Sky is the limit...

published in Avant Garde

At one point or the other in our life, almost each one of us must have cursed our work and desperately hoped for a change. I wonder if all hopers against hope ever analyzed: “why is it that they can never retire themselves from the idea of cursing their work, while in this same very world exist some others who don’t retire from the work they have done all their lives.” Well, the answer is suggested by the following quote:
“Make your passion your profession and you shall not have a single working day in your life”
In simple words, those who don’t retire, never worked at all…Now, don’t get me wrong here…I am not elaborating on the social problem of unemployment, rather I am talking about people who employ/engage themselves with work, which to them is more of passion than a mere means of finding the ends to life. And this piece of writing talks about my encounter with one such passion-infused individual.

Tall & lanky, he could well be mistaken for the unkempt school boy, who after a busy day of feuds and quarrels rushes to his workspace to shed his residual energy. But this guy was neither school going, nor finding a vent for his residual energy; to my surprise he was an engineer from the prestigious IIT, and what he was up to was his primary passion and not a residue of what his effort after four rigorous years at IIT left in him.
An entrepreneur by profession, Mr. Bramh Awasthi is presently the cent percent equity holder of his one year old startup ‘Whirlybird’. The organization, by virtue of its age may sound a fledgling, but has enough passion infused by its proprietor to show promise both in terms of its present performance and future prospects.
As a child, Bramh was a big time techie and dreamed of being in the IIT in order to pursue his passion for technology. He pursued his passion while in IIT Kanpur, by being on the lookout for entrepreneurial avenues in the area of technology. As a student of the aeronautical engineering department at IITK, Bramh found the right elevation to fly his air vehicle of dreams and as a byproduct of his departmental endeavors was born the backbone of ‘Whirlybird’.
As a third year student of B.Tech, the visage of Bramh’s entrepreneurial venture looked like a ‘rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicle’ (in simple words an automatically driven helicopter). His vision, expertise and passion took him to the USA for a summer internship, where he not only gained the appropriate exposure to kick start ‘Whirlybird’ but also brought back the requisite raw material unavailable in India for operational-zing his vision. After very little encouragement from the faculty community, Bramh and his friends created their dream helicopter as a partial fulfillment for the requirement of his degree of bachelor of technology. The prototype that he thus created was perfect in every sense except for the presence of an important component called the inertial measurement unit which Bramh owing to cross- boundary laws could not bring back from the USA. This unavailability of the IMU was what changed Whirlybird’s first product from a rotary wing UAV to the Inertial Measurement Unit.
In 2004, after passing out from IITK, Bramh (all alone) began the operations of Whirlybird under the aegis of small industries development bank of India (SIDBI). Today, one year later, the IMU made by Whirlybird is in its second version and catching the attention of the Indian defense’s military applications need. Having started as a one man show, its small successes managed to attract more people to Whirlybird and its present strength stands at 6, whereby it employs 5 others who toil day and night to make this technology startup into a name that would someday put Whirlybird in juxtaposition with the Boeings and the Rockwells of the world.
Apart from like mindedness, technological inclination and passion the core philosophy of the company is also to delve into products of non-military application which make use of high end cutting edge technology, and for this simple reason the next possible product that Whirlybird is looking at launching is an electronic stethoscope. According to Bramh, while the IMU is a product that satiates his patriotic feeling, the stethoscope has the potential to cater to a social concern. And it is this non-monetary purpose of making a product that drives the present team of Whirlybird to strike more wonders in the future.
Bramh believes that not each and every individual in an organization can be equally motivated and that the motivation of the entire organization can be built on the edifice of the extremely motivated few, who in turn motivate the others. Thus, Bramh is on a lookout for people like him who share a similar passion to create a healthy and passionate platform from where he could challenge the limits of the sky!!