This article was first published in Mint Lounge on Saturday, April 22, 2017
The CEO of Teach For India on making education accessible to all, the strength of her parents, and her own unfinished degree at Tufts University.
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein is a classic children’s picture book about an enduring friendship between a tree and a young boy. In this tender tale, the tree keeps giving and giving to a boy who keeps asking for more as he grows up. There are various interpretations of this book—but most readers agree that ultimately, it’s a poignant story about giving and selflessness.
So I’m not surprised when Shaheen Mistri, 46, founder of Akanksha and the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Teach For India (TFI)—both organizations focused on education—tells me it’s her favourite children’s book. Even before we meet for this interview, I have pretty much decided that a woman who set up a non-profit at the age of 20 to educate underprivileged children must be, well, selfless.
“I don’t think she ever thinks of herself that way,” says Mistri’s close friend and colleague of over 20 years, Nandita Dugar, who serves on the board of both Akanksha and TFI. “But she is one of the most selfless people I know.”
I meet Mistri for coffee at a café down the road from her home in Worli, Mumbai, where she is a regular. I have a feeling that many meetings are conducted here, over coffee and conversations—Mistri’s favourite things, one of her colleagues tells me.
Mistri seems embarrassed when I bring up her selfless nature. But since I find it hard to get inside the head of a woman who left a top-notch liberal arts education at Tufts University in the US to teach low-income children in India, I persist. This time, I probe her about what parents can do to raise selfless children. “I don’t know,” she replies. Then, a pause. “My own children are not in that space right now. Not yet.”
We go on to talk about other things but Mistri quickly brings the conversation back to my original question. She tells me what made a difference to her—her parents set an example.
“They always looked after other people,” she says, describing her father, a former banker, as a “rock” who helped people within their extended family, both emotionally and financially. Her mother was a speech therapist, so Mistri and her brother became familiar with children with special needs.
Mistri was born in Mumbai but her father’s transferable job meant the family kept moving and she attended a total of 10 schools. After stints in Lebanon, Greece and Indonesia, the family reached the US. There, Mistri attended a private high school in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut. The transfers were difficult for a “painfully shy child”, but they made Mistri value diversity and left her with an interesting accent that sounds like a blend of all the places she’s lived in.
Connecticut was a world far, far removed from India. To ensure the children didn’t forget their roots, the Mistri family would visit Mumbai every summer. And every summer, a young Mistri would volunteer at a school for the visually impaired, at an orphanage or any place that could do with an extra pair of hands.
“I didn’t like those trips to India at that time,” Mistri tells me, “but the seed was planted. I noticed the disparity. The inequality around me was glaring.” It is this polarity that would shape Mistri’s future choices.
Mistri came to Mumbai in the summer that followed her first year at Tufts University. One day, she was stuck at a traffic light near Nariman Point. A few children came running up to the car, begging. She recalls, “I remember looking at them and asking myself at that moment, why am I going back to the US? Won’t anything I do in India be more valuable than going back home?”
She called her parents, who were in the US, and told them she wasn’t going back. She’s still here, working on her dream to provide every child in India access to an education. Her parents have moved back to Mumbai too.
After leaving Tufts, Mistri enrolled for a course in sociology at St Xavier’s College, graduating in 1992. She convinced a group of college friends to volunteer as teachers and begged schools to let her use their empty classrooms after hours. Her tenacity paid off—the first Akanksha centre was born in 1991 at Holy Name School, Colaba. Fifteen children from neighbouring slums attended the first class that Mistri taught herself. She says she felt “every possible emotion ranging from helpless to exhilarated”. It was a start.
The centre soon evolved into the Akanksha Foundation. It now serves 6,500 children through three centres and 21 schools in Mumbai and Pune.
Mistri felt proud as she watched Akanksha grow but says it also brought on a feeling of restlessness. “After years of asking myself, what do I want to do, I began to ask myself, where do I need to be?” Mistri says, explaining that she felt a “crushing responsibility” to find a way to scale up what she was doing at Akanksha.
In India, there is an urgent need for it. Nearly one in four people here is below the age of 14. More than half the students in class V in government schools cannot read a class II text or do a simple math problem. There are 900,000 vacancies for teachers across primary and upper-primary schools all over the country. To address this, India needs intervention.
According to Mistri, that intervention is leadership. In 2008, she founded TFI, based on the proven model of Teach For America. It’s an extension of her work at Akanksha: The organization’s mission is to build a community of leaders who will work within the education sector to eliminate the inequality we see in it now.
It works on a two-part model. In the short term, TFI places outstanding college graduates and young professionals (referred to as fellows) in low-income schools to teach full-time for two years. During this period, they get exposed to the grass-root realities of India’s education system and, hopefully, are fired up enough to commit to a career in education. Many of TFI’s alumni do, and in the longer term, they work as teachers, principals, policymakers and curriculum designers who work towards the same goal—to educate all the children in India.
TFI, now funded by corporate donors, other foundations and high net worth individuals, is in its ninth year. It receives thousands of applications each year and has an acceptance rate of 8%. At present, it has 40,000 students, 1,200 fellows, 240 staff members and 1,500 alumni.
“She sets audacious goals. And then she just goes and does them,” says Dugar. “I remember thinking, why would anyone give two years of their life to Teach For India, but Shaheen’s done it, she’s pulled it off.” TFI has set one more lofty goal: It wants to reach one million children over the next five years.
Given Mistri’s formidable reputation, chances are she will get there. “She’s a visionary. But also someone who has substance and can execute,” says Fatima Agarkar, co-founder of Ka Edu Associates, a Mumbai-based educational management services company. “There are enough people out there who want to save the world. We need more people like Shaheen who are actively doing something, who are hands on,” she says.
I drop in at a dimly lit TFI class at the Worli Sea Face municipal school. Here, I find a fellow, Neha Gujar, 22, teaching class VI students. Around 40 boys and girls—children of drivers, domestic helps and daily-wage labourers from the surrounding slums—cheerfully jump up to greet me.
Gujar, who has a mass media degree from Jai Hind College, became a TFI fellow for a simple reason: She knows education can change lives. Her father comes from a poor family in Rajasthan. She tells me his prospects were bleak. But he managed to go to school and eventually joined the Indian Navy. The opportunity brought with it money, respect and a chance to educate his own children.
As a TFI fellow, Gujar earns Rs17,500 a month. “Compared to my friends, I’m not earning that much. Then I think about Shaheen. Her life. Her story. And I look at all that she’s achieved,” Gujar says. “That inspires me.”
Mistri still teaches once every 10 days and calls the classroom experience a highlight. “I don’t know any other role in this world where, whether you have had a good or bad day, you come into a classroom and you are just showered with love and acceptance by these kids. Being around the children, it’s hard to walk away and not say, what can I do a little bit more, a little bit better, for more kids.”
I linger in the TFI classroom and watch Gujar at her job. She shows me what her students are studying. Last year, none of them were reading at a level appropriate to their grade. Within a year, a quarter of the class is where it should be. Gujar looks satisfied. “Being a TFI fellow, I feel I am part of a movement working for India. Every day, when I wake up, I feel I have a purpose.”
It sounds like a rehearsed answer, but standing in the middle of that crowded classroom packed with eager faces in blue and white uniforms, I believe Gujar.
Remember all that talk about selflessness? I don’t ask this young TFI fellow, who will become a TFI staff member when she completes her fellowship, what or who drives her. This time, I am pretty sure I know the answer.
The master mariner, who founded a start-up after two decades at one of Asia’s biggest commodity trading firms, on Chinese hotels, Sunday dinners and god.
This article was published in Mint Lounge in March, 2017
Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint
Harry Banga always thought he would retire from a career in trading commodities when he turned 60. Much to his own relief, however, things didn’t go according to plan or he would have been at a loss for things to do. He tells me he has no hobbies. Banga, now 66, is immersed at work when we meet. His office is where he is happiest. It probably helps that it has a breathtaking view of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, dotted with ships.
The Amritsar-born, Hong Kong-based Harindarpal Banga—“Harry” to everyone who knows him—is the chairman and chief executive officer of The Caravel Group. “It’s a start-up,” Banga chuckles. But one with grey-haired managers, an experienced team, and a billion-dollar balance sheet. “We created something new,” Banga demurs. “That’s what a start-up is.”
A diversified global conglomerate, Caravel was founded in 2013 by Banga and his two sons, Guneet (37) and Angad (33). The Bangas own all of it. He says his sons, who were working elsewhere, forced him to start his own venture, promising they would join him if he did. Though both have leadership roles within Caravel, Guneet, who is the executive director, is currently on a sabbatical, working on philanthropic projects in Thailand. Angad, the group’s chief operating officer, plays an active role in the day-to-day operations and heads the asset manage-ment division.
Harry Banga made a name and fortune for himself over two decades at Noble Group, a commodity trading company based in Hong Kong. As group vice-chairman, he was widely credited with turning the company into one of Asia’s biggest business successes. He had joined Noble in 1989 to head its new shipping division. It was the perfect match: Noble could trade commodities and transport raw materials from suppliers to buyers. The timing was fortuitous. China’s economy was regaining momentum and the government was spending liberally on domestic infrastructure projects. It had a voracious appetite for raw materials. Banga quickly realized the impact an emerging China would have on the world stage, so that’s where he focused his attention. “I pretty much lived there, not in five-star hotels but in dirty, filthy, smelly guest houses,” he says, remembering the years he spent travelling to remote corners of China. “And the food was terrible.” It was rough, but he persisted, even picking up Mandarin during those years of travel and establishing key contacts within China.
“For an Indian national to be so respected, to have such ‘guanxi’(relationships) within China, is very rare,” says Sam Chambers, editorial director of Asia Shipping Media, which controls global maritime news portal Splash.
Banga left Noble in 2010. He doesn’t say much about why he stepped down, except that the way Noble was growing (“too fast”) and diversifying (“becoming asset heavy”) didn’t match his sensibilities. He continued with them as vice-chairman emeritus till their 2013 annual general meeting to enable a smooth transition.
His exit was well timed. Noble has been plagued by accounting problems, several high-level departures, and a downturn in the commodity market. The company is nowhere near the darling of the stock market it once was.
Rich with experience and cash from selling his stake in Noble, Banga set up Caravel. It is named after a small, nimble, 15th century sailing ship developed by the Spanish and Portuguese to explore uncharted waters. The business has three verticals: logistics, which includes maritime services such as ship management, commodities trading, and asset management. Asset management was introduced to attract Angad, who has a background in private equity.
In a little over three years, Caravel has put Banga back on the list of Hong Kong’s 50 Richest People, with a fortune of $1.02 billion (around Rs6,800 crore), according to Forbes magazine. Caravel, which posted a revenue of $80 million in its first year of operation, estimates a jump to $1.8 billion last year. Banga looks embarrassed when I talk to him about his wealth. “What means more to me is when they compare Caravel to companies that have been around for 50 or 80 years,” he says, adding, “At this age, if I have more than three drinks, the doctor’s bill is bigger than the drinks bill, so where will you spend the money?”
Later, I understand where the money goes—well, some of it at least. “I don’t fly commercial, I have my own plane,” Banga says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sometimes I say, why should I go in my own plane? I worry about my carbon footprint. But Angad says, Dad, just enjoy your life.”
As we speak in his office, I can’t help but notice that the view makes a perfect backdrop to Banga’s story. He began his life on the seas. He was not really interested in an engineering or medical degree, the traditional career path for most Indian men with his kind of family background at the time, and a chance meeting with a family friend who worked for the Indian Merchant Navy piqued his interest. Growing up in landlocked Punjab, Banga had never seen the sea. Without telling his father, he applied for a position with the Indian merchant navy. An exam and an interview later, he was accepted as a cadet.
Banga loved his life as a seafarer. “It was the lure of seeing the world. You went to a port and stayed there for months. I loved it. Seeing new places, meeting new people. It was amazing.”
He went on to become a master mariner (a qualification that allows you to become the captain of a ship) and at 28, the youngest captain in the navy.
It was during his time on the sea that the young Sikh cut his hair. It was impractical, with all that travel and being on a ship, he says. Banga’s father didn’t allow him into the house for three years. “Three years,” he emphasizes. Even after they made their peace, Banga had to grow a beard and put on a turban before going to meet his father.
I meet Banga for a second time at a gurdwara in Hong Kong on a chilly Saturday morning. He is there with his family to attend an akhand path (continuous recitation of religious hymns). “I believe in god and god for me is Sikhism,” Banga says. “Being Sikh defines who they are, it’s a big part of their identity,” Angad says of his parents. I learn that Banga has donated $1.2 million to the gurdwara for a new building and is closely involved in the design as well.
I watch Banga mingle easily with others from the local Indian community. He’s a slight man with a towering personality, the recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (the highest award given to overseas Indians) conferred by the then president, Pratibha Patil, in 2011.
Over the years, he has also developed a fiercely loyal inner circle of colleagues. The senior management at Caravel came with him from Noble. His secretary has been working with him for 30 years; the head of iron ore, for 25 years; and the head of his China unit, for 20 years. Perhaps his most endearing quality is his friendly disposition. He’s affable. Every morning, he walks the floor of his office at 10.30 and greets people personally. He has done this for 20 years. He has a monthly list of birthdays on his desk and doesn’t miss wishing an employee.
“It’s a we and us culture, never you, never me. At our Monday morning meetings, there’s no finger-pointing. If someone did something that cost the company, it’s we made a loss, never you made a loss,” says Angad. He credits his father’s leadership style—based on developing trust—for creating a family-like atmosphere in the office.
For Banga, nothing in the world is more important than family. I understand that within minutes of meeting him. He talks often of his father, a former civil servant, now 95 and ailing. Banga returns to New Delhi frequently to visit him. His wife of 37 years, Indra, goes through the day’s schedule with him before he comes to office. She has chosen all the art that is displayed in the office. His daughter-in-law Dana (Angad’s wife) works at the Caravel Foundation with Indra.
The family gets together for Sunday-night dinners. It’s not just a tradition, but one that is “sacred”, Angad says. If anyone can’t make it, there had better be a very good reason for it. It doesn’t matter that they have seen each other in office every day, all week. Sometimes, he’s kind of old fashioned, laughs Angad. “There’s so much pressure on my wife and I to have children. He’s like, all my friends have grandchildren, I am the only one who doesn’t!”
Speaking about the next generation (and a potential third), I ask Banga what he would like his legacy to be. He seems puzzled. I haven’t really thought about it, he responds. I rephrase the question. How would he like to be remembered? Banga pauses. Finally, he says, “I think I would just want someone to say, I miss him having a drink with me.” In case you are wondering, that would be single malt whisky.
The banker-turned-businesswoman and Nykaa CEO on nail enamels, taking risks, and how she built a Rs280 crore cosmetics and wellness company.
This article was published in Mint Lounge on March 24, 2017
When Falguni Nayar walks into a brightly lit Nykaa store in Mumbai’s Infiniti Mall, where I’m waiting to interview her, I scan her face quickly for make-up. After all, that’s why we are meeting—to talk beauty. Clearly, I am less subtle than I think. “I love make-up but I don’t have time to put it on any more!” she laughs loudly. The 54-year-old founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nykaa, a Rs280 crore cosmetics and wellness retailer, is simply wearing a nude lipstick and kajal.
Founded in April 2012, Nykaa started as a multi-brand online beauty retailer but has since extended its presence through a mobile app and brick-and-mortar stores. Think of it as India’s Sephora (the French multi-brand cosmetics retailer). At present, Nykaa has four stores, one each in Delhi and Bengaluru and two in Mumbai. To go pan-India, it plans to open one store every month from next year.
Nykaa is a young company but Nayar herself has been a force in the Indian business world for more than two decades. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, she spent the bulk of her career—over 18 years—at Kotak Mahindra Capital Co. When she left in 2012, she was the managing director and head of its institutional equities business. But, Nayar says, “I have always been an entrepreneur first.”
Nayar was born and raised in Mumbai, where her father ran a small bearings company, assisted by her mother. The household chatter revolved around investments, the stock market and trade. “Plus, I’m Gujarati,” she deadpans. Entrepreneurship is in her blood.
Straight out of business school, Nayar started her career as a management consultant. Her husband Sanjay Nayar, whom she met at business school, took a job in finance. He is now the CEO of global investment firm KKR India. Nayar says taking the professional route was easier since it allowed both of them to have transferable jobs.
But the entrepreneurial bug kept gnawing at her.
A few years ago, when her children (twins Anchit and Adwaita) left to study in US colleges, Nayar found herself with time on her hands. “Once I turned 50, I thought I would become complacent,” she said. It was very hard to quit the job at Kotak, “where everything was going right”, but with the self-imposed deadline of 50 looming, Nayar did just that.
Later, as we settle down for coffee at a Starbucks outlet, Nayar—dressed in a grey sari with gold accents (saris are a weakness) and delicate diamond earrings (another weakness)—relaxes into a corner couch and I start getting a sense of what drives her. “I’m an adventurer,” she says. “I was never a good swimmer but I would always be the first to jump in. The thought, what if I break a leg?, doesn’t occur to me.”
So when all the naysayers (and there were plenty) said India wasn’t ready for an e-tailer selling, of all things, beauty products, Nayar chose not to see the risks. Instinctively, she knew what women wanted. And she knew the number of Indians shopping online was about to explode.
According to management consultancy Technopak, though e-tailing currently accounts for only 1.5% of the overall retail market in India, it is growing at breakneck speed and will make up over 5% of Indian retail by 2021.
“Full marks to her for getting the retail story of India right,” says Ankur Bisen, senior vice-president, retail, consumer products and e-tailing division of Technopak. The principles of retail are simple, he says: Curate your products and know your products. And Nykaa appears to have done both really well.
Nykaa sells more than 35,000 products from 650 brands, both international and Indian, luxury and mass, and is constantly adding new labels to its stock. Last year, it brought global premium brand Estée Lauder on board, making MAC cosmetics available online in India for the first time. “It took a call on the personal care category and went deep into it. It didn’t get distracted. That’s how a retailer succeeds,” says Bisen.
Two years ago, Nayar introduced her own brand—and it has gone on to become a best-seller.
The company’s revenue has grown 350% in the last two years. In 2016, it raised a total of Rs104 crore from investors and the company hopes to break even by the end of this summer. An initial public offering is planned for 2020.
According to the company, it receives 15,000 orders a day, mostly from consumers between the ages of 22 and 35, who have disposable income and an interest in good grooming. Another attraction is the content—online make-up tutorials and product reviews are a great draw. But let’s face it, the main reason for shopping at Nykaa is accessibility.
“There was a time when women would come down to Delhi from Punjab just for a beauty shopping trip. Or they would ask a cousin to bring back a particular lipstick from a trip abroad. Now they can just order it online,” says Vasudha Rai, a former beauty director at Harper’s Bazaar, now a blogger at Vbeauty.co and columnist with The Hindu.
For those who know her, Nayar is a role model. For those who don’t, hers is an inspiring story. She’s a woman with a formidable career path and a closely knit, supportive family. It leads me to the inevitable question: Does she believe in the philosophy that a woman must “lean in” to be successful?
“Yes,” she replies. “I don’t think there is any glass ceiling. Women need to commit,” says Nayar.
Aware of the push and pull of family life many working women face, she says there’s no race. “If you need to take a few years off, you can come back. But when you come back, you need to be committed because you reap what you sow.”
Her daughter Adwaita, 26, recalls the early years of elementary school and says it wasn’t always easy to have a working mum. “I missed her! I would call her non-stop and disturb her in meetings,” she says.
As Adwaita grew older, she understood the choices her mother had made. “Today she’s my most important source of inspiration. She never really dwelt on whether one part of her life was being underserved and in the end it definitely all balanced out,” she says. Adwaita, who helped her mother launch Nykaa, is going to resume work there after she graduates from Harvard Business School this summer.
“Enough” and “done” aren’t words in Nayar’s business vocabulary, says Pratima Bhatia, a brand consultant who has worked with Nykaa, adding, “She never stops, even when she has exceeded expectations.” Once Nykaa had established itself as a multi-brand beauty retailer, Nayar decided to tweak the business model by introducing her own brand, Nykaa, in 2015. First up was a line of nail enamels. The range has since expanded to include kajals, lipsticks, body mists and lotions, among other items.
“It was a response to gaps in the market,” she explains. The beauty salon she frequented did not stock the popular OPI nail-polish range she liked. “They would have four colours of one brand, some from another. The whole experience was terrible,” she says. Research showed that part of the problem was with Indian import regulations, which made registering new colours a lengthy and tedious process. Nayar realized a domestic manufacturer didn’t need to go through that process, so if she made nail enamels, she could get them to the market quickly.
The strategy worked. Nykaa’s own nail colours sell 8-10 times more than the next best-selling nail brand on its website. According to Rai, it’s because of a “combination of good rates and cool colours”.
As we stand in front of a kaleidoscopic display of 120 nail colours at a Nykaa store, I’m drawn to a neon-green one. It’s called Key-Lime Slush. A coral-colour one is named Cherry Pop. I ask Nayar if she chooses the names. Yes, she says, it’s fun.
She shows me the top-selling nail enamel. It’s a charcoal-grey one called Squid Ink Mousse, which retails for Rs199.
And no, she doesn’t have Squid Ink Mousse at home. She prefers floral shades.
All of a sudden, Nayar pauses. She’s found a bottle of ink-blue nail varnish. The Nykaa branding in black is indistinguishable against the dark background. I can see it bothers her. She immediately asks a sales associate to notify someone in her office to fix it. “Retail is all about the detail,” she says, and when you are Nayar, every detail is a big deal.
Before we part, I ask her one last question: Why did she name the company Nykaa? “Because nayika means you are the actress of your life,” she says, smiling. I have no doubt Nayar is relishing her current role.
