Some top level things

• “Before you think of raising big money, make sure your customers trust you with their money” (from Indus’s post : How much money do you need to get started?)
• Be humble, honest, friendly and upfront
• Speak the truth
• Be passionate / energetic about your business
• Listen Listen Listen
• Share examples and stories from real experiences
• Before the meeting – learn about the VC firm and the folks you are meeting via Google/twitter. E.g –  firm background, current portfolio, good investments, info about the guy you are going to meet
• VC’s job is to punch holes on your business model / ask tough questions. Don’t get offended, don’t become defensive
• Appreciate and acknowledge good suggestions / good feedback.
• If you don’t know answer to some questions – DONT BS – Just say “I don’t know. I can get back to you on this”
• Let it go. Never get into back & forth arguments for proving your point – even if you are right.
• Show respect for other’s time (a surprisingly big number of founders don’t get it)
  • Note down all action items from the meeting and ensure that you get back on or before promised dates
  • Be on time for all calls & meetings. This is one of the biggest turn-offs
• Be you. Dress like yourself (but be clean), talk like yourself. Good folks want to meet the real you, so point being someone else to impr

Have your questions

#LeaveTheVcThinking: they have done the homework , they have good knowledge of  the VC industry, i can not fool them

• Have a set of questions that you would like to ask the VC.
• It will be great if  you can get in your questions first and garner some useful insight. If not make sure you get some time for you questions at the end
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions that you will offend the VC.  Good guys will appreciate it  and those who dont even have enough respect for you to answer your questions don’t deserve to fund you anyways
• What is the background of the firm?
• What is the background of folks who are meeting you?
• What investments have they made so far? Any in your geography domain?
• What is typical range in the size their investments?
• Which sectors do they normally invest in?
• At which stage do they normally invest in?
• What do they look for in a team / company?
• What value do they bring to the table?

The Team and You

#LeaveTheVcThinking: the team has a lot of passion/fire/determination, they are doing it for the right reasons, they will last & never give up, they will make it happen even without us

• Don’t rush through your intro, good folks want to know you and your story, so that  they can see inside you and get some key insights
• Don’t start with talking about your venture – talk about u
• Start with where did you grow up, schooling, college, work-ex, how did to decide to do a startup, story so far, what makes you tick and all the interesting stories
• Focus on things, items, incidents, experiences, stories that directly / indirectly relate to you as entrepreneur and your startup. Dont spend time on other things
• Give timelines of your story. Eg: which year did you graduate in, from when to when you worked at MS
• Every founder should personally talk about themselves

What does your startup make for customers? What problem are you solving?

#LeaveTheVcThinking: your are solving a real problem that is important enough to potential customers, this product – if done well – can get customers to spend dollars, there are no good alternatives, you really care about your customers, your approach to product development is extremely bootstrapped and iterative

• Take them on a journey with you, make them see your passion
• Share the story of how did you get this idea and how was it developed from an idea to a real solution.
• What do the customers want and how are you giving that
• Will always be compared to some companies – be prepared. How is Deskaway different than Basecamp? How can madhouse compete with Reliance? How will flipkart compete with Brick & Motar book stores?
• Respect the competition. Don’t focus on telling why your product is better than competition or what competition is doing wrong.
• Focus on what you are doing. Tell them how your approach to the problem is well thought off and different as compared to the solutions available in market?
  • You are creating a blue ocean, instead of getting to a red ocean
  • You are going beyond the customer expectation and delivering over and above it
• Talk about your experience of making & selling the product
• How are people reacting to it? How are they using it?
• Talk about real customer stories – how your product is improving people’s lives and giving them an amazing experience

How large is the market of this service?

#LeaveTheVcThinking:  Market is very very large, customer are/ very likely to spend dollars on the kind of problem you are solving, market is no where near saturation / commoditization , if a company can take 5-10% market share the top line will be very attractive

• Share your understanding of the market both from from top down and from bottom up
• Top down:
  • Use some obvious data, facts, trends which are available in a public to establish the market size.
  • Share your sources of data
• Bottom up:
  • Share your supporting hypothesis,  base it on your experience with usage of product and selling the product
  • What will it take to reach annual revenues of 10 L, 1 Cr, 10 Cr?
    • No of customers
    • ARPU (avg rev per user)
    • No of employees
    • Amount of capital
    • Time required
    • No of markets
    • Market penetration level

Product Development / Operations / Delivery: How will you continue to make and deliver quality product / experience at scale ?

#LeaveTheVcThinking: the way delivering & building can be scaled to levels of delivering service to customer when rev is 100 crore,  tech/product is playing the main anchor, it will be possible to find required human resources, business is not dependent on too many human resources

• Talk about how are you currently building and delivering  (its ok if some of it is mannual / non-scalable today)
• Talk about about your road map for continuing to improve technology /  operations / processes / automation  at every stage of the company
• Talk about team which develops the product. What kind of team do you have? Are they competent enough to build the product?
• How do you find / recruit people?
• How do you measure / track operations / product usage?
• How do  you plan projects and track progress?
• What is your product development methodology? Eg: agile

What are the unit economics?

#LeaveTheVcThinking: you are the master in economics of you business, you are mad about keeping this costs low, the product can be build / sold /  delivered at reasonably good margins , the bottom line will improve rapidly with scale

• What is the current cost of serving a customer for each type?
• What is gross margin, expected net margin? (its ok if you are loosing money right now)
• What are important drivers of costs / margins? How well you know them?
• How will these costs move as you scale the business
• What are you doing to improve the economics?

How do you acquire customers?

#LeaveTheVcThinking:  you understand the dynamics of customer acquisition, Customer acquisition can be scaled,  Customer lifetime in months * avg revenue per month > customer lifetime in months * avg cost of serving a customer + customer acquisition cost

• What are various marketing activities you do for generating good qulity leads?
• How do you validate leads?
• Also talk about some of the activities that you tried but they did not work out
• Talk about your sales process that works on converting that lead
• Talk about factors of how a customer makes buying decision
• What are qualities needed for someone to be a likely customer?
• Economics of your marketing channels (cost vs sales generated)
• Economics of your sales  channels (cost vs sales generated)
• Economics of a sales person (cost vs sales generated)

Are you looking to raise money? How much money are you looking to raise?

#LeaveTheVcThinking : you don’t need money but whenever you are ready talk – we want to be the first guys to look at the deal , they will use money well, they can make money for us, they can give us 10x or more returns on investment

• Show that you are are cash flow positive and are generating enough cash to support our growth (this is also a requirement for doing fund raising)
• Your preference is continue to spend time building and growing the business, since normally fund raising is a very time consuming process
• If this meeting is not setup specifically for fund raising – tell them your are not looking to raise money and will probably look at raising 2-3 millions in 4-6 months time frame once you have hit so and so milestones as a business (fill in your timeline and numbers)
• If the meeting is about fund raising – talk about the amount your are looking how you can use it to really grow the product, expand sales, expand operation , build solid management team and essentially achieve the hockey stick growth
• How much total money will you need to raise during life of the venture?

Revenues (Current & projected)

#LeaveTheVcThinking : revenues are at good level, growth in revenue is good, revenues can be scaled with funding

• Share the revenue numbers for last 3 months, have numbers of previous months also handy
• Monthly growth in revenues
• Projected revenues for 3 months , 6 months , 12 months
• Projections beyond 12 months
  • If you dont have them say we haven’t done those numbers but will be happy to get back and share them
  • If you have them handy, share them but point out that beyond 12 months its really difficult to make accurate predictions since things change quite rapidly for a startup

Competition

#LeaveTheVcThinking :  market is large and can support multiple companies, if you continue to deliver high quality service and manage your costs well you will do well, you are well aware of our competition and respect  them

• Be honest about competition. Never try to show that you don’t have competition – that’s one of the worst things to say, competition validates what you are doing.
• How are people solving the same problem without our product?
• Who are our direct competitors? How well do we understand them?
• Who are our indirect competitors? How well do we understand them?
• Who are the potential competitors?

View the image in a new window for better readability.

Notes:

1. This post is written keeping the market conditions of India in mind and may not apply to other geographies.

2. The table shows somewhat ideal scenarios just for understanding, in real world there are many more variations.

3. Don’t mistake table as set of fixed rules, these are just some possible combinations to enable you to create your own scenarios

4. Most of the times these things are function of the main investors subjective opinion, competition for the deal

5. This is not description of what my firm The Morpheus follows. Methods followed by The Morpheus could be different depending on the exact scenario

Update: (answers to the questions that have come on the post)

What percent of equity that will be diluted to the investors at each step?

This can be calculated fairly easily

• Equity given to the investors =  Total money invested / Post-money valuation of the company
• Post money valuation = Pre-money valuation + Total money invested
• Pre-money valution = Valution of your company before taking the investment
• Example:
  • Pre-money valuation = 1 Cr
  • Money being invested = 15 L
  • Post-money valuation = 1Cr + 15 L = 1.15 Cr
  • Equity given to the investors = 15 L / 1.15 Cr = 13.04 %

How did you come up with the pre-money calculations?

• Startup valuations are essentially an art, end of the day valuation of a company  on which both the startup and the investor agree on
• I have based these numbers on my observations and understanding of the preferences of Indian startups and Indian investors operating at different stages
  • I have been directly / indirectly involved in a good number of funding deals  / discussions
  • Also there are deals in which I was not involved but i have the information about them
• I have a personal bias towards revenue generating / cash flow positive startups

A surprisingly a large number of folks who start companies expect these glamorous  things to start happening automatically the day they leave their job and become entrepreneurs. And since the reality is very different, very soon they start complaining and eventually quit. Here is a little secret you should know:

“Things don’t happen automatically, u have to make them happen. You have to endure and enjoy the pain. Successful entrepreneurs know it instinctively & that’s what makes them tick.”

First 2 years (or more) of a startup are extremely demanding on you as the founder of the startup. You have to endure a lot of pain before you can even get a glimpse of some of these nice things. And there is always a high probability of not making it. Its kind of being pregnant for 2 years while knowing that probability of giving birth to a healthy child at the end of it is a mere 10-15%.  People who go through this period of pregnancy and deliver successfully are the ones who enjoy the journey and the pain more than the outcomes; ones who are prepared to do what ever it takes. You should ask the same question of yourself – are you ready to endure the pain? Or are you better off in your job?

Here is the list of some the things that you should be prepared to go through at a personal/ emotional level during your entrepreneurial journey.

• Unless you plan to live with  your parents, be prepared to move out of your comfortable flat in Versova  with rent of 20k a month and  move to Dahisar to maintain the size of the flat but reduce the rental bill to 10k a month.
• Flights won’t be the default mode of travel between cities (surely not kingfisher).  Every time you’ll travel you will evaluate train vs flight, usually the trains win and mostly sleeper class fare.
• Cabs are no more allowed for travel within the cities. You gotta be using auto rickshaws,  ride buses / trains / metros or even hop on the shared cabs (yeah I have done that)
• No staying in hotels, not even budget hotels. Make a list of friends / relatives in all cities and starting piling on. Or checkout  www.couchsurfing.org
• Can not eat in any fancy restaurant – get a list of affordable but clean food joints – McD is a great option. Cooking at home is even better.
• No more drinking out in pubs. If you wanna drink bring it home.
• No movies in multiplexes. In fact no time to watch TV.
• No phone upgrades / No laptop upgrades. Manage with what ever you have.
• No bank will give you loan. Not even a credit card.
• When we were doing our first venture madhouse – did not buy new clothes for 3 years. Only bought when an investor asked me come to the next meeting in formals.
• There is nothing called a work-life balance in first 2 years of a startup. It’s only work, work and more work. So get used to it and tell your family also.
• You are doing to work (or should I say slog) 18-20 hrs a day everyday for the whole 2 years. And in your 4-6 hrs sleep you will keep dreaming about work anyways
• And a lot of your work time will be spent doing small things, which are not exactly intellectually stimulating  - kinda stuff you always took for granted – cleaning the loo, mopping the floor, making tea, opening your office, buying food, going to banks, dealing with govt officials, starting the generator
• You won’t have much time with family or friends. You will regularly face – angry parents, angry wife, angry kids and angry girlfriends/ boy friends.
• No going to family functions or weddings. Even if they drag you to the function – you will be sitting a corner on your laptop or iPhone and that would leave your relatives angry with you.
• No holidays. No weekends. And if you really want a vacation - Use Google earth to enjoy your imaginary vacations. Feel happy when google earth has higher resolution imagery for your vacation spots. They have recently added high imagery for Kashmir region, especially gulmarg and Amarnath.
• No time to take care of your health. Running, exercises, gyms – all go for a toss
• Don’t expect any recognition for your efforts from friends and relatives – they wont get it – for them you are still a moron – who quit his fancy job with a big company and fat paycheck to do some thing as mundane as SELLING DVDS
• Be prepared to a lot negative talk – all most all people around you will keeping tell you how big a looser you are and many more things.
• Totally get used to failing. Infact failing is not bad – that’s the way to make progress. If you are building anything from scratch – you have to fail 20-50-100 times before you get it right. That’s how evolution works. That’s what happens when you try to solve hard problems.
• Be ready, most people will reject you : customers, investors, employees you try to hire, organizers of startup showcases. You have to keep looking for the ones who will accept you.
• Employee retention will be a pain. You will spend a lot of time finding and training freshers to find they have been poached by biggies with just 1.5x or 2x the salary as soon as training is completed.
• Your girlfriend’s / boyfriend’s parents may tell you that they are not too keen to marry their son/ daughter to an entrepreneur
• And if you plan to close an arrange marriage deal you can forget about it. Entrepreneurs are a total flop in arranged marriage scenarios
• Your co-founder will chicken out and will create a bitter scene. People who seem super committed and ready to give their life for the cause would suddenly find out reality and bail on you.
• Be ready to max your cards / pledge your Personal Assets/Share certificates to give fuel to your Business.

Lot of startups fail / shutdown, just because founders were expecting too much too soon and were not prepared for some of the hard things. I believe being aware of what is in store; can help you prepare for it. If you are prepared for the pain, it will not come as a surprise and I promise at the end of it – all the nice things that you started out for are eagerly awaiting you.

Thanks to Ashutosh Upadhyay , Ankit Maheshwari, Robin Moses, Indus Khaitan, Pankaj Guglani, Sahil Parikh and Nandini Hirianniah for reviewing the draft of the article.

We have started a twitter account called “Friends of Morpheus (@fom_morpheus). This is a community of folks who are either working with us formally or have a good informal friendship with Morpheus or are just interested in startups. The idea is to share / discuss / publish – news, articles, wisdom and thoughts about startups,  more engagement activities will be added overtime.  Sometimes we will also share updates from Morpheus and from portfolio companies

If you have something to share please tweet it with @fom_morpheus and we can further share it with all the fom_morpheus followers.

Click here to follow Friends of Morpheus –  http://twitter.com/fom_morpheus

Don’t forget to spread the word and feel free to send us suggestions on what more can be done or should be changed.

Recently I met with parents of the founder of one of our portfolio companies. They asked me about their son’s venture , how do I think its doing and what will be  the outcome etc. Here was my answer to them:

• Your son worked for 1 year as a SW engineer with a big company before starting his venture
• Now the venture is 4 months old and is already seeing some good traction
• Lets say he works on this venture for 2-3 years, at the end of it one of the two outcomes will be seen
  • Good case outcome: He continues with the venture. It has become successful – not necessarily an IPO but at the minimum its growing steadily and makes enough money to sustain itself and pay him a salary
  • Worst case outcome: The venture shuts down
• When your son started this venture he auto promoted himself from SW engineer to the CEO / CXO
  • A level he may have never achieved or achieved after a very long time period in a regular career with big SW companies
• Since he is  CEO / CXO – he would need to work  & network  with CEOs / Founders / Owners / Senior management folks of other companies
  • As a matter of fact this person I am talking about has already met CEOs / owners of more than 10 established / funded companies which are from the similar domain as his own company
• In case of shutdown of his venture it is certain that with the right efforts your son will:
  • Find a senior management position – VP / AVP / Director / Head of department with a company in the same domain
  • Get very good salary to go with these positions
  • And he would have switched from writing code to a domain of his choice
  • And if he has another venture in him, he can save enough to start it
• This will happen because 2-3 years as an entrepreneur will give the two things needed to get a senior position:
  • Network of decision makers at good companies who have seen him run his own company
  • 3 years of intense learning you get as as a start up founder, is worth more than 10 – 12 years in regular job
• These days people in the industry are very happy to hire X-entrepreneurs, since they know these guys can get work done
• Not all companies would be open to hiring him. But there are lot of funded, growing, young, dynamic companies who would be happy to consider him seriously
• Your son will be way ahead, both in salary and position, as compared to most of his classmates / colleagues who will never go out of the SW industry and become Senior SW engineer or at best a team lead in these 2-3 years. Some of these guys may have gone to top B-Schools to do MBAs and after 2 years will be doing entry level jobs in companies
• So if in the worst case spending two years passionately working on your startup can him chance to switch his job profile and domain, a very good jump in both and salary, and in good case he may be running a successful venture – doing a start up is a great investment in career, and not at all a risk
• They understood my point since it was quite logical, but still did not seem fully convinced . I don’t blame them. They are from a different generation

I also shared with them my personal example:

• In August 2004, when I left my job to start madhouse, I was Principal SW engineer in a telecom startup in California, two levels below a manager
• I started madhouse and promoted myself to be the CEO
• During my three years with madhouse I worked and networked with lot of other CEOs / VPs / Owners / Partners of other companies
• After three years madhouse was acquired by Seventymm and I joined as Vice President – Corporate Strategy
• So in three years I went from being two level below manager to the topmost layer of a well known company and with quite a good salary package
• Now while I was at Seventymm I had access to senior management jobs across domains like retail, consumer products, media. I had an offer to join as president of strategy at one of the leading public entertainment companies in India and the annual package was more than 50L
• But I turned that offer down and decided to start the next stint of entrepreneurship – MVP
• Other two founders of madhouse (Ankur and Nandini) saw a similar result as well. Nandini became AVP @ Seventymm and Ankur joined as VP @ Travelguru
• I am aware of many more similar cases

Business Ideas may fail, but Entrepreneurship is risk free

No opportunity comes with surety.  Even an MBA from a top B-School might not get the best returns. There are lots of bright ideas which never reap fruits. What is important is that you should be able to separate failure of your idea from your personal failure. Its very clear, if you choose to become an entrepreneur for the right reasons, have the right approach and are determined to give it your best shot for 2-3 years and create value in your venture, chances of failure are near zero. You will learn so much and get to know so many people that even in case of the worst outcome, you will come out way ahead and will be a much wanted resource.h

The journey of entrepreneurship is the real value add for the entrepreneur. The result is a by product.

So where is the risk in entrepreneurship?

Note: Thanks for Robin Moses, AshutoshUpadhyay, Ankit Maheswari, Nandini Hirianniah and Sunil for reviewing the post.

Dead poets anthem

Recently I watched the movie Dead poets society. The movie hit me hard,  I had tears in my eyes during the last 20-25 minutes. After the movie got over I was numb for sometime and my mind wouldn’t get away from it.  Its been 3 days since I watched it but the movie is with me. I can close my eyes and play the whole movie for myself.  So I guess its not a bad idea to write a post about it.

It teaches some of the most important lessons of life and delivers them in quite a hard hitting way.

• Be a free thinker
• Don’t conform; create your own identity
• Suck out all the marrow of life
• View things from a different perspective
• Be loyal
• (Most important) Carpe diem – Seize the day

Most institutions and influencers around us discourage us from following these lessons and sometimes even force us,  “to conform, to follow, to accept established views & methods, and to be safe”. These include – schools, colleges, parents, govt., relatives & more.

The movie is set in Welton Academy, shown as USAs most prestigious preparatory school, after finishing the school 90% of students  get into Ivy League. The school is run by a headmaster (and management) who is proud to continue the traditional, conformist ways of learning and wants to maintain absolute discipline. Mr. Keating (played by Robin Williams), an graduate of the same Welton Academy, comes into the school to teach English Literature – which is given pretty much a step-motherly treatment since the school wants to only produce – Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, MBAs.

Keating on other hand has different ideas. He starts his first class with “Carpe Diem” – a latin word that means “Seize the day” and Carpe Diem is the central philosophy of his teachings. He wants the students to be free thinkers, to create their own identities – he wants to them to “Seize the day” – Carpe Diem.

As per him English poetry has all the things we stay alive for – beauty, love, romance. His style of teaching is very fresh and totally out-of-the-box. Some of the boys go look up the yearbook for the year in which Keating had graduated from Welton and among other things they find the mention of Dead Poet Society. They ask Keating about it, at first he doesn’t want to talk about it. But when the boys push him he tells them about it but asks them to keep it a secret. During his school days, members of Dead Poet Society met in the Indian Cave which was away in the jungle by the river after dinners, read poetry and sucked the marrow of life. A group of boys lead by Neil like the idea, re-form the Dead Poet’s Society and start the meetings. These boys also start becoming free thinkers and start to create their own identities. One track of the movie is about the teaching methods of Keating – where he uses poetry to teach them some important lessons of life. Second track shows stories of  all current members of Dead Poets Society who are influenced by Keating’s teachings and decide to “be thinkers and find there own destiny”, instead of just doing what their parents and headmasters are telling them to do. As expected the school management does not appreciate his endeavor of making real thinking citizens out of the students and they decide to throw him out. The movie has an amazing ending, but I wont spoil the movie for you by telling the end. But let me tell you – it is the ending that is the most hard hitting. Watch the movie – you will enjoy it.

One of the reasons India has not realized its entrepreneurial potential and not produced the googles is that our kids continue to grow up in a conformist environment, risk averse society, surrounded by schools, colleges, parents and other influencing forces telling the kids to just follow, to conform and not to try new things. All of us admire and respect people like – JRD, Dhirubhai, Sunil Mittal, LN Mittal, Sanjiv Bhikchandani, Subhash Chandra, Narayan Murthy and many more, the entrepreneurs who have made a difference. Ironically, these guys were anything but conformist, all of them traveled the ‘road less traveled’, took the risk , trusted their guts and pursued opportunities which looked stupid to others. When Nandan Nikeleni decided to join Infosys as a young engineer from IIT Mumbai – his friends and family thought he was crazy and today he is one of the most respected guys in India.

The lessons of Dead Poet Society are cardinal to the success of an entreprenuer and I would strongly urge all entrepreneurs (current and would be) to watch the movie and internalize the lessons.  Get your parents to watch the movie as well.

Lessons once more:

• Be a free thinker
• Don’t conform; create your own identity
• Suck out all the marrow of life
• View things from a different perspective
• Be loyal
• and

Carpe Diem – Seize The Day

Credit: The image was taken from a blog post about Dead poets society

Continuing the good news for start-up folks, Fountainhead School of Business is organizing BarCamp Chandigarh – an extreme popular unconference, on 22 November. It will be a day long event that provides you the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions, meet like-minded folks, network and peek into the startup scene here.  Barcamp Chandigarh is also inviting folks who would like to conduct a session. Go ahead and signup to attend the event or to conduct a session at the Barcamp.

MVP is a supporting partner for the the event and we are doing our bit to make the event a good one.

I have signed up to do a session @ Barcamp, but have not decided on what all should I cover in the session. I am looking for some good suggestions from you on that, please leave your thoughts in comments or send a message to me on twitter @guglanisam.

What would you like me to cover during my session at the BarCamp Chandigarh?

I am right now at Haranahalli in Karnataka, 200 km from Bangalore. This is the ancestral village of my father- in-law. We reached here today morning via car, started from Bangalore around 0600 am, arrived 1130 am – after a small breakfast stop on way.

We have come here to witness a religious ocassion, which happens in a place called Amanhalla, few miles from Haranahalli. The villagers from 28 villages in his area perform a puja every year on the banks of  a small stream which is considered very sacred. Uniqueness of this puja is that it’s performed without any idol, the stream is considered the deity.  Since no particular deity is being worshipped people from all faiths and casts get together to participate in this puja.

Homa (sacred fire offerings)  is setup on the banks of the river and final part of puja is perfomed by steping into the stream. In this step the head priest, a lady and few other folks enter the river chanting the sacred hymns, give offerrings to the river : flowers, colors , rice and clothes. The lady performs main parts of the final ritual and at the end they say that the goddess enters the body of the lady.

I saw that the lady started behaving as if something has taken over her body, she started to dip her body in the water and came back out multiple times. Priest and other people who were with her helped her come out of the river and during that time they were also asking her questions – which they belive the goddess is answering through the lady.

As she was coming out of the river other ladies gathered to worship her and take her blessings and soon the ritual was over. People took a final look at the homa and climbed the stairs towards the area in which community lunch was being served to all.

The story of this ritual goes as fellows….

800 years ago, a Muslim boy of the region liked a Hindu girl. She used to go to the river bank every morning to perform puja and the boy used to follow her. On one such day, to avoid the boy,  she went and hid in a “deep ditch” in the stream, planning to come out when the boy left. The boy kept waiting and the girl died in the ditch. Villagers believe that after a few days of that incident, the girl re-emerged as a lake a few miles away. And so she was given the status of “devi” (goddess). Since then, every year, the villagers perform the puja on the river banks – where the final offerings are put into the “ditch” in which she had hidden.

Personally I am an atheist and don’t believe in existence of any super natural forces. But I am enjoying being a part of this ocassion, as its given me a chance to come close to rural India. This part of India is still green, non-polluted, people here are simple & hospitable. And of course I am already dying with hunger while I wait for my turn to eat. The food smells yummy…