One of the stories from my ninth-class book that is tattooed on my brain is called “दुःख का अधिकार” which translates to “The right to grieve”.

The story is about a mother whose son has died. She is from a poor family where they earn every day to feed themselves. The son was the sole breadwinner for the family and his sudden death due to a mishap leads to a dire situation for the family. Since the family’s financial situation is bad, the little savings they have goes into the funeral. The son’s wife and kids are grieving but are also hungry. Hence to buy food for the family and fund the remaining rituals, the mother decides to continue the son’s profession of selling melons in the market.

She puts her stall in the market, but shoppers and bystanders comment on how greedy she is that she couldn’t even wait for a day before she wants to earn again. They also curse how her greed will cause people to unknowingly do the wrong of eating food from a house which is grieving. No one realises that she doesn’t have the convenience of taking a break when her son died because she is poor and needs to earn so that they can eat. The conclusion of the story is that you need a level of privilege to even grieve the death of your closed ones.

This need of privilege transcends into many other parts of our lives and one of them, is “the right to startup”. I believe that starting up even if the individual is independently competent & resilient requires a significant amount of privilege like

  1. stable financial & health condition of family or no significant obligations
  2. savings to take care of yourself and fund your ideas (including failures) until you get to a level of sustaining it through revenues or funding
  3. an idea you believe in
  4. a network of people through education or through work that can help you build a team or become part of your team
  5. conducive infrastructure & market
  6. stable geo-political conditions and a harmonious society to operate in

I believe people who have competent backgrounds may not be able to start up if the first condition is not met. Most of the times individuals are placed into those situations entirely by chance and the situations are out of their control. A lot of other conditions are also significantly impacted by chance — you fell sick on the wrong day? you might never get a good education and subsequently a good network, you are born in unstable geography or wrong timer period? you might spend days just trying to be alive.

Overall, this makes it even more important for people who have “the right startup” to startup and contribute to the society. I think Bhavin Turakhia puts it most succinctly, “It is our moral obligation to make an impact proportionate to our potential.”


#startups