“Be the change that you wish to see in the world” — Mahatma Gandhi.

My inspiration. This is a story about a young man, “Udhavi Maghil” Divakar in his late 20s, living in Tambaram, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India. Diva is an one-man army, who has dedicated himself to help visually challenged students by finding them scribes to write exams, assignments, reading, and building audio recordings for the last 10 years.

Who is a scribe? Scribe is a volunteer, who assist and write exams for visually challenged students.

This is how it works: Chennai colleges, schools or students, reach out to Diva with requests, he finds scribe volunteers, follows through, and closes the scribe requests individually. The details related to the examinations such as exam center, time and location will be shared with the confirmed volunteer. Guidelines (Do’s and Don’ts) will be briefed in prior to the volunteer. On the day of the exam, volunteer appear for the exam along with the required documents (like Govt ID proof) to assist the visually challenged student in taking their exams.

Problem statement: If there are no available scribes to write exams, visually challenged students have to skip that exam and wait for the next schedule.

500+ requests per day (peak during exam months), managing 400+ scribes, 20,000+ back and forth communications with scribes, requestors, and students is Diva’s world today. Current request pipeline needs 30–50 scribes every day in Dec due to semester exams. Some days there are both morning and afternoon exam sessions. To make it more interesting and challenging, on average 20% of scribes drop out, and Diva has to fulfil those drop out requests few hours before the exam.

Diva has been managing these tedious registration, sign up, status tracking processes and tasks, manually with limited tools — Google forms, Google sheets for tracking, and WhatsApp for communications. Most importantly, he does this all with a Big Smile. Diva is a full time employee in an European company, volunteers after office working hours, puts his energy in his leisure time, sleeps for less than 4 hours a day to take care of students who need help. A true warrior. A Samurai. What was fascinating to me was, when I asked him, “why do you do this work? Do you have anyone in your family or friends circle, who is visually challenged?” He answers with utmost genuinity, “I want to give back to society. I have no strings attached. Most importantly, when I go to bed everyday, I can sleep peacefully with gratification.”

I could relate Udhavi Maghil scribe finder process to Kafka Event streaming — message queuing system (Pub/Sub Model), that I am familiar with. There is a producer, consumer, and the Bridge. All year round, Diva has been tirelessly acting as a “human” bridge between scribe volunteers and students. He is a real world connector. I got introduced to Diva few months back, iterated with him on his current state, brainstormed with a small team, and understood areas where help was needed. Kafka decoupling and Gandhi ji’s quote — Be the change: Introduced an on-call support management process to manage scribe communications, decoupled, organized individual tasks to task groups, identified owners to task groups, automation opportunities and planned execution with a team.

Now, we have a dedicated Udavi Maghil support contact phone number, assigned on-call person, standardized template message content creator, automated push notifications to WhatsApp, requests manager, and volunteer call log management. A system is born.

417 calls were made by the team last week. I know it is just a start. There is a lot more to be done.

“I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou.

Diva made me feel good today. I will never forget Diva. I feel satisfied that I have been a small part in allowing Diva to sleep, that extra 2 hours. Thank you D for the opportunity.

Hats off to Udhavi Maghil team: Divakar, Santhosh, Sowndarya, Rees, Vignes, Sweety, Arun, Yathi, Vijayalakshmi, Ubhasana, Chitha, Sriram, Akshaya, Angel, Kishore, and Manimozhi.

Few Chennai references — colleges and schools that Udhavi Maghil team is collaborating with: Nandanam Arts College, Presidency College, Queen Mary’s Women College, Nethrodaya, School of Excellence Law, Sethu Bhaskara Matriculation higher secondary School, Institute of Hotel Management, and Shasun Jain college for Women.

Interested folks, who would like to enjoy “that extra 2 hours, Samurai” journey — we have kicked off a non-profit “Thiri Foundation”, a low key organization with a group of close friends, Mano, Mani, Siva, primarily focused on enabling these silent warriors through technology, process and solutions. Join us. DM me via LinkedIn message. There are more samurais out there and I truly believe there are many good hearts that are willing to help.