Sixteen years ago, Kaushik Raju won three titles at the ITF Junior Grade V Tennis Tournament held in Colombo and in Brunei. What followed was not another title, but an injury. However, Kaushik wasn't the kind who'd give up. True that he was not able to participate in ITF tournaments, but instead, he went on to become one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Today, Kaushik is the Technical Director of Atria Institute of Technology in Bengaluru. Despite the title, he has enough time to do multiple tasks as it’s all about managing time and not letting success or failure affect anything. We recently caught up with him for a quick chat. Excerpts:
1. From beginning as a junior ITF champion, you've become a successful young entrepreneur. Was your journey planned?
Not exactly. I still believe that I have only started working on my mission. I belonged to an entirely different platform yet, I got into my work and I’m fully satisfied with it.
2. Your focus is on improving the education system, especially through advanced learning methods such as Xcelerator. How do you plan on implementing these ideas in India, where we usually follow the traditional education system?
It was actually a little challenging, but I think our education system is a bit outdated and it needs to be replaced with a more advanced system. The problem is one may have the knowledge about everything, but they won’t be able to utilise it. It is all about how to use all this knowledge. Earlier, the education system trained kids to memorise everything, but today, things have changed. We have mobile phones so, we don’t need to memorise anything.
3. Being a young entrepreneur, what are your views on sustainable development projects?
I think sustainable development is the need of the hour — we have climate change issues, all our natural resources are running out and we are facing scarcity of water. We have reached a point where we need to think about the long-term plan for the future of the human race. This is what we are focusing on and it is our priority at a group-level.