Immediately after 1st of Jan, there was a two-day wedding shoot in Pune. Subbu joined me for that. I shot a movie and he worked as the candid photographer. We often switch roles in different weddings. To prevent us from getting bored.
From Pune I flew to Bangalore and spent almost a week there trying to shoot two short documentary movies at the same time. There’s this place in Kormangla called IKP-Eden which is basically a shared office-space (I think you can rent a chair @6,000 per month) targeted at smaller sized start-ups. But what makes Eden very interesting is that, it has its entire ground floor setup as a workshop with all kinds of machines and tools and equipments (welding machines, lathe machines and all those ironman kind of stuff basically); pretty much everything that you might need to create a physical product. On one of the floors, they even have couple of 3d printers. Because of such facilities, many physical product based startups are moving to Eden (those with ideas for new medical equipment, new vehicles, new drones etc.).
Our Prime Minister keeps promoting “make in India“. Yet, if you look around, the infrastructure required to actually make things (from something as simple as say a new design of a water-bottle to something as complex as a new kind of car) is not accessible for start-ups, all at one place. The existing big manufacturing companies with a dedicated R&D team and all that, are usually the only ones creating new products. The college guys are stuck with e-solutions based ideas; you will see one new food app after another, but will hardly see a new type of say a camera, coming from a startup. IKP, by setting up Eden, wants to change this. And it is doing a good job of it.
L2, one of my IIT (and hostel) seniors, who works for IKP, invited me over to spend few days at their place to see how I could bring out the story of what they are trying to do, via my 3MS. I got to interview many startups in the process and got some great shots. Let’s see how the 3MS comes out to be.
Amongst the startups that already operate out of this space, there is one working on a new medical device that promises to automate the glucose dripping process (presently, it’s a manually controlled procedure and unnecessarily relies upon the efficiency of a nurse). Then there is another one working on a battery operated smart-vehicle, targeted at warehouses where workers will no more need to manually collect and carry around goods. These are just few examples. In my next post, I will talk about one more startup Skylark Drones, that operates out of Eden. How the startup came into being is the story of the other 3MS (along with the one on IKP-Eden) that I was there to shoot in Bangalore. That’s a cool story in itself.
