Trying to be the mentor for you that I never had! - Tanay Pratap Tanay is an engineer at Microsoft, a coding freak turned mentor to over 50,000 students across India. He has over 30,000 followers on Instagram, 8000 on youtube and 13000+ on Linkedin. He teaches coding for free to students, acts as a mentor to them and is influencing the education sector of India in a way we can't imagine. In this podcast, we talk about why your life will change as soon as you take responsibility for it but we don't stop here. We discuss how we can take responsibility of life, why Gen-Z procrastinates, how you can be action-driven and many more things. Connect with Tanay here: Linkedin Instagram Connect with me here: Linkedin Instagram Youtube

Prema Iyer, 78 years old, was born into a traditional middle-class Iyer family. Her father was a Central government employee, and her mother, a housewife. From the age of three, Prema has lived in Delhi Married at the age of 18 to an Indian Air Force officer B.R.Iyer, Prema looked forward to building a life with him, it had other plans for her. Before the marriage hit its two-year mark, she lost her husband in an accident. Recounting the day, she says, “On the morning of the day he passed away, I had a heated argument with him and urged him to work on the ground, since we were expecting our first child (eight months pregnant). He told me death could come anywhere, not just when he was flying.” After his untimely death, Prema recounts the initial state of shock she was in. I was like a dead person, I didn’t care if I ate, got any sleep, and nothing mattered. She even contemplated suicide – but there was life inside her that kept her alive. She says she had two choices before her – either live under the charity doled out by relatives or make something of her life ahead. Prema was offered a job with the Indian Air Force on compassionate grounds, where she served in the Civilian Administrative Organization for 20 years and took voluntary retirement after her daughter was married. “It was extremely difficult in the beginning to walk into a place where I was a junior to many of those who reported to my husband. But nothing deterred me.” Even at 78, her enthusiasm for life has not reduced. In the year 2013, she joined the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) in Dehradun as their in-house counselor called ‘Campus Nani.’ Her role here, as the name suggests, is to be an alike doting grandmother to all the students. To listen to the students, teachers, and even parents, and help them overcome their issues. One of Prema’s students, who wish to remain anonymous, at the college says, “It was only because of Nani that I was able to face my fears and emerge stronger. I was being stalked and didn’t know where to turn.” Prema wakes up by 3:30 am every morning with a deep sense of gratitude. When asked how she manages to see the silver lining in everything, she says, “for me, gratitude is not an attitude, it is an overwhelming sense of thankfulness.” Prema’s mission in life is to reach out to as many people as she can. She welcomes calls, e-mails, and even meeting people and just talking to them.

Saurabh Maheshwari is the man behind the famous news focused youtube channel Gyan zara hatke which recently crossed 500k subscribers. He is from Indore and runs a software company for a living. In this podcast, he reflects why he started a youtube channel, how media is biased and what he envisions for himself.