Traditional Cooking methods and recipes

• Create a website with a section for each state
• Include recipes of only home made dishes that are usually not available in restaurants
• Source recipes from senior citizens to include traditional ingredients (freshly ground masalas instead of ready made powders)and methods of making including tools like the stone grinders, etc.
• Allow people to contribute but follow a set template to maintain consistency
• Any new contributions to be vetted by the admin
• Create a movement like the 100 sarees pact on FaceBook and get people to try out these recipes and post on FB with pictures, their experience
• Encourage people in apartment complexes to meet and try out these recipes and post
• We can even hold cookout sessions in different cities where people can come together to make starter, main course, dessert etc. each from a different region

Education for rural children

• Several educated senior citizens in urban India have time on their hands and are getting bored with not much to do.
• Almost everyone has cheap smart phones and internet is cheap and available in many rural places. Digital India initiative will make it ubiquitous soon hopefully.
• We can collaborate with telecom providers like Airtel, Reliance and others to provide free internet to select government schools in rural areas that we shortlist to work with initially. We can add more later on
• Sign-up senior citizens to teach subjects to children in rural schools over WhatsApp call or Skype at agreed times let’s say 2 to 4 times a week on Maths, Science and English. And another important subject is Values.
• This does not replace schools, but more like collaboration to teach difficult topics and get doubts cleared.
• Batch of 15 to 20 students per teacher
• Could have different teachers per subject or same teacher depending on teacher’s comfort and availability
• We could collaborate with NGOs like MagicBus and others to identify schools in rural areas
• We can collaborate with corporates to donate smart phones, projectors, laptops to these schools. As per legal requirements, all corporates are mandated to donate 2% of their profits to social causes so hopefully not too difficult to get them to donate.

Challenges and Opportunities

There are so many challenges and opportunities around us that can be solved either for profit or not for profit. This is an attempt to come up with at least 100 problems / challenges / opportunities.  Listed below are the ones I have gathered so far (there could be duplicates).  Let’s do some more ideating. Can you please think of problems we see around us and add to the list.

Click on the links (Only on some items) to go the the page with solution ideas for that challenge.

1. Urban solitude – people moving cities and houses, families don’t have time for each other. Lack of initiative of meeting people or calling them. We tend to use WhatsApp and don’t put enough effort in meeting people in person
2. Excessive packaging waste due to e-commerce – Amazon, Swiggy
3. Lack of quality education in govt. schools especially rural India
4. Traditional cooking methods and recipes dying
5. Excessive traffic jams, single occupant cars
6. Insensitivity of people towards road accident victims
7. Growing cases of non-communicable diseases like heart, diabetes, etc.  owing to unhealthy lifestyle and food
8. Road rage / growing impatience of people on roads leading to fatal accidents. No fear of breaking traffic rules
9. Rise in suicide cases among teens owing to depression
10. Absence of top class affordable healthcare for the poor
11. Absence of quality family time. How about family sit down dinner.  There is always one kid or parent missing at the dinner table
12. Invasion of social media
13. Lack of support for senior citizens – Elderly couple who live alone, whose kids are settled abroad, they need support for daily chores
14. Lack of support for working mothers
15. Urban housing for poorest of poor
16. Disposal of plastic, electronic waste and in general waste management
17. Severe air pollution
18. Screen time for Adults and Kids
19. Awareness of avenues to do service back to the community
20. Food waste – everywhere (especially social functions) and hunger everywhere else
21. Save river water – Help Isha foundation with planting Trees
22. Mental Health
23. Physical Health
24. Jobs (Future of work), Poor employability skills at present
25. Support structure (Safety nets) -Family, Friends, Social, -changing dynamics
26. Excessive usage of non bio degradable (disposable) products during social events
27. Higher level of expectations from family and society and stress levels for students and professionals to succeed. Education and Life was much simpler when we were kids.
28. Talking from Bangalore: potholes to be fixed, garbage on roadside to be cleaned, planting more trees
29. Corruption
30. Migrants from other states unable to have smooth integration primarily because of language barrier (how to teach state language to migrants in first 6 months of their stay..)
31. Lack of awareness about Sanitation and Hygiene
32. Ultra-dependency on instant relief from ailments using drugs that are really harmful in long term usage
33. Low literacy levels
34. Children sexually abused
35. Lack of mechanization of agriculture
36. Rising instances of rape
37. Lack of sanitization and hygiene
38. Lack of clean drinking water
39. Chemicals/pesticides in vegetables/animal products, Need Organic food
40. Losing proficiency in Indian languages
41. Child labor
42. Lack of counseling for elderly parents shoved in to old homes
43. Declining art of wearing a saree
44. The lost arts – hand weaving, stone carving, etc.
45. Home economics – basic life skills – sewing on a button, mending a hem, changing a car tyre, unclogging a sink / toilet, etc.
46. Willing Retired folks with lot of skills but unutilized
47. New mothers who don’t want to take up a full time role. Very few part time 3-4 HR jobs available.
48. Dependency on private transport due to inadequate public transport system.
49. Indian traditional knowledge and wisdom, written or told in Indian languages slowly being lost or ignored due to linguistic focus shifted to English and other modern languages – Losing skills in our epics, our Maha Kavya, poems by our great poets (basically related to our culture and literature)
50. Food products adulteration in eateries
51. Heavy book load for school children
52. Pressure on women to zero size
53. No value based education for kids
54. People are always looking for shortcuts in everything
55. Unfriendly transport facilities and buildings for the differently abled
56. Plastic everywhere-  Find easy solutions to replace common usage of plastic ( e.g. bamboo tooth brushes, paper or l lead straws)
57. Water shortage
58. Population explosion and overcrowding in cities
59. Teenage obesity
60. Stray dogs
61. Drainage in all small towns
62. Uneducated people suffering under Government officials
63. Children / mentally ill women made to beg on the streets and abused
64. Need socio economic inclusion for rural india
65. Eve teasing
66. Health and well-being for corporate employees
67. Supporting employment/ business start-up support to people with reduced mobility
68. Community farming (we bring project management and risk management skills)
69. Volunteer service at hospitals to support care givers and help them manage multiple tasks and self
70. Religious violence
71. Cattle menace on streets
72. Low focus on sustainable  agriculture
73. Upskilling opportunity for unorganized labor like domestic help, house cooks, infant care etc.
74. Fast food and highly processed food becoming popular
75. Marriage declining singles rising
76. Sex education
77. Too many Temple and religious processions
78. Obsession with Virtual Reality Vs Reality per se
79. Access to electricity
80. Superstition
81. Decreasing number of parks and community centers
82. Decreasing trend of physical library and books being replaced by electronic media
83. Kids playing more indoor games as outdoor is no more safe and/or they are addicted to online content
84. Rising insensitivity – people only concerned about themselves, no one thinks of society or environment

 

Are there any issues that you are passionate about and want to pick up? Right now, let’s just come up with some proposed solutions. We can think of execution later. If we are able to think of solutions which are for profit, that would be great.

We could even combine a couple of issues to come up with a solution e.g. getting ignored / bored senior citizens to teach the rural children using video call

Even for execution, some of it can just be a hobby like creating a website for traditional recipes from all over India i.e. recipes of dishes usually made at home and not available in restaurants

If we can form a few groups with each group taking up one or two challenges, we can come up with a lot of solutions. Maybe have some get-togethers with family / friends and brain storm to find solutions.

There are so many non-working people who just need some inspiration and guidance to do something. We can give our ideas to them and maybe some of us can also be a part of some initiatives.

Post your comments below. Let’s all add comments related to other challenges and problems in one thread and interests about participating in the solutions in another thread. I will create a separate group / page for each challenge we want to pick up and add people interested in solutioning it to that group.

Let’s all be a part of finding the solution instead of just complaining!