas to success, it is interesting to know the journey of the fellow entrepreneurs.

Rashmi Bansal’s style and language is amazing as always ! She has got another bestseller! Read it !</em>

- Ashok Karania on his blog.

Reviews on Infibeam here.

Twitter feedback:

@YouthPad I like the narrative of Connect the Dots..

@ravisagar Read first 3 stories this morning. Truly inspirational stories. Almost finished the book. Why don’t you write part 3???

6. When are you having a book launch in Mumbai, Delhi, etc etc?

There will be ‘Connect The Dots’ launch events in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai in the month of May. Would love to see you there, will keep you posted!