KAVACH: The ‘aha moment’ of our story

Every movement begins with an ‘aha’ moment. Every era-defining revolution stems from a singular revelation, when a light bulb goes off in one person’s head and it hits them like a ton of bricks: “Oh my God, I was wrong. Now I need to make things right.”

Revelation is a hell of a motivator. No one is a better judge of that than KAVACH. Yes, that’s right. KAVACH too, began with an earth-shaking ‘aha moment’ that changed the course of our academic, professional and personal trajectories forever. That ‘aha moment’ was when we broke through the matrix of the ‘Successful’ syndrome.

Every overachieving scholastic fanatic began life as a wide-eyed child curious about the tickings and inner-workings of the universe around them. Our story began much the same way. We were all once filled with the drive to excel and rise meteorically in the world. We were participants in the ‘life-race’, clawing at every stray achievement and killing ourselves for success–whether it was grades, accolades, internships, even every pop-quiz was make or break.

That’s when we found Dassault, or rather, when Dassault found us. At the peak of our high-school ‘success-stories’ climax, the opportunity to change the world knocked at our doorstep. We gladly answered. But what started out as an extra-curricular project to flaunt on our profile and highlight on our resumes, ended up taking us on a roller-coaster ride of emotions, carrying us seamlessly to our ‘aha moment’. And that ‘aha!’ revelation went something like this:

You’re not lame, Mia. You’re just like the rest of us. Just like us, your metrics of success have always been about you. You need to graduate, you need to get into a good college, you need to succeed in life. But here’s the thing. How many people have succeeded in this world purely in pursuit of their own self-interest? Compare that to the number of people who decided one day that the world needed fixing, and set off to do their part to help fix it. Even at KAVACH, before we became founders of a start-up, we were pupils of the Dassault initiative whose first lesson is to teach students like us to care about the world’s problems. The first step to our journey was problem scouting. But it was also about zoning in on the problem that stoked our inner heroic selves. First-Aid Literacy was one such problem. The question of First-Aid Literacy led us to reflect on our own shortcomings as so-called ‘Knowledgeable’ students who seemed to have it all figured out. Our second ‘aha moment’, therefore, was as follows:

And that’s the crux of every good story. That’s the climax of our story. We’re battling the poison of First-Aid Illiteracy with our hard-won student-literacy. Using field-specific knowledge to arm others with universal knowledge. For we now know, that until every child, every student, every individual has the power to save a life if they need to, we’re not self-sufficient. We’re not knowledgeable. We’re not successful. And one of the most successful individuals in the history of humanity, Benjamin Franklin did say: