The paradox of doing wrong to achieve good
Dhairya Pujara, founder and CEO Of Ycenter, open the Friday morning program with his keynote.
He went to a private school but after school he stayed with her mother, in the corner of a class of a public school where his mother was a techer. At school he received a value based education. At school he noted diversity, e.g. Having and expensive pencil box or not having it. Another kind of diversity was gender based.
Moving forward to college he launched a website to share used books at low prices for people who couldn’t afford to buy new ones. Take the bottom up pyramid of human needs: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization. He started from the top, asking himself about his purposed. Then he moved to US, quit his job and joined the university service sending people to Mozambique.
Intention, action, impact: these were the three concepts he focused on. He started fixing medical equipemnts but he soon realized that he needed to fix the education gap.
He founded Ycenter, starting to build a community project, Ola Health, requiring to send a text to get cures. Microsoft funded it for three years but it didn’t work, people felt intimidated about sending texts. A card game about malaria prevention created with the local population was succesful instead. Now he’s running various successful programs in India.
Empathy is really important to him. It allows him to overcome the lack of diversity in his perception. Because lack of diversity is the problem in fixing problems.