A member of the world music group, Penn Masala, a lead technical expert-in-resident, and an entrepreneur, Mr. Vishnu Rachakonda graced our school with his presence. The students of grade 11 and 12 of CMRNPS were given an opportunity to interact with Mr. Rachakonda during his expert talk.
Mr. Rachakonda, a bioengineering and biomedical engineering graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, is interested in tapping data resources in healthcare to improve lives. He’s driven to learn and powered by grit. He has a lot of experience in venture capitals and startups. He has helped more than 500 startup companies.
But it wasn’t always unicorns and rainbows for Mr. Rachakonda. He rode a whole roller coaster to get to where he is today. During his college days, Mr. Rachakonda was a part of the acapella group, Penn Masala. In his time with Penn Masala, he posted a number of videos of him singing onto YouTube. There was one video in particular that caught a lot of negative comments and energy.
He was met by a lot of angry and hateful commenters on the video. Though the video was not offensive, people seemed to be rather annoyed by the fact that his hand movements were not in beat and that his singing was terrible. But he converted this hate into something positive and continued practicing more and put out a lot of amazing videos with Penn masala.
With the students of grade 11 and 12, he shared a very important message. The message of turning your failures into success. With the range of examples he provided us during his talk, it was pretty evident that he didn’t dwell on his failures and cry about it. In fact, he learned from it and kept moving on.
He showed us the power that we as humans possess. The power of learning and grabbing information from anywhere, anyone and anything. To achieve his definition of success, he grabbed as much knowledge as he could and moved on.
Towards the end of the talk, he sang a few songs and all of us thoroughly enjoyed it. Apart from falling in love with his melodious singing voice, the students drew a lot of inspiration from him. A quote that would summarize Mr. Rachakonda and his subject of the expert talk well is one by Nelson Mandela: “Don’t judge me by my success but by the number of times I have fallen and got back up.”
It was truly an honor to meet Mr. Rachakonda, we look forward to seeing him again!
– Priyasha Sinha
Editorial Head of CMR NPS, Bangalore.
