MicroIndians

An another nostalgic post.  "MicroIndians - The Complete Software Solutions" was the venture that we tried bravely and proudly during 2001. Let me  narrate the complete sequence of events:

River Vaigai bisects my home town Paramakudi. I was associated with a training institute on the other side of the river Vaigai. The place is called Emaneswaram. There I got the intro of Mr.B (We used to call him Ji). Ji was (is) a textile designer. My home town is full of hand-looms. It was the bread and butter for my family too. Hand loom is a right mixture of science (engineering) and art. 

Weaving sarees was the primary business there. In order to create designs in the Saree, we used to have  Jacquard machine and punched cards (the ancestors of present day computers). Converting the designs in to the form of punched card involves these steps:

• Graph generation of design
• Card Punch Marking.  

The above steps are very tedious, laborious and time consuming. It would take its toll on the eyes. To convert a small design they used to take 4 to 5 days. Yet the accuracy can't be guaranteed till it comes live on the saree. If the accuracy is below the threshold, in addition to the wastage of the material, the entire process has to be repeated. 

Here comes our "MicroIndians". One fine day I was on a casual discussion with Ji. He explained the difficulties in the above system. I asked him instantly why can't this be automated?. He said there exist a very costly automation tool. They are both out of their reach and not suited as well. I asked him why we should not try the same? 

He laughed at me initially and quietly asked "is that possible?". I told to him that "Let me try". I was not having a computer with me that time. I stayed in the institute that night. The coding in Visual Basic began. There was no one around me except the "Vetri kodi kattu" song from Rajni's movie Padaiyappa. Got in to that rythm of "one to one talk with the system". 

I didn't noticed that it was morning 5.00 AM. By that time, the "Kernel" was ready. The next day afternoon I went to Ji's workshop / office. With the VB Project in a floppy disk, i was nervous not for the reason whether the project would work but for the reason whether the floppy would work. To my surprise it was working.

Ji gave the input design, within 2 mins the card punch marking was ready. He didn't believed initially that it is working. Tried with various designs. For all it was working fine . 100% accuracy. With the drops of tears in his eyes, he looked at me with an expression which i can't express in the limited vocabulary of words that i knew in English.

Then he said, "Today you have given a solution for our struggles which were making many to feel pain the eyes, hands , head and back". I wasn't aware even upto that point of time that it is a solution to such a big problem. Then he told me the original price that the earlier company had quoted. It was running up to many lakhs for the full version. 

I told to Ji that we would distribute this free of cost to all the designers in and around our place. Then Ji replied that it is not for only people around our home town. He said the same solution would work for the designers in Kanchipuram, Kumbakonam, Dindigual, Madurai and Varanasi as well. 

After the initial nerves got settled, we formulated "MicroIndians" , our own startup company. Hired a small office place. For marketing we added two more people. One of them was Bala, my dearest friend. We fixed up the price around 35K. It moved like a hot cake. I used to go to each of the designer's office for final implementation. Looking at the solution at work infront of their eyes, they were very joyous.

More than the money that we made out of it, I was happy about applying the things that i studied to solve a long standing struggle that the people in my home town faced. 

The motto of making this post is not to self-trumpet about myself, but to say , "You can, If you believe you can. Don't get scared by the scale of the problem. Huge problems too have simple yet elegant solution "

A strange little co-incidence, the same "vetri kodi kattu" song is looping in my laptop as I make this post.