Creating learning atmospheres
good morning everyone it’s lovely to be
here
what is success what does it mean to be
successful is it a fancy car and a house
sparkling jewelry designer clothes
maybe your name in the news or being a
speaker at a tedx event
well i feel success is subjective
for me success is about making a
difference in people’s life who i may or
may not have come in contact with
now don’t get me wrong i’m not saying
that the fame the money the cars the
house is not important or it does not
define success to most people
but what will make you work harder than
you did yesterday is something that will
give you a sense of purpose
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i’m one of the lucky ones who found this
purpose early in life
i grew up with a thought process that
anything is possible
my parents come from a very humble
background they had me
even before they could think of having a
career at the age of 22
my father was not only responsible for a
wife and a child
but gradually his mother and a family of
almost 60 people
i’m not exaggerating i wonder what was
going on in his mind back then
not only did he take care of the family
really well you can see
but he went on to become a very
successful businessman
and an even more successful social
worker so much so that
it has been over 17 years that we have
lost him
but i still meet new people who remember
him fondly
because at some point in their life my
father had helped them
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i take my inspiration from him daily
everything i do
mohi gets most of the credit he rarely
told me what to do
but he always encouraged me to follow my
own path to become my own person
and to make it count he always taught me
to dream big
as soon as i received my mba degree i
returned to india and i started working
on the most
important project of my life of starting
a college
now picture this i am 24 years old i go
up to my mother and i declare
mom i want to start a college
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she immediately responds with uh okay
so what do you need she did not laugh at
me
she did not say something like uh puja
why don’t you start with something
smaller and then you can see how it goes
because by this point i had already
tried to run a manufacturing unit that
belonged to the family
and failed miserably but remember i told
you about the household that believed
anything is possible
i wasn’t lying i remember gaining most
of my confidence in that
moment sometimes it just takes that one
person to have faith in you and then you
can go and do what you need
now this
now this thought of now this thought of
starting a college wasn’t out of the
blue or on a whim
when i was studying in the uk i
had an epiphany i wasn’t dumb
i wasn’t a bad student or i wasn’t bad
at some subjects
i probably just needed to learn better
why couldn’t learning be like this in my
country i thought
there must be so many students just like
me who have not realized their potential
and all they need is a good mentor
or good guidance
so anyway i started with my research
there was so much to do so much to think
about and so much pressure
because i wasn’t merely thinking about
you know
making a product or selling a service i
was thinking about developing human
resource for the country
which would be useful 10 to 20 years
down the line
education is a big responsibility and
should definitely be
treated as such
so i start so anyway i started my
research there was so much to do
right from naming the college to
identifying the land to registering the
foundation
to getting the right teachers to making
sure that the students believe in your
offering the advertising admissions
permissions etc etc etc and i knew
nothing about
about running a college what was i
thinking
so the first thing i did was join an
institute in pune
to learn something and to gain some
experience on the way
because how will i know what kind of
people to hire
if i don’t know what kind of work there
will be
now this path wasn’t easy of course i
met
a large number of people who always
looked at me doubtfully and
told me how difficult this journey would
be and how many hurdles i would face and
blah blah blah but i also met a lot of
encouraging people who
who who made me believe that i can do
this
most didn’t take me seriously because i
was too young to know anything about
anything
but i tried to block these people out
and i focused on the positive
and i focused on my purpose
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so now uh an mba graduate
from a family of an established business
who has nothing to do with education
before this why did i start a college
why did i start an educational institute
and a school for architecture and design
of all the things
i probably just like to torture myself
no but seriously
i wanted to as cliche as it may sound i
wanted to
create a platform for creative courses
there are such few options available for
someone to pursue creativity as
a career and i wanted to make that
available
that gave birth to the satish missal
educational foundation’s
brick school my name is puja missal and
i am the founder director
of this beautiful place
[Music]
thank you now an idea remains
just an idea if you cannot translate it
to people and make them believe in it as
much as you do
you can be extremely smart talented
creative
and hard working but you are nothing
without a team
you cannot accomplish everything by
yourself
a team is extremely important
my team at bric is continuously working
to create a platform for students to
grow and learn
the underlying philosophy that we all
believe in is
we are not here to disseminate
information or to create professionals
but we are here to create a holistic
person of anyone and everyone at brick
after all there’s so much information
that is freely available online
that anyone can access at their own time
and what we may teach them today may not
be relevant tomorrow
so education should be something which
makes the child
understand themselves better learn
something about themselves
rather than just learning about all the
subjects
so most of my students have won
a number of trophies awards on local
national and international platforms
they do fairly well in most of the exams
but what i am so proud of my students is
that they are extremely socially
aware and socially sensitive towards
people who are probably less fortunate
than
themselves or less privileged than
themselves
they take up extreme they take up a lot
of initiatives
which are socially relevant as you can
see here
our students selected a street at the
heart of the city and the initiative was
to clean it up and to make it useful for
the community that is living in the
neighborhood
so as you can see the before it was
completely with garbage and debris
and they converted they painted the
walls they changed the flooring they put
some artwork on the wall
they made it more habitable
now the community uses it to sit around
to play the children use it to
as you can see cycle around and through
this project i think my students learned
a lot more about space about humans
about the
requirements than what they would learn
by sitting in the classroom
so these are the kind of things that we
do in school
my the teachers the staff the students
they refer to the college as their
family and just like a family
we support each other and encourage each
other to do better
[Music]
yeah just just as a so our college is
probably the only one
where the peons are comfortable enough
to
perform at the cultural annual festival
every year
the first ever scholarship that was
initiated at
brick was initiated by a teacher can you
believe that
i couldn’t so i am extremely grateful
that i have this
i’ve been able to create this family and
i will continue to make it bigger and
better
for moments like these this was a letter
given to me by my students who were
graduating
with a box of beautifully handmade
jewelry
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the fact that i was able to
without even talking to them able to
motivate them to do something by
themselves to explore their creativity
it really warms my heart
these and some other you know small
messages and notes that are left to me
by the students and the teachers
make me realize that the path that i’m
on was chosen for me
and this is definitely my purpose so
what is success then
when you find yourself asking this
question ask yourself
[Music]
are you good at something are you happy
and have you made a difference if you
answer
a yes to any of these questions you are
on the right path
and if not what are you waiting for
continue your journey and change those
notes to a yes
for me i ask myself a fourth question am
i making my father proud
and i will continue on this journey
because i am not done yet
and i am not afraid of failure the only
thing that i am scared of however
is the thought of giving up thank you