[00:00:00 – 00:00:08] Nitin Bajaj

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the industry show.

I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Adhirath Sethi. Adi, welcome on the show.

[00:00:09 – 00:00:11] Adhirath Sethi

Wonderful meeting, Nitin. Thank you.

[00:00:11 – 00:00:14] Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here. Let’s start with who is Adi.

[00:00:16 – 00:01:18] Adhirath Sethi

So I wear three hats as I like to say, or actually now maybe four hats. One of them, of course, is is that of an author. So I’ve written two books of fiction, and, this book, On Agastya, the Moving Mountains, was is my first nonfiction. So that was an experience. Otherwise, I’m also a businessman. I have my own company based in Bangalore and primarily deal with polymers. And the third hat, of course, is my the work that I do with Agastya.

So as a board member and as someone that has spent a lot of time watching the foundation evolve, I’ve had a front row seat as you could see into into how things have panned out. And so I obviously help out both as a board member and where I can operationally and step in and offer my services as they are. And finally, as a family person, I spend a lot of time with my family, and I consider that quite a vital part, especially now that my son is close to going to college. A lot of my time seems to be taken up by, maneuvering his daily schedule and making sure he doesn’t mess up his future. So that’s that’s what I do.

[00:01:18 – 00:01:46] Nitin Bajaj

At least you think you are. Right? Yes. We all do. We’re conveying all these four hats, and we get a taste of all of those. I’m curious to ask what led you to Agastya. But also before that, if you can give us a sense for why this foundation started and who started Nitin, And then, of course, your connection into it and what pulled you in and what has kept you there.

[00:01:47 – 00:04:18] Adhirath Sethi

Yeah. So we of course, the tagline we use for Agastya is that it’s the largest hands on experiential science learning platform in the world. And, that that’s I wouldn’t say the elevator speech. That’s just the tagline we use. But to describe Agastya is to say that we try and take hands on science learning to the furthest parts of rural India. We take low cost, high impact science experiments, excuse me, in vans, mobile vans and bikes. And these go to government schools across the country with the idea being that we want kids who otherwise are learning pure straight out of textbooks to, in fact, experience science in a practical and hands on way.

And so Agastya instructors are basically trained to ignite and spark curiosity, as we say, in the minds of children and to open their minds to the idea that science is more than just the theory that they read, but is, in fact, something that you can play with, that you can explore, that you can break. These models are made to, in fact, be destroyed if they have to be and rebuilt, and that you can ultimately enjoy and possibly see a future. So Agastya was started about twenty five years ago. In fact, February 2024 was our twenty fifth anniversary by a man named Ramji Raghavan, whom along with about four other cofounders had this idea that education in India was lacking in some way. Although we are a culture where education is highly prized, it has unfortunately devolved into a rote learning exam based answerism system. In no small way because we are in fact such a huge population, it becomes quite difficult to offer the individualistic kind of training or teaching that kids perhaps in western countries are able to get. And so, obviously, I wanted to plug this gap to say that if kids are only gonna be learning from textbooks, and this includes kids that sort of graduate and go on to engineering colleges, They were all graduating with a very theorized, very non practical view and experience of what science is.

And Agastya idea was if we can at an early stage so we work with children that are in the fifth standard all the way to about the ninth standard. So at that stage, if we can create an intervention that at least brings them the awareness that creativity, curiosity, and innovative learning are, in fact, methods and tools that they can use and explore, then we really create a foundation that they can then tap into much later on and become better versions of themselves, which is what we’re aiming for.

[00:04:19 – 00:04:38] Nitin Bajaj

Well, Pat, what’s what’s your connection? You got exposed to August fairly early on, and then I’m always curious to ask people why. As you were wearing these four hats, you could have spent more time being a family person hanging out with your son and your spouse. Why choose this instead?

[00:04:39 – 00:06:44] Adhirath Sethi

So I was lucky enough. Of course, I don’t a lot of people don’t know this because we don’t have the last same last name, but Ramji Ragman is in fact my maternal uncle. And, in that sense, I’ve been lucky not just from the point of view of being a board member and watching the foundation evolve from the inside, but also having been there perhaps at the time of its conceptualization itself. Suramji was a banker, a a financer based in London, and, he was my guardian when I was studying in London. And so I had, you could say, a front row seat or I was a fly on the wall throughout the evolution of Agastya when he quit his job in London, decided to come back to India and, take this very, I would say, by in his own words, foolhardy plunge into education when he had no experience of anything to do with the education landscape in India, especially. And, eventually, as a board member, I got to see a lot more high level decisions and, the kind of calls we took at different inflection points of the foundation’s growth. But I think combined, it gave me a very interesting perspective into how Agastya evolved, how the concept for what we were trying to do went from what it started at, which was Ranji’s idea to actually build a school in India, to eventually this very different sort of hub and spoke model wherein we disseminate science through a mobile delivery mechanism that is then fueled by science centers located across the country.

So Agastya is now in 22 states all over India. And so it’s been a tremendous evolution, a tremendous growth from where it once was. And my own involvement eventually went to the point where we said when we needed to make or collate, otherwise, create a repository of Agastya learnings and insights, anecdotes, etcetera, we decided, okay, let’s write a book that captures everything that’s happened in the last quarter of a century. And being both on the board, being having this unique perspective in terms of having been there from the beginning and, coincidentally, being the writer as well, that was when I put my hand up and said, I might be the right guy to to put this all together. Yeah.

[00:06:45 – 00:07:04] Nitin Bajaj

That’s fascinating. And I wanna dig more into the book in a bit. But as we step back a little bit and talk about this fascinating growth and journey over the last twenty five, twenty six years, When you look at things now, what do you believe is the one big challenge you’re facing?

[00:07:06 – 00:08:55] Adhirath Sethi

When you say today’s challenges, I think Agastya biggest challenge is and I say this in the book, that it is unfortunately the best kept secret, in India right now. This kind of work they’ve done when we go out and present to people, they’re absolutely astounded by the breadth of the work, by the longevity of the of the foundation, and by the number of people that have put their weight behind bringing these visions that we’ve had to reality. So eminent scientists, donors from across the world, billionaires, thought leaders from Nobel laureates down to very senior scientists from large organizations in India. And yet the name Agastya is not yet a household name. People in the education space will hear Agustia and say, oh, we we know what you’re doing, and you guys are doing a fantastic job. But when we go on social media, for example, or when we go outside to lay people and we say, I guess, they are some of them may recall having seen a mobile van moving around or something, but most of them are similar to most of them would just say, what is it you do exactly? So one of the reasons for writing the book was to try and see if we can get this story into as many hands as possible and make people aware of the, honestly, the crazy obstacles and challenges that this foundation has faced and the very creative manner in which they’ve surmounted nearly all of them.

So for us, the big challenge now is increasing our reach, is going from where we are currently, which is reaching about 5,000,000 kids a year to about 20 or 25 or 30,000,000 kids a year. And the main challenge is, yes, spreading the name in a way that allows people to to look at Agastya and say, yes. I’d like to either be involved or at the very least, I’d like to tell somebody else about what these guys are doing because more people need to know.

[00:08:56 – 00:09:13] Nitin Bajaj

That’s a great challenge, but more importantly, the impact that Agastya has been able to create. Congratulations and kudos to you, to Ramji and the entire team. Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities, what’s the one that you’re most excited about?

[00:09:14 – 00:11:40] Adhirath Sethi

So we have this Agastya vision two point o currently that’s running. And as I said, we reached 5,000,000 kids now. We’ve reached about 25,000,000 children throughout Agastya twenty five year journey. And while we think that’s a great number, the new number that we now want is a hundred million children. If you were looking at the government school landscape in India, then you’re looking at about 200 to 300,000,000 children in India that go through this, learning journey. And so what we’re trying to target is at least a third of that, which is a an enormous number. So it’s more than the population of most countries.

In fact, about a year back, maybe a little more than a year ago at the Clinton Foundation event, Agastya was commemorated and applauded, and their work was spoken about, obviously, in very glory very glowing terms. And they watered down this hundred million number down to 35 because they said if we say a hundred people just think you guys are, making stuff up. But internally, if you speak to the team and if you look at the, at the staff or the management, they chew up these large numbers for breakfast, honestly speaking. And they look at a hundred million and they think, yeah. That that sounds very doable. And even I, as a board member, with the utmost optimism, I’m looking at this number thinking, how are you guys staring this down and being so casual about the fact that you’re gonna reach it? And they believe that they can.

And I think that’s been one of the strengths of the foundation is they built this culture of insatiable positivity and this do or die or otherwise get it done attitude that is reverberated throughout the foundation’s twenty five year journey. So at any point of time, even in the book, you would see that there’s multiple points where things just look absolutely impossible. And we always say that’s that we don’t just sell creativity and curiosity as taglines as it’s not a product we’re selling. We do get high on our own supply. We do take creativity and say, we have to focus it inward as much as we’re trying to project it out to children and tell them that it’s important to be creative. So all these obstacles we faced and that we’ve overcome have a creative element in the manner in which they were approached, and I think that is why Augusta continues to to do what it does. That’s something we’re very proud of.

The number that we’re seeing, you know, it’s flashing in all our minds. And, we may speak in about five or six years and be laughing about the fact that now that number is 200,000,000. So we’ll see. I’m sure we will.

[00:11:40 – 00:11:48] Nitin Bajaj

I love that energy. I love that positivity. It’s very infectious. And when that happens, it just it’s a snowball effect.

[00:11:49 – 00:11:49] Adhirath Sethi

Yeah.

[00:11:50 – 00:12:14] Nitin Bajaj

Now as we look forward, I love to take a pause and reflect and invite you to share two moments from your personal professional or philanthropic life. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There was failure. There were lessons. And another where things exceeded your own expectations and were a success beyond your imagination.

[00:12:17 – 00:18:01] Adhirath Sethi

So I’ll stay with Agastya because I think that is the theme of the, of the of what I’m trying to do here is to as I said, if we don’t push the word out, then, you know, it wouldn’t make sense. And, again, it doesn’t really apply only to Agastya. I think I was thinking about this earlier in terms of successes. And we write about this in the book where we say that not having money early on and that the positive funds, the difficulty with which it was to raise funds. And, again, Augusteo was founded, and ninety nine to two thousand was when the foundation was just being was started, which coincided with the dot com bust, the bubble bursting. And so a lot of the funds that were promised were just suddenly frozen or otherwise retracted. And Agastya reached this point where it just didn’t have the funds to fuel its ambition.

And we’ve seen this before. In businesses, sometimes you see it, an overabundance of fortune leads to a kind of a lack of direction. You start thinking you can do everything at once because you have the resources to do everything at once. And when you don’t, it forces you to focus on that which is most relevant and the levers that you can actually pull. And we see this in sports all the time. Right? You want to saunter the victory.

You you’d like the idea that your team might win. You’ve taken cricket analogy, for example, with plenty of moments to spare and plenty of wickets in hand. But the matches that really stick with you are the ones that it was a last ball success or it was just a blinding catch that came out of nowhere. And from the jaws of defeat, you basically snatch victory kind of a thing. And I think Agastya has been multiple I’ve seen this multiple times where things were almost, drying up or just about fading and then a hail Mary and someone shows up and the day is safe. So I think the foundation has built this now into its ethos that even now when there are funds and when there are donors say, hey. Spend more money.

They say, no. We’re gonna try and do this again within constraints we apply to ourselves because time and again, we’ve shown that when we can do that, it actually brings us the best version of what we were setting out to achieve. And of course, being an NGO and being a nonprofit, we always know that every rupee that we save, every dollar we save is another child that we can potentially reach. So there’s no reason to overspend and otherwise go crazy when, ultimately, as we said, there are still a lot of children in India that can be reached, and we’re trying to maximize that rather than so I think the challenge, as I say, the failure was basically not having the funds early on. And what this resulted in was a culture of using frugality as a tool to maximize the impact that you can have, maximize the ROI, you might say, in business. But in Augusta’s terms, it was I can reach a thousand children with the same money that otherwise I might have only been able to reach 10 or 15 children with. So I think that was brilliant.

A success, we’ve, again, had many of them, I think, in Agastya. One of the things we said very early on was we’re trying not to build a foundation, but we’re trying to start a movement. And to this day, we’re very true to that to that philosophy to say that even if someone were to take Agastya’s models or to take its methods or to take its entire kind of mode of functioning and replicate it and do something that was not called Agastya but was in their own name or their own brand, we would still give them a blessing because, ultimately, that’s what we were trying to do is to spread the idea that creativity and curiosity would be better served if we could get them into the minds of young children. And even if we don’t have the reach, if someone else says, hey. I’m gonna now carpet bomb another hundred million children at another part of India and do this all over again, that would be great. And so from the beginning, this idea of starting a movement was very important to us. And somewhere along Agastya journey, we saw a program called Operation La Santa, in which we weren’t really trying to start.

And I write about this again in the book where someone went to a school or a village rather, and they were trying to show take a mobile van there to show a government official how the van functions. And it happened to be the evening, and they suddenly saw a girl in the far corner teaching some children on her own. And they went and approached her and said, who are you? And she said, my name is Agastya. And I used to be in Agastya program when I was younger, and I graduated. I finished college. And this is what I do.

I have a night school where I use Agusta’s methods, and I teach these children. Many of them are just running around creating havoc because they’re kids, And a lot of their parents are still in the fields because this is an agrarian area, and this is a farming village. And, it makes the parents very happy because their kids are in one place, and the kids are happy because they’re learning something. And they look up to me, and they think that I know my stuff. And I love it because I really loved my journey with Agastya. And we sat back and said, wow. This is what we were trying to achieve, wasn’t it?

An organic, almost self sustaining version of Agastya’s work. And so we gave this girl a stipend. We said, look, we’re gonna support you. We’ll send you the models that you need. Keep doing what you’re doing. And this mushroomed into operation, which eventually went off to about 650 villages across India. So it was the beginning of our own understanding of the kind of fires or the sparks we were igniting across the country. And we said, well, this was in our minds, we didn’t really see what kind of shape it could take eventually, But, it’s happened now in front of us, and you can obviously see that what we’re doing seems to be, working if someone if this is working.

So I think that’s a success that we’d really look at and say, well, that I think underlined that we were on the right track, and we were definitely doing the right things.

[00:18:02 – 00:18:21] Nitin Bajaj

Fascinating. Now switching gears, what do you do to de stress, relax, and get off the treadmill when you’re not driving a business, being a parent, being a child or a husband, or not thinking about a custody.

[00:18:22 – 00:19:44] Adhirath Sethi

Ironically, I actually do get on the treadmill to de stress because I do like to run a lot. But, otherwise, I think one of the reasons I do these different things is because each one is de stressing to the other. So when business gets stressful and someone from Agastya calls me and says, hey. Listen. Can you come and give a talk to a bunch of kids? I’m like, oh, great. I really needed this distraction.

So each one, I think, in a Sethi, becomes the distraction to the other. Families, of course, distressing. I’ll I run my life by the motto. My deepest ambition is to go home early, which is something that is genuinely true. It’s the happiest part of my day is, like, when it’s done and I’m like, okay. Now I’m gonna go sit on the couch with my family and watch something is the best part. But, otherwise, yeah, I do enjoy it.

Of course, I love gardening. I love cooking. And, of course, I do love writing as well. And as I said, this all comes with its own each one is a lever for the other. So for me, it’s I think the adage is true.

You enjoy what you’re doing. It’s not that stressful. And I suppose I learned very early on that if you only do one thing, then that can be the recipe for getting frustrated with that one thing you’re doing. I’m a lot happier going back to my business on Monday morning knowing that I’ve had a weekend doing all sorts of other things and not particularly stressing about Monday morning itself. So I think that, for me, is a formula that seems to be working. And exercise, definitely. I think that helps.

[00:19:45 – 00:19:57] Nitin Bajaj

Love that. And I resonate with you on pretty much all of those. Now a podcast or a book you would like to recommend and share, Obviously, you can be biased when you’re making that recommendation.

[00:19:57 – 00:20:48] Adhirath Sethi

Yes, sir. I’m listening to I listen to a lot of RadioLab. I really enjoy their podcast, and I love their stuff. But of late, again, because I’m trying to get my son more into podcasts. So I was trying to figure out so Planet Money, since I’m an economist for me, Planet Money really works well. It’s NPR who generally do really good stuff, and I’ve been listening to them as and when they release their new podcasts. And, it’s great.

It’s it’s perfectly right length, and it just it’s the kind of stuff I wanna listen to. I also spend a lot of time listening to Acquired. The Acquired does these wonderful three, four mammoth behemoths of podcasts where they cover the entire history of a company. And as an entrepreneur for me, that’s, again, a very fascinating thing to listen to, to see how things originated, the pivots, and who knows? Maybe they’ll do one on August day one day. Now that I’m telling you that, that would be nice.

[00:20:48 – 00:21:01] Nitin Bajaj

We We gotta manifest it and make it happen. Now onto my favorite part of the show, we call this the one line life lessons. Adi, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:21:03 – 00:24:59] Adhirath Sethi

Is it just one? Or There’s ideally five. That’s ideal. I have five, in fact. Again, because I’m trying to turn my son into a respectable member of society. These things I think at a certain age, you start distilling and synthesizing the stuff more for passing on because you realize no one’s gonna sit and listen to your drone on for two hours. So if you can quickly just give them and just say, just remember these five.

I’ll come back to you later. So I actually have five. Actually, one of them that I tell him is everything compounds. I think I live by this motto. And I think it’s true of wealth. We know that, but it’s definitely true of knowledge. It’s true of friendships.

It’s true of any kind of experience that you have. You have enough of them early on, and I think I call it an alchemy of insight. After a certain age, they all start reacting with each other in a way that I don’t think you could have predicted. And it it leads to this wonderful zone where you suddenly say, oh, I’m coming up with ideas that just it’s all kind of been assimilating in the back of my head, and now it’s making itself themselves known just by reacting with one another. The other one, of course, is that to be generous in your assumption. I always do that. Generally, a very impatient person.

So when someone’s making me wait or I made you wait today, so you would have been generous in your assumption of why I might have done that. But I do like to take a step back and say, okay. Let me just assume that whatever it is has a genuine reason behind it rather than this person is just being inconsiderate. It works with my wife, especially, because sometimes we leave the house and she’d say I’m stepping back in, and she won’t come out again for about fifteen minutes. And it used to get me annoyed, and then I’m like, I’m sure it’s I’m sure it’s good. And invariably, she’d come out and say, listen. I thought I’d quickly do a load of the washing machine because then when we come back, it’s and I’m like, thank god I was generous with my assumptions because that does sound like a nice thing to have done.

She says, of course, embrace discomfort, which I think I’ve started doing a lot more. And I think we my mother used to say we like to do what we like to do. And I think a lot of people just go along the same route because it’s just very convenient not to change too much and not to disrupt one’s own routine and schedule. And I think doing that sometimes is a great way to just step out and say, okay. Because I had an experience maybe, but it was an experience. And as I’ve said earlier, everything does compound. So you come back with something.

Whether it was enjoyable or not, I don’t know, but it’s great to disrupt. And, I think the other one is time. I try and tell a lot of my son, especially, that you can either treat times an infinite resource or a very finite resource depending on how you respect it. And when you get good at organizing as being efficient at respecting the kind of time that, you know, you have available, it’s sometimes you find that you’re able to do 10 times as much in the same amount of time. And I’ve met other people who sometimes spend the entire day, and I’m like, you only got one thing done. How is this happening? So I think respecting time is something that is that starts working for you in miraculous ways.

And I think the last thing is exercise. It’s something that I only discovered, I think, during COVID. I was exercising before that, but I got more serious about it when I was told I was prediabetic. And I said this is something that I don’t want escalating. And so I’ve really found that it’s a great way to start the day. To do, like, the most grueling thing first thing in the morning just makes everything else in your day seem much simpler by comparison. And, I always tell people worst case scenario, if all hell breaks loose and my business fails, if Auguste are in close, at least I can look in the mirror and say, I have my health.

So that’s not something it’s a great place to plant your flag and say, at least I can start from there and move on rather than look and say, wow. I let even this one go. And so I think it’s entirely in your control, and I always encourage people to just push themselves a little bit and try and get even half an hour in because, I think it it does wonders for both mental and physical health. So that’s it. A bit longer than I think the time I was maybe allotted for my one liners, but there we have it.

[00:24:59 – 00:25:41] Nitin Bajaj

This is perfect. Adi, thank you so much for sharing your journey, for sharing your story, but most importantly, for continuing to fuel the fire that Ramji and others have started with Agastya. Kudos to you and the entire team, and super excited for you to have written this book and for you to have shared that story with us and your one night life lessons. We will definitely bring you back on in five years where you will share that you busted those hundred million plus numbers and are looking at many more. So I’m really excited for those children and for this entire generation.

[00:25:42 – 00:26:02] Adhirath Sethi

I look forward to that. And thank you so much as always, Agastya, and we depend on the support of folks that recognize what we do, appreciate what we do, and feel that the story was broadcasting. And when we have folks like that step up, then, you know, we know we have the kind of support we need to move from strength to strength. So thank you so much. I really appreciate this. Thank you.