Archana Chandra, CEO & Board member, Jai Vakeel Foundation & Research Centre on nding her passion and purpose. In conversation with IPP Vineet Bhatnagar

Archana Chandra, CEO & Board member, Jai Vakeel Foundation & Research Centre on nding her passion and purpose. In conversation with IPP Vineet Bhatnagar

Thank you for spending this aernoon with our members. 1992, you are just nishing your undergrad degree in commerce from HR College, what are you thinking about your career?

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for having me here. Yes, I had just graduated from HR College and the firrst job I applied for and got happened to be with the Times of India group, Femina and
Filmfare. 1994 was the year that both Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai won Miss Universe and Miss World respectively. Of course, we strutted around like we had won it. They were fun years, there was
so much glamour, but what was really interesting was learning how to do events at scale. But I was done after two years, and moved on to an organisation called Informix, a database company, or rather
which was a database company. It was based in the US, so it meant international travel and a great paycheque.

In all respects, my career looked like it was on the right trajectory. It was also around that time that I met
my husband, Amit. A small known fact is that we knew each other for less than two months before
we were engaged and in four months we were married. I was all of 22 and he was all of 25.

Child marriage, may I say?
Child marriage? Absolutely. But there’s a lot to
be said for getting married young and growing
together. at has been one of our biggest secrets,
where we grew up, had each other’s back, and we’re
better friends or greater friends today than we were
back then.
Aer two stints in the corporate sector, you
immediately shied gears to the social sector.
What were the experiences that gave you the
clarity to make this very unorthodox change?
I think what happened is that there were a series of
events in both my personal and professional space.
Informix got bought over by IBM in the US and
they decided to wind down their India operations.
So, for no fault of mine, one ne morning I had no
job. My dad, and I’m an only child so this was a big
one for us, my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and
we lost him within a month. It was also at this time
that Amit and I were planning our family and we
had three back-to-back miscarriages. With the last
one, we lost our child at eight months. So, it was
probably the lowest and darkest point in my life.
at’s when I started saying, why me? You know,
what really is the purpose of my life? And it was at
this time that I found my spiritual school, which
is the pranic healing and the school healed me
physically, emotionally, mentally and gave us the
strength to have a beautiful 19-year-old daughter
today. But it also helped me understand the
purpose of our life. Is there a broader canvas that
one can work with? Another very dear friend, an
American by the name of Sue, volunteered with
Akanksha and she would go into the community
and worked with children for career advice and
vocational training. I was like Sue, what are you
doing? How are you even communicating with
them? But she always had a spring in her step and
her stories were not always of success, right? But
they motivated me to get to Akanksha.
Akanksha works for the education of children from
the slum community. It was started by Shaheen
Mistri when she was 18. So, I met Shaheen, and
I started volunteering at Akanksha. I was doing
the only thing that I knew how to do at that
time, which was a little bit of events and some
fundraising. But what I loved about that space
was that it didn’t matter if you were the best HR
person or the best nance person, or the best
marketing person. You were there for the child.
And that is what I really, really loved. I stayed there
for two years. en, at a social dinner, I was having
a conversation with Dr. Anahita Pandole, one of
the leading gynaecologists of the city, and the most
amazing, amazing person who said, “Oh Archana,
you have to come and see this place called Jai
Vakeel. I’ve been going there since I was a kid. It is I have to admit while I’m nodding furiously at her,
in my head, I was like there is no chance that I’m
going here. Because the truth of the matter was that
I didn’t even understand intellectual disability. And
I was like, what am I going to do there and how am
I even going to engage with these kids?
Needless to say, if any of you know Anahita
Pandole, there’s no saying no to her. She literally
put me in her car one morning and brought me to
Jai Vakeel. I walked the campus, met the kids, felt
the positive energy as well as unconditional love
from them. My heart got engaged. en, because
of my training and background, I went back home
to look at data. e truth is again, I found no data,
and when I did nd it, it said 2% of our population
has intellectual disability. I remember thinking that
2%, loosely broken down, means 1 in 50. And if the
number is so high, for someone like me who I think
is fairly well travelled, exposed, educated, I couldn’t
remember the last time I saw these people in any
public spaces that we visit, whether it’s a theatre,
mall, family function, et cetera.
So that’s how my head and my heart got engaged.
And I stayed and decided to give whatever little skill
set or experience that I had to a cause that was so
underserved and help shine some spotlight on it.
Awesome… I want to delve into how your and
Amit’s journey of giving started, so please share
how it began and what keeps it moving.
Amit and I are both professionals, right, so there’s
no inherited wealth that we come with. But from
the day we got married, we gave a certain percentage
of our then really meagre income. Over the years, as
our income grew, the ability to give grew. Initially
we were giving more to people and causes that
we knew, so family and friends. I think at some
point we said, can we also give some more time?
All of you know Amit was probably the youngest
investment banker under 30 when he built out
DSP Merrill Lynch, but a lesser known fact is that
he joined a not-for-prot board before he joined
any other corporate board. So, Akanksha was the
rst board that we joined. Over time, we started
thinking more seriously about how we can give
both our time and money. We were also very blessed  to have had exposures and conversations with many,
many people who inuence the way we think. One
such person who I think even Amit mentioned
in his talk last time was Chuck Feeney. We read
his book called e Billionaire Who Wasn’t and
Chuck Feeney built his wealth through duty-free
stores and then gave it all away anonymously and
helped build the higher education movement in
Ireland or eradicate AIDS in South Africa, built
Cornell University, et cetera.
So, these kinds of conversations started pushing
us in terms of what more we can do. I think in
2007, Amit said, one day, “Let’s dene our wants
and needs.” And I was like, what does that even
mean? So, we had a conversation around where
our income is growing, our ability to have more
is increasing but let’s kind of fence our material
possessions. While I conceptually loved the idea,
I didn’t know how to do it and so we actually got
some professional advice. We got our nancial
advisors to work with us and how do you create
this grid? Again, I’m going be honest, it was much
easier for Amit to put a number on the ground. For
me, it’s not like I had grown up with wealth, so I
enjoyed the freedom that money gave me, whether
to travel to a place that I’ve always wanted to, or an
experience, etc. And I did not want to feel guilty
the next time I wanted to travel somewhere or even
wanted a piece of jewellery.
So, it was harder for me, but we stayed the course
and Amit as well as the nancial advisor helped me
navigate, to actually put a number on the ground. It
was one of the hardest things I’ve done, and I have
done some pretty hard things, but this was one of
hardest.
en, aer that, it became really easy, because
the rest of it just moved to the Foundation that
we created called the ATE Chandra Foundation
because by then we also realised that our giving
needed to have more structure. So now all of that
goes to the Foundation and the two main areas
that we are passionate and excited about through
the Foundation are rural water and sustainability as
well as capacity building for the social sector.
ank you for being so candid. e Jai Vakeel
Foundation – what drives you to remain so
focussed now on their activities for so many years
now? What brings that spring in your step every
morning to run to the campus?
Like I said, I walked the campus, fell in love and
I stayed. But Jai Vakeel is an organisation that is
80 years old. is is our 80th anniversary. So, we
were started in 1944, which is actually before even
India’s Independence, by Mr. and Mrs. Vakeel who
had a daughter, Dina, who was born with Downs
and there was nowhere to send her for education
or therapy. So, they started in their house with one
child, and today we have grown on to serve over
700 students across our three campuses.
You said three campuses?
So, we had one in Mumbai in Sewri, which is
very close to the ITC Parel Hotel. We have one
at Talegaon, near Pune, one at Deolali, close to
Nasik. And Mrs. Vakeel was clearly the pioneer of
her times, right? She was ahead of the curve. She
even won a Padmashree for the work that she was
doing. And she ran the school for 30 years. She was
succeeded by another daughter, Tehmina Shro,
who ran it for 39 years. I came to Jai Vakeel way
back in 2007, was invited to the board in 2009
and I took on the leadership role aer Mrs. Shro
passed away in 2013.
And what is intellectual disability?
Using IQ as a starting point, we don’t use this
model much these days but if 100 is normal IQ,
all the students that we serve on our campus have
an IQ of 70 and below but it’s a whole spectrumbased
condition. e lm that we saw was more for
the severely and profoundly challenged kids. We
also have the mild, moderate, etc. So, what we’re
trying to do with these kids is provide inclusion
and we have dened inclusion to be at a family level
because unless the family accepts you, honestly, you
can’t move ahead. And then at a community level
and nally at societal level. On our campus, we are
doing whatever we can to empower and equip these
children and their families through three broad
interventions: health care, education, and skill
development.
From 2013 to 2018, the team just put their head
down trying to get our house in order. We were trying to strengthen all the verticals that we work
with. In 2018, we looked up and said, we’re doing
a good job, I think, with respect to whatever kids
we have direct access to. But in a country like ours,
where 26 million have this, what is our answer to
scale? And again, Vineet, our kids have choice of
ICSE and so many boards, but these kids have no
board. erefore, there is no curriculum, there’s
no standardised methodology of testing. So, one
of the things we did over those ve years is build a
standardised assessment checklist and a curriculum
and workbook. In 2019, we partnered with the
Government of Maharashtra to take this out
to scale in over 475 schools across Maharashtra
impacting over 20,000 kids.
So, Jai Vakeel worked with the Government of
Maharashtra to come up with a template which is
being used in other schools that take care of ID
students?
Absolutely. Jai Vakeel has been very fortunate to
work with the government since our inception
because there was nobody else. Initially, we worked
to create the framework. We’ve been getting a grant
from them for the past 55 years and therefore when
we made this checklist and curriculum for our kids
and tested it with our kids, they were like come on
let’s take it to scale, let’s go all over Maharashtra.
Wonderful. So, technical question: does Jai
Vakeel actually follow a metric which gives you
your rate of success?
Absolutely, because while I said the government
gives us a grant, the truth of the matter is it’s a
percentage of our total spend. Our annual budget
is around Rs 22 crores whereas only Rs 4-5 crores
comes from the government. e rest is through
CSR, foundations, individuals, HNIs and they’re
all asking for impact. So one of the pieces we’re
working really hard on is how do we articulate
impact in a space like ours because we are not giving
regular education to regular kids but there’s still
a dierence that you’re making and how do you
measure and articulate that.
Okay, great. With both Amit and you having so
beautifully structured your lives around giving,
and living with very well-managed materialism
even in a maximum city like Mumbai, what is the typical dinner table conversation at home and
how is this actually shaping your young daughter
Anika?
e truth of the matter is you may think you
can shape everything with your child, but I don’t
think that you could. What we can bring to the
table for our kids is really just a good set of values,
conversations around what we are doing with our
time and our resources, and then leave them to that.
So, Anika’s been volunteering, rst at Akanksha
when she was really little and she has also
volunteered at Jai Vakeel. ere was a time,
ironically, when she said, “I’m going to grow up
and be like my mother and only serve.” And I
was like, “Who’s going to put food on the table
for you, honey?” So she was like, “No. I don’t
want to make any money.” And, it was absolutely
wrong messaging because we then actually had to
articulate to her that you have to be self-sucient.
I can go out and make money to full whatever
want or need that I may have. Today, I chose to
do something dierent, right? So, I think today
she’s in a better place, more balanced, where she is
looking at careers which will get her the money. But
I think she does come to the table with a high level
of empathy. And I think that’s going to hold her in
good stead in life, no matter what she chooses.
Well said, well said. Excellent. So it is fair to say
that you have found your passion and purpose.
But what is the guidance that you want to leave
behind with some of us here, because not many
can claim that they have found their passion and
purpose?
Life happens. If I hadn’t reached the lowest point
in my life maybe I wouldn’t have been here. At that
time it did feel like the end of the world but what I
have learned is that whenever something happens,
just look for ‘what is the learning in it for me,’ ‘what
does the lesson really mean,’ rather than getting
overwhelmed by the situation.
Before I joined Jai Vakeel, I did go out and meet
other organisations and meet other leaders but it
was Jai Vakeel that made my heart sing and that’s
how I stayed. Till date, I feel that sometimes we
lose context of what’s really important in life. ‘My
driver’s gone on holiday, now I have to go there,
there’s no parking, what am I going to do?’ Meeting
these kids and their families every day, working
with them, seeing their resilience, puts my life in
perspective about what is really important and how
not to sweat the small stu.
e third thing I would say to each one of you is go
out and see other causes. Go out to meet dierent
leaders from dierent organisations. I think we’re
fortunate in some way where we live in a country
like India where there’s so much happening and
so much that needs to be done. For me, it was Jai
Vakeel, but there’s so much that needs to be done.
Each one can go out and nd the cause that your
heart connects with and do more there. I would
also say, move out of your comfort zone. I am
inherently an introvert; in college, I was happy to be
the wallower. And if I had a choice, I would really
go through my life like that, do my own thing, but
put my head down.
And that’s what I did when I took on the leadership
role at Jai Vakeel. From 2013 to 2018, I was happy
or happier because I was just doing my work.
But in 2018 -2019, which was actually our 75th
anniversary, we looked up and said, people still
don’t know what intellectual disability means; and
it’s been 75 years that we’ve been doing this.
So, we said let’s start talking about our work, our
course, our space, because inclusion is not going to
happen if this segment of society doesn’t include
and embrace my kids and that is when I was thrown
out of my comfort zone to do conversations like
these which are hard for me, in all honesty, they
don’t come to me naturally. Amit is the more
extroverted people person. So, I have learned again
that no growth happens without getting out of your
comfort zone.
Lastly, all of you here have already done so much.
My mom and dad were in Rotary; my dad was
President of the Rotary Club of Bombay North.
My mom is 92 but very actively involved in the
Inner Wheel Club. So, I do know that each one of
you is always already doing so much. e question
I would really ask is, is that enough or can you do
more?
I want to make an on-the-spot request to you.
I would like to bring a group of 15-20 of our members and their spouses to visit the Jai Vakeel
Foundation campus in Byculla.
Tell me when?
Next month, April 26th.
Done. Only 15, 20?
If there are more, we will split them into
two batches. e next question would be,
a hypothetical, is what happens when these
children become adults? What is the next step
and how do they look aer themselves?
ank you for that question, it’s a great question.
We have 350 kids in school on our Jai Vakeel
Mumbai campus and while academics is a goal for
them, one of the bigger goals for them is actually
independence in their activities of daily living.
So, how can you be independent in looking aer
yourself ? And that’s a goal from almost the rst
day that they enter the campus. We work not just
with a child, but also with the family to make this
happen and this continues till they’re 18. We have
another 300 students from ages 18 to 50 and our
goal for the ones that can go out to work is for them
to work outside. When we are saying our vision is
inclusion, it actually means that if the right thing
for Archana is to go out and get a job then that’s
what she should be doing.
So, from 18 to 21, we have a vocational training
section and that is why conversations like these are
so important and powerful because that’s what you
all can do, right? We are doing whatever we can on
our campus to empower and equip the children
and their families, but unless a society as a whole
is aware, accepting and including them, change is
not going to happen. So, there is a whole training
programme that they are put through, but we may
realise aer three years of training that Archana is
NOT going to be able to sustain this job at Bombay
Gymkhana for whatever set of reasons. en, we
have a sheltered workshop on our campus where
another 170 students from the ages of 21 to 50
work. We have seven dierent vocations that we
teach them, and they make things like Agarbatti,
candle etc and trust me the products are kick-ass.
en we use those products for giing which is
to spread awareness about the cause but also to
showcase the abilities of the kids. So, they’re with us till almost 50 and there’s constant counselling and
career conversation with the parents.
Just to get a little technical, so what all, but
here’s all these terms, what are the various
manifestations, the actual aictions, you know,
at the end of it, like one knows Down syndrome,
ADHD, the whole alphabet soup out there?
If you can just spell out what they are, because
there’s tons of terms one hears.
As a society, we really need to do away with
labelling. But I will explain what is really
going on. Again, IQ is not an accurate way
to this conversation but just for simplicity of
understanding. If 100 is normal IQ and 70 is all my
kids with intellectual disability, 70 to 90 is typically
the learning disability spectrum. So, your ADHD,
dyslexia, inability to comprehend numbers,
alphabets, slow learners, some sort of a learning
disability, would typically come in that category.
With the case of the kids that we serve, their brain
has been aected, and no amount of surgery or
medication is going to change IQ.
So, because your brain has been aected, you will
have some other disability with it. It could be in the
form of visual impairment, hearing impairment,
cerebral palsy, layered with autism and or some
combination of this. I cannot change your IQ, but
what we do with you through our interventions
of healthcare education and skill development is
empower and equip you to be self-sucient in your
activities of daily living, as well as do other services.
Whereas in the other situations, and I’m now
coming to the side which is mental illness, oen
we also get mixed up with mental illnesses. People
are like, ‘Oh all your children are schizophrenic.’
No. Mental illness can be cured through therapy,
through medication, through counselling, you can
beat it. So, that’s broadly the dierence.
I admire the work you’re doing. My one query
was that the parents of such children are largely
worried what will happen to my child aer I’m
no more. And I think Jai Vakeel used to have a
residential place which is closed. So, is there any
chance of reviving it?
Yes, we had a residential home on our campus when
I took over in 2013 and we had 38 students and
that was coming from a place of the journey of Jai
Vakeel and which had been very organic. So as and
when the parents felt the need for something, Jai
Vakeel would step up to provide it. So, a parent
came and said, “I stay in ane, I can’t come up and
down every day, will you keep my child Monday to
Friday?” And we said, “Yes.” Similarly, somebody
came and said, “Aer me, what? Will you keep my
child?” And we said “Yes.” So, what had happened
by 2013-2014, was that my youngest child coming
to campus for therapy was a few months old.
And my oldest on campus was 70 years old. e
ones who were 70 actually needed nursing and
medical care which, as an organisation, we were
not designed or equipped to provide. ey were
even coming into the classrooms. So, as a leadership
team, members of the board, and members of the
family, we actually came into the room and said,
what are we really trying to do over here, what is our
core competency? Because the truth of matter is,
that nobody can be excellent at everything, right, no
company, let alone a not-for-prot. So, what is really
our goal?
Inclusion and we’re going to provide it by doing
healthcare education and skill development and
therefore whatever was non-core, we mindfully
decided to wind down and partner with others for
whom it was core. So, the landscape had evolved
and now there are residential homes like Aadhar,
the one in Karjat set up by SPJ Sadhna, et cetera,
which are designed to look aer people like the
kinds that we had. I literally visited homes, found
the right t for each child, had a conversation with
the family, and made that transition happen for
them. at’s why we wound that down. Having
said that, even as we speak, I have two kids on my
campus. Both of them have come to me, they’re
abandoned, they are orphans, they came to us
through the Child Welfare Committee, and we do
know that no other organisation will take them, and
if we push and move them, they will not survive.
So, despite it not being the most nancially viable
proposition, we are running a residential home for
the two kids on our campus.