The accidental entrepreneur

Life is an accident. There's no better way to describe Tara Thiagarajan's journey so far. Everything from science to microfinance to moving across continents were things she never imagined or planned for. But they happened and she learnt to adapt and enjoy every experience coming her way.

An accomplished neuro-scientist armed with a PhD from Stanford University, she had to shift gears to micro-finance, when her father suddenly suffered a stroke in 2004. The eldest of three daughters, Thiagarajan had to step into his shoes at the Micro-credit Foundation of India (MFI), a micro-finance NGO run by him for women's self help groups (SHGs) in rural Tamil Nadu. The next two years were a difficult time. "It being a non-profit and with so many lives depending on it, divesting the organisation was not an option," she says.

But science was not something she could leave behind. Thiagarajan continued with her scientific career flying to and from the United States where her family and work were. By then she was expecting her second child. "The circumstances for me in my pregnancy were really not conducive. My father was ill, I was travelling between India and the States and it almost seemed like my daughter was born along the way," she says. By the time she was expecting her third child, the trans-continental lifestyle began to get difficult and she decided to move with bag and baggage to Chennai at the end of 2008.

When she took over, Thiagarajan felt the not-forprofit model was not really working for them as they were responsible only for recovery and remittances and not the lending. With her father's colleagues coming on board, she then decided to found Madura in 2006 that had to be a private, for-profit enterprise but one that worked for socioeconomic change.

While Madura was taking over the SHGs from its predecessor organisation, MFI, the latter topped the Forbes list for being the world's most cost-effective micro-finance organisation in the world in 2007. This they did by adopting an approach different from the other micro-finance entities. Unlike them, MFI and consequently Madura, does not employ people who travel through the rural areas collecting money every week. Instead, the groups themselves come in and remit the money at their branches once a month. Also, the training and education of the groups is carried out not only by the company's facilitators but also members of existing groups who know the set-up.

These lead to lower operational costs and Madura can lease out loans at one of the lowest interest rates, between 18-21 per cent on diminishing balance, compared to the market rates of between 25-40 per cent.

With 160 branches spread across rural Tamil Nadu today, Madura, in its four years of existence, has given out micro-loans to the tune of Rs 500 crore. But Thiagarajan wanted the role of the company to extend not only to providing capital but also educating the groups on where to begin and what to do.

"If you rely on a live teacher, there is a definite emotional connect but there are other limitations of how many people you can access. That is why we developed a digital information capsule which we will soon be putting into place." Besides this, a Tamil feature film, Shakti Pirakkudhu, based on the lives of the members, is ready to roll out as part of the education initiative. Madura is also working in partnership with professor Madhu Viswanathan of the University of Illinois on his venture, The Marketplace Literacy Project, that aims to enable entrepreneurial literacy among low-literacy, low-income buyers and sellers.
Watching her manage Madura, shows how Thiagarajan has adapted into the world of finance. But adapting is what she has always learnt to do. She graduated in mathematics from the University of Brandeis in the US and then returned to India to work in the family textile mills in Chennai. While studying maths, she developed an interest in science and was eager to go back and pursue it. "I decided to apply for an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management and in between classes would sit in at undergraduate classes of physics and biology and then applied to Stanford for a PhD after I had some grounding." It was at Kellogg that she met her husband, Geoffrey Alan Dick, now a security and emergency management consultant in the US. Three weeks after meeting him she was to head off to China and Mongolia on a trip by herself. She mentioned it to him a day before leaving and entirely rhetorically asked if he would like to come along. Two weeks into her trip, she got a call from him announcing he was at the Beijing airport.

Travelling was a passion. She braved septicemia in Kenya and survived on millet rice and roots in Timbuktu. "On the trip to Timbuktu, we had been backpacking across the area for about two weeks and travelling through remote parts. Eating an ugly smelly root for days finally got to us." They reached the nearest airport and asked for a flight out to Togo, the next stop on their itinerary. The only available flight was to Paris and they took it. "Our hunger knew no bounds," she laughs and adds, "the first thing we did was to head to an American restaurant and gorge on burgers and fries. We felt really stupid afterwards for abandoning the trip midway." She is planning her next trip to Kodaikanal with her children, a place she has fond memories of.

"Growing up in Chennai, we would alternate between that and a suburb in Philadephia, where my mother is from, during the summer holidays." Her mother, Deborah Thiagarajan, is a sociologist and now runs Dakshinchitra near Chennai, a centre for the folk arts and traditions of South India.

An average day for Thiagarajan is packed with activity. She gets up at 7 a.m and goes through the whole morning routine of getting the children, six-year-old Krishna and three-year-old Kavya ready, complete with 'stop fighting' and 'brush your teeth' and packs them off to school including one-and-a-half year old Kevin who goes to a school for toddlers.

She then does yoga for an hour and shoots off to work by 10. Once home in the evening her time is meant entirely for the children until 8 when they go to sleep. From then until 1 a.m. is her metime.

"It's when I do all my scientific work, answer emails and generally read up on things." It's no wonder her idea of a perfect vacation at the moment is where her children can be whisked away to 'kiddie camp' by 6 a.m. so she can sleep in a while longer. Sundays with the little ones mean lots of reading and watching youtube videos together on randomly chosen topics that interest them.
It is this love for reading that she has combined with her love for science and started a small publishing company with younger sister, Rena, seven years her junior, who works in a geothermal energy company in San Francisco. "It's called Magic World Media and the idea is to tell children that science is not about learning facts but exploring the unknown. So it attempts to answer all the questions they have that grown ups usually shrug off with a 'because it is so'." Her other sister, Maya, five years younger to her, teaches English literature in the US.

These multiple interests is what her PhD advisor at Stanford, Dr Richard Tsien, found striking. "She gets bored with doing the same thing. Though it must be an incredible challenge to juggle her microfinance efforts, her neuroscience interests and her ongoing collaboration with our lab, not to mention a family. If anyone can do it, Tara can."

To manage some more time for her scientific work, Thiagarajan often goes to the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore where she is a visiting scientist. Her work in the field involves studying electrical activity in the brain and the networks between neurons and how they communicate.

The passion shines through when she talks of how her subject can be equally applied to society at large and to the microfinance model in particular. She explains, "Studying the way neurons form networks, you can apply the same principles to how networks are formed among humans as the way the two cluster and organise themselves is very similar. We can then see how information flows and accordingly draft strategies."

For her husband, shuttling between the two countries has meant a role-reversal. "It's funny, it was Tara first and now it's me doing all the travelling," he says. But he is now in the process of moving his work to India, so if not all, he's here most of the time to be with the family. About his wife he says, "She's fearless. There is nothing that she would look at and say I'm not trained for this, how am I going to handle it? She doesn't see change as a negative and definitely keeps me on my toes," he laughs. Thiagarajan agrees. "Every time I tell my husband, I think now we are beginning to settle down, something happens. If I look back, I can't say any part of my life has been boring. Every phase has been exciting and has had so much activity."

Five ways to connect with your children 1. Travel with them during holidays and show them something new. 2. Play outdoors with them. It's good for you and good for them. 3. Tell bedtime stories. Make up your own series so that you can all participate in the story telling. 4. Talk about work. It connects them to your day when you're not there. 5. Lots of chasing with the tickle hands because it's just a pleasure to hear them laugh.