Empathetically Yours: Connecting Emotion and Enterprise Part-2

The choice of our professions and the journey that follows depends a lot on the nature of the emotion that drives them! The years of our youth are an important milestone that bridge our younger selves and our adulthood, physically, psychologically, and emotionally and its very easy to miss those small nails and rivets that connect our aspirations to the bigger picture. These tiny connectors are the motivators which can be categorized as empathetic, materialistic, or scholastic objectives that print out the roadmap on which we pin our professional aspirations and achieve our goals. The ethos and pathos of our professional journey create stories of successes and failures that justify or nullify the choice of our objectives and are archived as “lessons” for the future pilgrims, in search of professional nirvana.

The easiest and yet the most challenging task is to listen to yourself and connect on empathetic terms with an immediate crisis or requirement, that can serve a social cause or help our environment at large. This blog post explores such spirited teams and professionals from India who took up the cause of improving community life and bringing about a change through a prudent application of technology and a will to explore beyond the known.

Anik Panja and JV Raghava Sharma are giving rainwater harvesting a whole new meaning through their Vizag, (India) based Hydrorgraviticity that makes filters of sand and gravel which can be retrofitted to pipes to reuse rainwater that otherwise would have been wasted.  The filters have remote sensors to detect the pH, turbidity and the flow of water which serve as information that tell users about the purification levels in the filtered water. Each gated community has a dashboard that helps users view the data while a master dashboard helps the company interpret the data.

Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian lunar probe, was launched by the Indian Space Research Organization in October 2008 and operated till August 2009. The technology used to detect water on the moon in this mission is now used to predict leakages in underground water pipes, a non-invasive method to conserve water, deployed in Aumsat, an enterprise set up by Riddhish Soni and Akash Solanki. Aumsat runs Python based algorithms that use artificial intelligence to detect images provided from an Argentinian satellite, passing the Indian sub-continent every 15 minutes while an API connecting the satellite to Aumsat’s system, captures the images. These images are then processed and interpreted, and the data is provided to clients for further usage.

Ekatvam was initially a final year engineering college project, engineered by Rishabh Ravichandran and Piyush Bhandarkar. The duo has devised a solution, including a dashboard, based on the JavaScript library ReactJS, which automatically processes data collected from satellites and government sources to alert users on over-usage of water, and detect the speed with which ground water in villages is depleting.

Agromorph, pioneered by Akanksha Aggarwal, uses bioreactors, powered by sunlight to cleanse impure, contaminated water. Algae, present in the bioreactors eat up the harmful effluents present in the impure water, thus cleansing and purifying not only water but also the surrounding air, through the process of photosynthesis.

Bhavesh Narayani’s Solinas, that first originated in IIT Madras, uses robotics and an image processing algorithm to detect blockages in sewage systems. The data collected is then stored in a cloud-based system. Since a single robot cannot analyze the data for the various kinds of sewage pipes, there are three versions of the robotic system to cater to the three major sizes of pipes used in the sewerage system.

All the five start-ups mentioned, were selected to participate in the Next Generation Water Action multi hub challenge run by the Technical University of Denmark. Eske Bo Rosenberg, Consul General of Denmark to India says that the water innovation challenge was a collaboration of the Atal Innovation Mission and Niti Ayog from India, in association with the Danish government’s Innovation Centre in Bengaluru, India.

Run Towards the Fire: Ahmed Elsherbini, MD of Boeing India Engineering and Technology (BIETC) says that projects, specially, in engineering, should be chosen outside the comfort zone. He asserts that young engineers should grow their skills, read widely, listen carefully, ask questions, learn, volunteer and challenge oneself while staying positive and having fun.

In any profession concerned, one should always take up challenges that are new. The spirit to innovate, explore new ideas and go into the unknown, build professional character and expand horizons.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling: “Technology is one of the areas that encourages diverse talent and welcomes people who embrace multiple identities of gender, ability, etc. From the vantage point of my two decades of experience, I can safely say that there hasn’t been a better time (yet) to be a woman in technology, or anyone from a historically under-represented segment”, says Sarada Vempati, EVP and Head of Enterprise Functions Technology, Wells Fargo India & Philippines.

Look for everyday uses of engineering concepts: Growing up, Sarada watched her parents find unique ways to make life around their house convenient and remove or fix obstacles by using ingenuity, always ensuring that the solution worked towards saving time, effort, or money.

Sarada states, “My formative years, therefore, was a lived experience in terms of identifying problems, defining solutions, testing ideas, implementing the best options, and measuring outcomes. This approach transferred easily to my studies, as I began to explore and understand more complex problems in mathematics and physics and how specific solutions had been arrived at.”

Partha Parthasarathy | Director, Device Technology, Micron, India, reinstates:“Today, I work at Micron where I use some of the same principles as we build the foundations of the digital age. Our work, at the hardware level of the world’s information and data, helps enrich lives and solve some of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. While theoretical knowledge and context is foundational, look for everyday uses of these concepts to make life just a little better for you or your community. Discuss these ideas with a trusted pier group, allow them to build on your thoughts, and arrive at entirely new solutions. This, to me, is the heart of what it means to be an engineer.”

 Since technology is widely used for engineering activities, voicing challenges, scopes and opportunities at the workplace and the necessity of empathy to counter the mental and psychological blocks may, seem most relevant in the engineering vertical. However, Empathy and the opportunities it paves for optimizing enterprise and entailing the benefits therewith, is a common factor of success for any discipline seeking more productivity and holistic growth.

"Any fool can know. The point is to understand" , Albert Einstein.

And to understand, we need tag our logic to the wisdom that comes with experimenting with what triggers us to reason, rationalize, analyze and act. Empathizing with a cause can give us a confident start.

With the pandemic further accelerating flexibilities and putting forth opportunities to fully embrace the agility that technology provides, the workforce is connecting more to the empathetic side of the work-life arena. With more options for part-time and remote work, taking breaks to accommodate life events is the new normal, with little to worry about skills becoming obsolete, as opportunities to train online are now easily available.

“Water, water everywhere but not a drop of water to drink!”, may not be apt while looking around for water to quench a parched throat alone! It is also metaphorically applicable to satiate our souls, as being alone and bereft of empathy seems quite an irony, in a living population predominated by humans…..who are known to be emotionally intelligent beings.

If you wish to connect more on this and bring forth new ideas, do post your thoughts on this page.

Till we meet next!

Connect, contemplate and co-ordinate.

Cheers!

Disclaimer: The write-up in this blog owes references to the content published by the Times Of India, Kolkata on Friday, September 16, 2022.