From Cubicle to Cosmos: How Paul Savio built an Astro Tourism Business
The conversation drifted to you know absolutely clear skies not a single cloud in the sky and then I pointed to one corner and said except for that bit and that's when my dad said that's not a cloud it's the Milky Way. The ASM (Area Sales Manager) was very clear he said don't come don't travel after dark to Lucknow. Better you stay there so I said why? He said nothing much there was another company's ASM was assaulted and murdered some 8 months ago but since then nothing has happened. 2015 end I got this,
I I I felt something which I had never felt ever in my life and something which I thought that I would would never Venture into which was I decided that you know I'm done with working for someone else. This is origin stories a show about Indian Brands businesses Founders and how they got here I looked up at the night sky and felt the immense size of the universe you might have have you ever looked up at the night sky and thought I'm going to make money from from this I'm Ravi Kosik and on today's show we have Paul Savio of starscapes starscapes builds and runs space observatories in the remotest parts of India Paul's mission is to share his passion for Science and Space with school children families and anyone curious about their place in the universe he does this by running astr TS photography workshops and Rocket building sessions lacks of Indians have attended his events come along as we follow Paul from his IM am Kolkata days to his tins at Giants like Nokia and Samsung to his first observ in utarak the fascinating Journey Begins three decades back in rural Kerala where a young Paul was visiting his grandparents this is just after the rains subsided and we were in The Terrace and uh we were looking up and you know uh again I still remember seeing stars like I've never seen before and uh the conversation drifted to you know absolutely clear skies not a single cloud in the sky and then I pointed to one con and said except for that bit and that's when my dad said that's not a cloud it's the Milky Way wow and uh you suddenly you know you get a you you get a perspective of yourself uh which even at at an age of 9 or 10 you can suddenly realize that you're just a spec in something which is so vast right because you you you can see the stars and stars are specs in the sky but when you when you see the Milky Way It Is you you've seen that in textbooks you've seen that in pictures you see a big spiral thing which says that you know the sun is a small dot on this huge thing called the Galaxy and all that and suddenly you're seeing that Galaxy it puts everything into perspective it kind of gives you a a realism shot and uh that was something which was uh a great experience which still lingers today for me that Thrill is something which I shared every every time I've done a stargazing experience as either you know someone who's just attending a stargazing session or taking a stargazing session that that thrill and that experience was something which I could sense in the others and we shared it and that that never dies and uh you had this great experience around age of 9 or 10 but then when you come back to Bangalore you're back in the AI IIT R race right how did you carry through your passion for Astro astronomy Astro photography all of that through what for most middle class bangalan is the rat race of academic experience uh Bangalore of course has a huge uh has a pretty uh good astronomy scene uh there are a lot of people I I'm not talking about today I'm talking about say 20 25 years ago today of course it's it's peaked but uh it's always been the case where uh to an extent we had the planetarium and it was always quite vibrant uh there was the astronomers the Bangalore amateur Association of Bangalore astronomers which was also there it was also of course there was also the you know the the encouragement from home so dad and mom used to encourage us experimenting in these things and going out and checking out these things and stuff like that there was also opportunities like contests and competitions which could give that exposure you go from Bangalore to Surat so that's that's an engineering degree and as we know most Engineers don't do engineering work uh you went on to uh went on to write the cat you got through I am alata uh at till there at any point did you think this is a possibility to be a business or were you still in the hey it's something I do for 2 or 3 hours a week I still need to like uh become a Management Consultant or a salesperson or a marketing expert uh did you have to choose between the two or very very clear that this was a hobby and never going to be no no this was definitely a hobby if you go back to the school days it was that is when I was seriously considering it as a career uh I wanted to get into Aerospace or astrophysics engineering or research in the field of astronomy but I didn't find opportunities that I would want to pursued I tried to look Beyond India but that was not a thing which worked or possibly because of lack of exploration or just lack of avenues to explore right I didn't really pursue it you have a lot of avenues today which weren't there 20 years ago so take me through your time at Im calata so I know that you wanted to get through I and you didn't after 12th standard and uh it's the dream of most people uh that were like us at that point in Diamond Bangalore right uh but you cracked uh cat which is point I'm sure you were top five% of India at that point in time uh that nice thing to say right but yeah I mean it's it's a tossup at the end of the day I think the top 5% in the country are a toss-up but I got lucky obviously and it all worked out um I joined IM Kolkata the thing is U what matters a lot in especially as you go up to these levels is the P group it's just selection bias you have Ultra smart people who are today I mean 10 years down the line I can say they many of them are CEOs many of them are running their own companies and you know how Uber successful people are and and they were smart in school also and it was it was great to interact with such people and that was that was the part I loved about those two years right it it worked out eventually for pretty much almost all of us and we were that batch of people when I think we were sitting for our summer placements which in the banking sector because it's a finance oriented I mean Finance leaning school right A lot of people look at getting into the Leman brothers and the Goldman Sachs of the world and uh November was our placement September 18 18th lemman declared bankruptcy this 2008 2008 and we were that batch so we had a bunch of people getting sitting for placements all like really smart people who possibly would have had a very very different career if they were you know 5 years earlier trying to get into a field which did not exist because you suddenly had Banks collapsing left right and Center and they became extremely undesirable but in two years time the market turned again and again we were the beneficiaries of the turn so by the time we graduated college the market was on the upswing but I got hindan lever at that time and very soon you know over those next one and a half years I kind of realized that that's what I wanted to do cuz you got through Hindustan Le in the first for my internship for internship okay you know along with that internship plus you know the education which happened afterwards I realized that uh you know what excited me was creating that uh value perception uh through marketing and you know you're actually showcasing what value you have and and then seeing the realization of that through sales and uh Hindustan lier is a extremely prestigious brand at the IM from marketing yeah it was it was for marketing it was a most sought of brand at that time I think it still is I'm not too sure how that's changed but it is I mean it is the biggest fmcg in the country and one of the biggest in the world right so it is extremely sought after of course now today I don't know whether the Amazon's of the world have taken that space but uh yeah I I limited myself to the marketing companies and I uh I managed to score noia at that time and uh incidentally Nokia was the most sought after company that year in at least along with h and PN this is at the the peak of 2010 yes and the peak very rapidly fell because I this was the placement was in May and by June people are asking why you joining Nokia wow so again I got to see the fall of one of the world's most prestigious brands from within so Nokia uh takes you in for a national role and the office is in guran okay uh but uh we get to do one year of training 6 months I spent in a small town called hardoi which is around around 100 km north of lakau and the territory I handled were from hardoi onwards all the way up to the Nepal border three districts of uh up and you know zero Hindi right now I know zero Hindi at this moment and this is entirely Rural right so the average price at that time for a handset uh which uh the country used to sell was around 3,500 rupees or 4,000 rupees and my uh average price was around 1,200 rupees because it was as rural as it could get and uh the ASM was very clear he said don't come don't travel after dark to L now so better you stay there so I said why he said nothing much there was uh another company's ASM was assaulted and murdered some eight months ago but since then nothing has happened so I don't think you should worry about it but just don't you know just be safe I was like okay I think that's not something I'm used to anyway so I decided to stay in small town which is a big deal for the small town also so even my Distributors never hosted a sales manager and Nokia was for the last 10 years was the thing which made their lives right it kind of built them from ground up to the millionair they were at that moment so on your first day uh you have a meeting with all the dealers and obviously they'll speak in Hindi how did you communicate um in fact I remember the first meeting um with the sales team and these were the the some of the best guys in the district or in the state actually uh one of them who was who won awards and all that so I was talking to him and basically we started discussing and then I asked him uh uh I wanted to check what his uh what the performance of the top selling model at the time it was a phone call Nokia 2690 it was a 2,000 rupe phone or something and it was hot selling product across the country so I asked him that's usually your benchmark you how the sales was going so I asked him 2690 sales he had a blank look on his face and he looked at the distributor then the distributor looked and said that's when I realized we 269 in Hindi they say 2690 so it is chab and and I knew numbers from 1 to 20 I didn't know anything beyond that at that moment I still remember taking my phone with its 3G newly you know rolled out 3g connection and sitting over there and opening a website which showed numbers from 1 to 100 and sitting and mugging up the numbers from 1 to 100 in the next one hour wow cuz that was it that was the language you had to learn and uh it really felt uh like you were in the deep end of the pool with you know with a life boy around you cuz there was there was a support system but you had to learn to swim and uh I had a town which was right at the Nepal border I used to go there and you could see the Border check post and stuff like that so it was quite an interesting experience for those 6 months kind of set me up for the next two stins I had with Nokia the next one was in Andra for another 6 months and then Punjab for another six months so it was all over the you know three different cultural centers uh which I got to see in my first job itself so it was it was a good experience there I saw another part of India and Border Town so I did my trips to you know Amritsar and saw Jalia wabag and waga border and all that so it was it was fun while it lasted what was the collapse of Nokia from the inside like because uh we it's easy to forget now but at that time Nokia was probably larger than what even AIS today right they were in probably every country in the world except North Korea so what happened Nokia was one they stagnated internally there was no uh Innovation happening they also kind of got uh too big basically as a company uh it became Behemoth and it wasn't really Moving Innovation is stifled two is uh on the handset side Samsung got in so as devices they started assaulting Nokia brutally so uh you know basically go to retailers and give Nokia gives 2% margin Samsung gives 10% margin right and Samsung has starts paying for visibility and stuff like that and poaching Distributors and retailers completely and on the software side uh you had on the premium side you had Apple getting into the picture so all these things happened at the same time noia stagnated plus Apple and Samsung and Android hit at the same time so within that span of 3 years uh the the consumer just shifted base and I switched to Samsung in 2013 correct and yeah how long were you at Samsung uh Samsung was again 2 years but Samsung was interesting because I worked in a European company and then an Indian company and now a Korean company so an East Asian company it's a completely different Paradigm they're very clear about what they want and they're very clear that if you don't deliver you leave and uh they have very clear set rules you stay within the rules and you perform you go up you stay within the rules and you kind of manage your way you can stay on you break the rules whether you're performing or not you leave and and uh we created a program which is alive even now as one of the most significant uh retail loyalty programs for the mobile industry could you explain what that means what yeah so essentially what we did was we said uh if you are my top retailer I can give you more money but then uh anyone else can come and give more money to more more than what I give you right so if I'm giving you 5% margin on my phone I someone can come and give you 10% margin when you a retailer It's the final shop on the road the shop the shop who you goes and purchas so this is the offline market for Samsung where Samsung through its distributor s to the retailers and uh and these are the individual retailers I'm talking about not the big chains not your chromas and your uh uh you know um what do you have sangas and pvas not those guys it is your individual retailers and there are quite a few of them because the big guys us to do an average of around 70 80 lakhs of uh revenue for Samsung alone per Outlet per month wow and uh Samsung used to be third so if you're talking about 80 lakhs you're saying on an average they would do 2 and a half crores of Revenue so if you're talking about 2 and a half crores of Revenue and even if they take back say 5% of that 12 and half lakhs of profit every month which these Outlet book right and I don't think you have too many msmes which do that today and and they used to sell All Brands so the idea was get the Loyalty of these Brands to push your of these shops to push your brand because they have a spin-off effect to the rest of the market if uh the top shops start talking about uh OnePlus then people will start looking at that say okay great so this guy is selling OnePlus maybe I should buy a OnePlus and then go possibly to a smaller store or in in a small town and you know buy from buy that brand so that Network effect of Brands is very important for these Outlets which is why uh companies spend a huge amount so if you go into any of these big Outlets you'll see uh you know huge kiosks inside the store you'll have boards you'll have demo devices which you can go and play around with all these are company sponsored and companies spend a lot on these Outlet simply because of that so what we thought was instead of giving that for the outlet there's a business aspect which we are doing let that be the hygiene Factor what more can we do so that's when we started talking about how to engage with the retailer on his personal life so we started giving them benefits which they could use when they go out in a holiday we gave them a conci service we gave them special uh benefits for you know shopping vouchers and stuff which their or Spa vouchers which their family with their wives or Sons or daughters could use we gave scholarships for the kids I'll give you one example was in I think Hui or belgum or one of these places where uh all the business happens on the main streets and they decided to dig up the road so all those Outlets had to shut down for like 6 months wow and those 6 months the threshold for invitation was historically you do around 50 lakhs of business or something like per month and these guys dropped to something like 2 lakhs or three lakhs and we invited them back into the program saying that we know why you had this problem that moment when they got invited it was a huge spark of loyalty for them and they kind of swore by Samsung after that and uh we we gave them a lot of family time so we used to actually have a monthly dinner for the dealers so they could take their family their wife and their children out for a dinner we used to send a a MK or a BMW to their house and this is in non-metro India where yeah yeah it will be in small towns and stuff like that wherever we could if if it wasn't a MK or we used to get the most Posh vehicle for that town it matters that the neighbors see them yes there'll be one guy who goes there he give a bouet to them invite them into the car and the car will go to the best hotel it's a five star hotel or seven star whatever go there and there'll be a separate table set out for them menu will be given to them and then there'll be a photo up at the end of it which will be printed out and given to them and stuff like that so those kind of experiences came in right holiday and stuff like that and the other thing was every company was giving holidays uh for the dealers what we said was we'll give you lounge access so even if you're going say Samsung or whatever Micromax or whatever some other brand which gives you a trip you go on a Micromax trip but you access the launch because of Samsung so you stand out even from everyone else because you're a Samsung loyal dealer so those kind of differentiations we started creating and uh it is a very exciting phase for me because I started understanding something which all of us intuitively know how to get people how to make people feel good yeah that is a good experience which went on till around 2015 by 2015 end um I felt something which I had never felt ever in my life and something which I thought that I would would never Venture into which was I decided that U you know I'm done with working for someone else were you tired of bureaucracy or were you disappointed by this just money or did you have like a quarter life crisis or was it more like I just want to do something under my own banner I think it was a lot of the first point the diet of bureaucracy thing it was um I mean it's not the red tapism alone it's about the fact that there are a lot of vested interests which you have to play around with which could actually hinder everything you want to do even in a extremely process oriented company like Samsung that that used to happen it's like you having a motor race and the drivers have to basically think of removing the trees from the road being the main challenge rather than actually driving towards the Finish Lan that was the feeling I had so I thought let's try out and see if we can you know make it big on your own uh whole other battle uh the idea there was this is something like a go to market consultancy essentially what it means is I know the market in India uh for this particular segment of the industry let's say Electronics uh you are an electronics brand sitting in China or us or Europe or Somalia or wherever you want to get into India now if you have to enter India what you need to do is first of all come here and understand the market yeah right and then bring your product or adopt your product to the Indian market then set up a sales uh Channel marketing all that support and stuff like that what we said was we will do the second part we will do the market understanding you just bring your product okay bring your product and obviously put in the money but the business will help you set up here because we know the market and that was the Crux of water GTM consultant consultancy was we started working with a couple of brands with a couple of exercises which went off pretty well and then there's one uh company which was in the field of mobile accessories so basically phone covers and chargers and cables and power Banks and so on and they said they wanted to start off in India and we helped started by getting some Distributors on board and for 6 months that business went on so basically there was sales there was everything which was happening and then um after that they came and said why don't you just setting it up and handing it over to us why don't you run the business here when you say accessories uh like what are are included and yeah so your phone covers your chargers your cables your power Banks so it took a huge space around 20,000 ft in GGO Factory space put up the assembly line six assembly lines and all that Brands which were China based they were they were sending the raw material we were assembling it here and we decided to build the business up here that was my next 3 years of uh life in the industry you ran this business for three years on behalf of a different brand but you were like the local CEO uh yeah so operations basically so we uh the brand was still brand which was established because it was selling uh earlier in India and uh yeah so it was their brand which we were licensed on it was not that we were a manufacturing facility for that brand it was more like we had taken the license for that and the pnl was ours so we used to invested it was not it was not like uh they were paying our salaries or anything got it so it was it was still taking the market risk and the yeah yeah everything was us so we used to actually buy the products from them so their involvement got over the moment uh we paid for the raw material how did your first uh stint into the entrepreneural world as compared to a corporate world at at the end of three years it actually uh you know it it got hit really bad during covid till 2019 we had our ups and downs both in terms of you know the market changing uh moving away from mobile manufacturing of power Banks and so on and one of the things which happened was people stopped moving around right so people stopped uh requiring power Banks so when no one requires power Banks is nothing for us to sell CU our business is pretty much uh manufacturing was power Banks and chargers and power Banks was around 90% of our Revenue kids will never understand how crazy it was just that I'm not talking about those two years I'm talking about that that one month after the lockdown was announced and that that craze of you know even even people who are extremely privileged like us uh we are so used to ordering stuff home and then ordering wasn't happening and uh as you go down it BEC becomes so exponentially more complex and heart- wrenching as you go down the you know the social pyramid right and it affected us in a lot of ways because we were still financially manag managing well off and stuff like we are obviously we are wealthy enough to tide through these things a lot of our employees weren't and especially in the factory L of the labor wasn't so it was extremely painful to let some people go but the bulk of the team we kept on and we continued paying salaries for as long as we could some of them uh especially uh the labor was usually from up and Bihar so they had to go back home we worked with flip cart in developing some audio range and all that because that's when your wireless started picking up your true true wireless earbuds and stuff like that so a lot of products we launched I think six six products I think across uh flipkart's portfolio including their own brand hrx and all that uh but it didn't last and uh when when you have to shut this mes down did you take a break before you started star capes or like no actually so starscapes happened uh it it kind of H it overlapped this in a very very significant way so we were sitting over there and then rash is talking about astronomy and that's when I found out that he was also an amateur astronom and uh he had a cottage in this place called kasani in utarak it's a small town around gets around 2 lakh tourists it's got what 10,000 people or something who live in that place is it like a religious place or is it like a station it has a combination of both so there is a small Temple and there's it's also it's like a a lot of the trekking community comes past that place because there a lot of tracks around that okay so they do a pit stop there essentially and there is some there's an asham there it's it's a it's a small town but two lak is a very small number actually if you think about it so this is his personal Cottage like for him to uh basically like a Sumer house kind of thing okay so uh there he had a telescope and uh that house when he was not there he used to let it out on Airbnb and so on and guest who used to come there used to love seeing through the telescope uh what Ram thought was you know why don't we just open this up so he got a small rooftop on one of the restaurants and got it built up basically put four walls in a roof which could move mounted the telescope there started ticketing those experiences we trained some local people to handle the telescope and taught them about the night sky and stuff like that and they used to conduct the shows so essentially it became like a show so basically what happens is you go in you get your ticket you go into that place it's like a four walls and a roof right with a dimly lit uh place and uh there's the telescope in the mid and then suddenly the roof opens up and all you see above you is the night sky I'm a treer in utak how will I how will I find out about this that's local Discovery so we just got the local touris and travel the taxi drivers the auto guys the hotels nearby we just told them that this thing is there during their experiences essentially there is one person who is an expert who we call the Star Guide who explains the night sky so he teach he talked to you about the stars and constellations and planets and you know how to identify them what they signify what's the stories behind them history mythology science everything it's like a whole story narrative which is built up it's like a half an hour chat which happens and that's the bulk of it and then afterwards you get to see a lot of the objects through the telescope whether it's you know the moon the creators on the moon or the rings of Saturn or the satellites of Jupiter some deep deep space objects like you know some galaxies and star clusters nebulas and all that stuff and at what time or at what point did you realize that okay this can be more than a passion project so one is it kept growing so just for an illustration we we had priced the ticket at 100 rupees or something 50 rupes or something the first year we brought it up to 100 rupees 150 rupees the next year uh the customer base kept growing we brought it up to 350 the next year it kept growing brought up to 500 rupees the following year and it still kept growing it's it's around 2019 where I said you know I'm tired of this so I don't really want to continue with this mobile accessories of course I did continue for another two years because that covid happened and then we had to keep that thing alive or help to wind it down and stuff like that cuz the concept was simple concept was open up in a place which is which where people people visit so we don't have a Drive traffic there it just has to be discoverable and it has a fairly decent night sky so you give a night sky experience but for people who have never had a night sky experience correct so your Baseline is low we went we identified uh a partner who would help us set up in nital we identify the location commercials are drawn out we had to sign the agreement and Co struck wow so this was in the march of 2020 and uh our big season is the summer summer of 2020 went out out of the picture we had uh team which is set up uh and we had no business 2021 summer also went in with the Delta wave at that time so we didn't have uh any uh business for two years so how did you keep your team engaged for that time it was very difficult so we tried a lot of things we uh some of them uh I mean a lot of them went back home and then they came back uh at the location they tried a lot of V variations you know like uh some of them are Engineers so we they rigged up a system where uh with the Wi-Fi we didn't even have Wi-Fi we used to mobile dongle thing and from there you know uh through the telescope connect a camera and then rig that and uh put it on the internet so do something else and at what time did the traffic to these locations begin to recover and just and why Nal uh why not any other part of comfort zone because it was just we didn't want to stretch ourselves too th we were already there in kasani and the thing is even I was there in Delhi at that time okay so uh with covid striking I moved South and then we started exploring opportunities in the South so uh 2021 immediately after the the Delta is when to answer your question when the traffic started recovering the problem with our calendar was we have an April May June and then we have a July August September where shutdown because of monsoons so July August September of 2020 and 2021 were when Revenge tourism peaked but the problem was those are times when we were shut down finally in October of 2021 we opened our second Observatory uh that time we incorporated the company starscapes and uh we structured it uh with the objective of creating astronomy experiences and making them accessible to everyone the core of that whole thing was astronomy experiences for everyone right so it's not that what we doing is uh very very different from I mean it's not a groundbreaking new thing which we bringing into the world right stargazing is one of the oldest things which have been there like meand thirs have been looking up and doing stargazing so it's nothing which is new what is new is the accessibility so what do you need for stargazing you need clear skies now where do you get clear skies obviously at inaccessible places so the clearer the sky the more inaccessible places I it's directly proportional so your best stargazing you go to Google today and see what are the best stargazing sites you'll get ladak you'll get Andaman you'll get spiy it's easy to say that it's very difficult to get to any of these places so what we said was we'll we'll tie up with some you know some local Resort or something which where we could start the operations and so we started talking to Club Mahindra and Miki in G and uh they said okay let's try it out now so my staff set up an observatory experience within Club mindra property Wonder in Miker and uh it was a great experience went off very well so well in fact that Club Mahindra said why don't we tie up nationally wow all the yeah so on that one month's sample uh so we tied for all the centers essentially there are 38 centers uh it wasn't viable in places where it is too many you know too small so we said we will look at the big centers and five of the big centers we opened up our uh setup so you had you started starscapes practically in the middle of the pandemic uh it began to go well you had your Delta wave and then now you just try one month with Club Mahindra and then they want you to scale across their entire portfolio and the story didn't the hiccups didn't end there because end of December is when they said let's scale up and January February was the Omicron the third third wave so we had another two month pause uh thankfully by March it cleared up and we opened up at um pondicherry at munar Goa varka Beach and one more location in Kur which is at barit around 30 km from M so if I'm at Club Mahindra Goa I am at the beach till like 5:00 p.m. 6 p.m. 7:00 p.m. I go back I'm practically thinking two options are Netflix TV shows uh I can't enter the swiming pool I can't enter the beach uh after a particular time or starcaps right what makes a family or a couple or a guest at that location consider St no so actually the first thing is that right I mean the the option of uh sitting in the room is not what people come do these resorts for because uh like I said that go back to that uh that metric of accessibility and this right when people come to to these places what they want to do is they want to have new experiences uh it's not a a great Tech experience they're coming for it's a nature experience they're coming for which is why they go to the beach right because people want to be outside and uh that's something we kind of tap into which is why your Netflix may not be the competition what could be the competition is sitting at the restaurant and you know having a meal that could be the bigger competition and what we did was we started stacking a lot of experiences during the daytime okay so we don't restrict our experiences to stargazing of course stargazing happens which is the most uh you know the coolest thing to do but uh there is a star during the daytime so we do have solar observations during the day so on the telescope we fit uh the solar filters and uh you can observe the sun through the telescope you'll see sunspots and stuff like that in fact now we have new tools with which you can observe prominences you can observe flares and you know the actual structure of the Sun and stuff like that from the outside who who's the Target customer in this is it a family uh is it a family who's not in science but they want the kid to be interested in science who typically is the user of yeah so actually it's a combination of both see ultimately what happens is a lot of people relate to this because of many reasons one is when I was a kid I had gone like me personally right I had gone to my uh you know grandparents place in a village small town and I saw the skies I never never seen that since I moved to moved to a Metro so now I want my children to see that so I one of the target uh targets for this so I'll push my kids in there or I might actually want to go and see some something which I had enjoyed when I was a kid uh so both these are huge and the third is U kids who want to generally do activities so while we do the solar observation and the night sky observation we also have workshops and uh you know activities for children like making your own Rockets you uh making spectroscopes Sund dials you know pinhole projectors and stuff like that so we take simple stuff like you know take a kg cardboard roll it up put a cone and put the fins and connect it to a pipe and then connect the pipe to a bottle jump on the bottle the rocket goes up right so that's a rocket Workshop while you're doing that while you're having fun doing that you're also learning about how the fins affect the flight the trajectory how the core nose core is important and stuff like that and those kind of activities kind of get stacked up during the day the second thing is we we working very closely with the government of utak right now the government wants to promote astr tourism and uh they've identified certain districts and certain sites where the sky is great and there's no other tourism you know reason so for instance haridwar is you don't need to promote tourism in haridwar right that's done it's been done for the last 3,000 years you need to look at tourism somewhere else nital also has its latent tourist spacee but a lot of districts have nothing and uh when there's no um economic tent pole you need to find one and astrotourism would work in certain places especially added districts or towns Villages where you can't grow anything you can't do anything else you find a reason to promote tourism got it uh you mentioned that uh there's C I mean there's madikeri there is Goa and a couple of places right but I would assume a madikeri and Goa compared to an anital or ladak would just polluted with light right do an extent you're right in about Goa but again that uh the places we are looking at is South Goa which is also within Resorts right so it could to a certain extent have that clear sky uh there's a metric it's called the bottle scale ble it's essentially it's a scale of brightness so your nine is your basically your indan nagar and one would be in the middle of the ocean or something like so uh we look at around four or five anything lesser anything lesser than four or five is still okay so go out fall around four and a half five oh nanital would be around surprisingly would be around three and a half four uh kasani is two Marik is the odd one out it's two it is surprisingly dark for a district headquarters uh the reason is because it's it's forested and it's it's it's filled with coffee Estates so it's a very very dark sky surprisingly dark for something which is so you know critically populated when you start at a center like madikeri how do you acquire like your first customer or your first show basically we get hotels nearby uh aware of the fact that uh there is something here uh we get the uh taxi operator the tour tour and travel agents nearby who do that and we do a bit of branding online so so this is referral so when somebody asks an at the railway station or the airport uh what else is there to do in the city you basically they refer you yeah and that's a huge driver actually we we don't we don't understand that ecosystem because we not part of it but when we do get into that U see ultimately a hotel a hotel not a resort like uh say a club MRA or a Taj or anything which wants to keep its guest within it but a hotel where people just come to stay right their first thing is when they go to the uh the reception desk and say what is there to see here the person there needs to give an answer which is going to be useful for the guest do you have the ability to get somebody in Bangalore sitting to now visit K just for you that's going going to be the next thing cuz Miker our own Center is just start is just starting I think October is going to be the first time we're going to do that but uh we haven't focused on getting people from uh Metro from Delhi to nital or mukteswar Bangalore m is going to be the first attempt we're going to do it because uh one is we've generated enough content and enough interest by talking about our three platforms there and two is uh since all the big uh Resorts of Club Mahindra and we also have a tire up at St reges in Goa so we do have some level of salience here we have not invested Ed in that in terms of building the brand but that's the next big push which we'll do and we think that we'll be fairly successful moving people from Bangalore to medic because of the accessibility uh from the boy who saw the Milky Way at rural Kerala to cracking the cat to joining Nokia which eventually imploded to then starting a first company which may or may not have worked out the way you wanted how did you expect this journey to be and how has it actually turned out well um a lot of it was uh take as you go so it was uh decisions not accidents they were all decisions but decisions were made uh in in a short time span right it was when I was growing up it was okay should get into the field of astronomy professionally that didn't happen got into engineering okay then let's become an engineer let's get into signal processing and figure out something in electronics that didn't happen and then realized that consciously decided to move from there to management got into management wanted to make it big in corporate then consciously decided that that's not my cup of tea moved to Startup then did something which I was comfortable in which was mobile accessories decided that it's not exciting enough iously moved to something else now I I don't know what the next step will be but it will again be a thought out decision but it may not be something which I can predict today I can't say 5 years from now it's going to be how many centers does starscapes have today how many projects how many employees and how many families do you touch in a year or customers and where do you see that maybe like even two to three years down the line we have three observatories and uh two part two smaller uh setups Miker will come up with the fourth big Observatory we have it in kasani Bimal and mesar the the three ones Miker will be the fourth UTI is currently we are revamping it so it's I'm not counting it here apart from that we have a partner observatories in six centers which we will hopefully be growing to another you know seven eight more over the next 3 4 months spreading it out in mikar a little more UTI should start soon uh Coastal Tamil Nadu towards piceri and up to mahabalipuram there are a couple of Partners we're discussing with and uh an exciting thing right now is to open up in andman Port Blair so there there's a couple of there's a partner who's talking to us who's potentially trying to partner with us uh a few few more business models which you're exploring is essentially to have um have a training program for people in small towns and Villages uh to learn about astronomy so that they can go back and open their own Center so if if I'm having a small home stay in um in some small village uh I get five six tourists every uh every month or something like that right this is a particularly tough time for anybody who who is interested in science right uh there's a lot of fake news there's a lot of controversy around vaccines or alternate forms of medicine Etc uh is that a factor for you to pursue this uh this project it is yes and um I think the only way you can uh I I can give you a lot of information and you will never be able to judge for that judge for yourself whether that information is right or wrong right uh but once you experience it it becomes personal and that is the core of starscapes because we want to give you that experience once you experience s we do have people who come when they observe the observe you know Saturn for instance people refuse to observe Saturn and some people when they observe the Sun or something they'll remove their slippers and then observe the Sun but that's fine but the point is at the end of the day you're learning that this it is it is it's not it's not reducing what our ancients taught about these things right they they call them gods for all practical purposes are those are awesome things your son is not a small disc in the sky it is something which is so colossal and it is the reason for the existence of the earth so these are things you'll actually understand you'll understand the science behind the beliefs which we had so we don't want to counter those beliefs we want to kind of build on top of them we'll never say you're stupid for believing cuz that's that's wrong awesome it has been wonderful having you here Paul and thank you so much for sharing uh your struggles and your journey with uh which led you to starscapes yeah thanks a pleasure talking thank you
2024-03-05 03:33
