Pratilipi – Ranjeet Pratap Singh Krishna Jonnakadla 0:01 This is Maharajas of Scale, the podcast where we go behind the scenes and talk to founders who are demolishing the myths around building and scaling a big business in India. These are the stories that have shattered the assumptions around Indian consumers and are changing the game completely. I am Krishna Jonnakadla, serial entrepreneur, co-founder of FLIT, the Fashion Locator In Town and a start up mentor bringing you these stories. Namaskar, Namaste, Namaskara, Prayayam ! If you're wondering why I'm greeting you in so many languages today, we are talking to a unique individual and unique organization called Pratilipi. By talking to Pratilipi, today we have started a conversation with a company in the domain of art, not in the domain of business. They publish content, stories, their storytelling platform in our twelve Indian languages vernacular which is very close to my heart. So we are today with Ranjeet of Pratilipi. Ranjeet, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Ranjeet Singh 01:05 Thanks a lot for having me here. Krishna Jonnakadla 01:06 Welcome to Maharajas of Scale. A lot of Indians are polyglots. And they speak multiple languages, they can read multiple languages, do they actually read any literature or not is a separate point all together. About 20 years ago, when I was in Vijaywada in Andhra Pradesh, I was on multiple assignment. And that's when I picked up reading Telugu. Now I could read and write Telugu. But I realized that in Andhra Pradesh in Vijaywada, there is a road called Lulu road, which is home to a lot of publishers. And I would go to these places every other day, and pick up tons and tons of books. And I will stay up through the night and then that's when I realized that the world of vernacular literature was so rich and so different. What was your spark in studying Pratilipi? Ranjeet Singh 1:53 Actually, before that, let me kind of take a moment to share my thoughts on what you said. A couple of things. So first of all, like I personally don't like the word vernacular primarily because of connotations and like, I am not a grammar nazi, but I do think that you know, certain words should be used in certain situations because of the condition of how people think about those words. So I like to say that Pratilipi is an Indian language where it is taken from, like some of these Indian languages actually much bigger than the almost any other language that you would not call vernacular. So, it doesn't make sense in my personal being. Second of all, I don't think of Pratilipi as an art platform, or even a business platform I think of particularly, of course, it's a for profit company, it has raised a bunch of money and stuff like that. But the premise of the Pratilipi is not art or business, the premise of Pratilipi essentially is democratization of storytelling. So my belief in life essentially, largely has been always around people having equal access and equal opportunity. So the primary reason of why we started building Pratilipi, so there's a real story that I'll talk about, but rationally speaking, it's largely about that why should somebody have access to more literature, more content, more opportunities, more hopes or dreams versus somebody else just because of a particular language. So, in my family, for example, anybody who's older than me would not be able to speak a single sentence in English. And that just because of that, if they don't have the same access or same opportunity that sounds ridiculous, so I was lucky that my father was in army. So even though he passed away when I was fairly young, that essentially meant that I studied in Kendriya Vidayala. At that time my fees was like 45 rupees a month, and which might sound like a very small amount of money now, but at that point in time, like, there were people who used to tease me that you studying a very expensive school like 45 rupees a month is a lot of money that somebody's spending on your education. It was a very weird phase because you know, people in my school think of me as somebody who is relatively very poor, relatively very unsophisticated. And then people in my village would think that you know, it's extra fashionable, extra sophisticated and extra rich, and a bunch of things different between these two were the most common thread is whether or not you're able to speak and kind of like understand English and my belief has always been that it's not just about English, it's not that I have anything against English, we all speak English right now, but the belief has always been that language should be something that unites people, it should not be something that separates people. So that was the rational part of why we started building Pratilipi and the real story of the emotional stories is crappy simpler, and it seemed like I have gone a very very small village in Rae Bareli lives 1000 population village, I think, has been famous for three things. It has been the Gandhi Bastien, even before Indira Gandhi, like Firoz Gandhi was actually from MP from where it has been famous for literature. So Nirala was my favorite writer actually was not from Rae Bareli but he spent almost all his working life, is my really one of the greatest writers ever. Then Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi was from Rae Bareli and then it has been famous because like a lot of times people confuse it with Bareilly and there is a very famous song like “Bareilly ka jhumka”. Krishna Jonnakadla 05:00 Rae Bareli is Sonia Gandhi’s constituency. Ranjeet Singh 05:03 Yeah. So like, I in fact lived in Rae Bareli with my mom from class seven to class 12 but essentially my home is not in Rae Bareli, it's about 15 kilometres away from Rae Bareli city. So almost nobody was English if you make more than five six thousand a month you are decidedly rich, people would be jealous of you if you're making more than 10,000 a month. On the side of it I'm a voracious reader so you know, so I used to read like 130 140 plus books so you just think everybody else started by reading comics like Champak or Chanda mama or Balhans. Krishna Jonnakadla 5:33 So these 130-140 were in Indian language books? Ranjeet Singh 5:37 At the starting almost everything was Hindi in fact there was no the language that I knew. And the little bit of English like my own course books for example literature and my elder brothers and cousins and their English books, but like 99% Hindi and then started reading like Nagraj, Super commando Dhurva, Chacha Chowdhary stuff like that, then started reading classical literature Nirala, Dinkar. Then started reading contemporary Indian literature. Krishna Jonnakadla 6:00 Chacha Chowdhury, I used to read it, one of my favorites. Bablu is one of the characters isn't it. Ranjeet Singh 6:08 Names sounds similar but I am not able to place it. Krishna Jonnakadla 6:12 Chacha Chowdhury and Bablu are the two guys that team up and would do a lot of mysterious things and so it was very interesting. Ranjeet Singh 06:18 I feel like you're mixing characters from a different comic. So Chacha Chowdhury there is primarily I think, Chacha Chowdhury and Sabu. Krishna Jonnakadla 06:25 Sabu Yeah. Ranjeet Singh 06:26 Sabu is not a kid. Sabu was supposed to be like 50 feet tall, very powerful guy, this one comes from Jupiter. Yeah, I remember there was a kid but I don't remember his name primarily it was Chacha Chowdhury and Sabu but there are bunch of kids one of whom is quite frequent. Right So yeah, I think I remember butI'm not able to place the name I still remember the story. So there should be some sort of the comics like Chacha Chawdhury. Krishna Jonnakadla 6:48 Doremon is very popular and which is actually written in Japanese right? The Doremon cat is famous for doing all the magic to extended Kingdom. okay. And when my daughter now watch this Doremon, I was reminded of Chacha Chowdury’s magic powers. And there's this one story where they have to watch a football game, and they don't get tickets to it and charges creates a contraption that creates a transparent layer, a sort of an X ray that helps him. So Sabu and Chacha Chowdhury are both using that contraction to see the football match. So I remember that. Ranjeet Singh 7:25 The funny part is Chacha Chowdhury doesn't have any magical powers, but he's supposed to be very, very smart. So tagline of Chacha chowdhury comic says was, Well, two things one was “Chacha Chowdhury ka dimag computer se bhi tez chalta hai”. And the other one was “Sabu ko jab gussa ata hai tab dur kahin jwala mukhi fat ta hai”. I still remember these taglines. Krishna Jonnakadla 7:43 Are they still published? Ranjeet Singh 7:47 They still are published. I don't know if like how frequent they are anymore.