Manoj Dabas is from the first batch of PGDFM (1988-90). In his long and eventful life after IIFM, he has worked with a variety of premier organisations dominating various dimensions of forestry and NRM space (WIMCO, TRIFED, TERI, BILT, and ATREE). He embarked upon his entrepreneurial journey in 2008 when he set up Aravali Foundation for Education, and a little later, Creative Edge Media and Services Pvt. Ltd. to pursue his interests in environmental education and outreach communication space.
Q: How has your journey been from IIFM to this role?
It has been a gentle roller coaster ride like all interesting journeys inevitably are. Migrating from salaried employment to being an entrepreneur requires some courage on the part of someone from a middle-class, non-business background. I was prodded by destiny to do that at a relatively young age. The driver for the plunge was not material gain but a weird resolve to sail in my own boat.
Looking back, I can divide my work life into three distinct phases. First ten years (1990-2000) when I worked for companies/organizations in the forestry sector (WIMCO, TRIFED, TERI, and BILT). These jobs entailed working in setups engaged in logging (WIMCO), export business (TRIFED), project management (TERI), raw material management (BILT), and finally, a lateral shift into marketing (at BILT). All these assignments, apparently very diverse and unconnected, exposed me to an extremely diverse array of roles, situations, characters, issues, and challenges in a short, yet intense, period of time. This ability to be a “bit of a jack of several trades” helped me a great deal once I branched out on my own.
The 2nd phase saw me walk out, due to its monotony, of the cushy “marketing” role at BILT, then a blue-chip company, into uncharted territory. I was hired to set up and develop ATREE’s operations in North India. ATREE was then a fledgling NGO with virtually no presence outside Bangalore, and the board was generous and confident in giving me a free hand to do things my way. The role of promoting the organization in government and donor circles gave me a chance to explore and exploit my full potential as an individual. This manifested itself in opportunities like being a member of the Final Interview Board for Chevening Scholarships of the British Council (for 2 years); an invitation to contribute to the production forestry component of the Green India Mission document; to be a part of a team constituted by MoEF to define the term “forest” in an Indian context (an offshoot from the directions of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the famous Godavarman Vs Union of India case).
The third stage started in 2008, and continues till date when I decided to take a deep breath and quit ATREE and commandeer our family trust, the Aravali Foundation for Education (AFE), as the institutional platform nest for my work in the field of environmental education and outreach communication. We soon hit luck and were running one of the largest outdoor learning programs in Delhi using our three specially created campsites in the Himalayan region. The success we achieved in expanding our communications division at AFE, led to the setting up of Creative Edge Media and Services Private Limited (CREATIVE EDGE) in 2010, to take out all “for-profit” work out of AFE (as AFE was registered as a trust and could not pursue commercial assignments without losing its tax-exempt status). This now keeps me happily occupied while also leaving me with enough time to pursue my hobbies and interests (reading, travel, and photography).
My work has taken me to 41 countries and also gave me coveted opportunities like the British Council Fellowship (1994) and the International Visitors Program of the US Department of State (2004). I have also been fortunate to be involved with consulting assignments of national/multilateral organisations on issues that interest me, especially urban environmental management.
I have the satisfaction of having conducted my professional life without any compromise of my preferences and principles. On occasions, this has been a cause of material loss, but that later turned out to be well worth the trouble. I have very often been lucky and sometimes very foolish. But then, a professional journey is made interesting only by the sudden sharp bends of the road that you survive, only to tell the tale.
Q. What were some of the key milestones/learnings in this journey that you would like to share with us?
An individual is a complicated aggregate of all the days s/he has lived through in the relevant time frame. Like the concept of “time”, the concept of “milestone” is nothing but human imagination. It is the continuity of one’s efforts that is the real thing. For a person who works just for the sheer joy of it, every day is a milestone. To cut that loaf of happy existence into imaginary slices is pointless. Every morning when I open my eyes, I know that have crossed a new milestone.
However, I can talk of several turning points in life. First was when I was selected by British Council to attend a program in UK on Environmental Communication. It laid the foundation of exciting things I could land in the field of environment education. The second turning point came when I was picked up by BILT after someone very senior, maybe LM Thapar himself, chanced upon an article I had published in AMBIO. I was then working with TERI and that article catapulted me into the corporate world. The third turning point came when the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India (DBT) handed over to us the responsibility for editing and publishing Biotech News, the popular bimonthly magazine. It laid the foundation for our very successful outreach communication business, with almost all S&T agencies and many other ministries of the Govt. of India, as our regular clients.
Q. What is the most satisfying part of your current role?
Though I head Creative Edge but restrict myself to developmental networking with various clients. Shubhra handles the office backend (that allows me to hit the road and occasionally to swing at the golf course). The nature of our work allows aggressive outsourcing for execution. That helps as well. Creative Edge primarily works with government departments to help them achieve their outreach mandate. Our role is to conceptualise and develop customized publications and other outreach products (films/podcasts, e-books, etc.) for serving a wide variety of outreach goals. While the work is reasonably gainful, the real satisfaction comes from creative involvement in the development of various outreach products, in terms of narrative, presentation, and production.
More than 10 publications produced by Creative Edge, over the past 4 years, have been unveiled by the Hon’ble President or Vice President or Prime Minister of India (one by all three along with the Prime Minister of Portugal who was visiting India). I was lucky to be recently tasked by Govt. of Haryana to bring out two coffee table books Haryana Aravallis-The Last Frontier and Wetland Birds of Haryana. Both publications were very well received and have had reprints. Such opportunities bring real meat to the table.
Q. Has your learning at IIFM helped in shaping how you approach your professional roles?
The most important thing I learned at IIFM is that goals & ambitions, however, you may visualize them, are not achieved through giant leaps, but through countless incremental steps, taken one at a time. A management-training program can only deliver you at the starting point of the professional marathon. IIFM did just that to me and did it very well. Subsequent events, opportunities, and mistakes took me into directions that I had never ever countenanced. And I am grateful to god for that. I have come to recognize that more important than having a “grand plan” is to have an eye for the moment and to seize the opportunity when it presents itself in a flash. My biggest, howsoever relatively modest they may be, successes came from sensing and seizing the opportunities when they sprang out of nowhere. It’s not that I haven’t missed opportunities. Maybe I have missed most of them, but the few that I snared, were life-changing, not only for me but for our whole family. They have enabled me to keep my days packed, a plate full, and a fierce sense of independence, intact. A trainer, at an MDP that I attended at IIM-A, said during a session that after a certain amount of growth in one’s profession, one has to be like a cricket player fielding in the slips. You are not expected to run after any ball, but to snap up the few oddballs that may come screaming at you. This is not to undermine the importance of hard work. But then “pure” hard work, in my personal opinion, is a virtue of donkeys.
Q. Who (or what) are the biggest influences or drivers in your careers? What would be your advice to freshers and IIFM graduates who are choosing similar sectors/roles?
My biggest influences have been my family setting and upbringing. I was born in a literary family that exposed me to creative writing at an early age. My father is a highly accomplished, award-winning linguist and satirist, felicitated by none other than the President of India. His literary excellence, and exceptional sense of humor, lent an academic, or should I say a creative and happy environment at home.
My one penny worth of advice to all freshers is
(a) to pay as much (repeat-as much) emphasis they can, to their articulation/presentation skills and
(b) recognize the fact that the world always moves on interpersonal relationships.
I have seen many brilliant students fizzle out of steam because of sub-optimal articulation skills and the absence of a drive to create a socio-professional network of their own. On the other hand, I have seen so many with, at best, a modest academic record does so well because, apart from having reasonable grades, they knew a thing or two about staying in the socio-professional loop over extended periods of time. This is not to say that no one with a clerk’s mindset ever became a commissioner. They sometimes do. But who wants to emulate that? This is not to undermine the importance of scholastic rigor, but as I said earlier, marks from an exam will take you only so far, and no further. That is a very small part of the equation. 9 out of 10 times, a person who breaks away from the pack is the one who has the ability to convert class fellows into brothers, colleagues into personal friends, and seniors into long-term mentors.
Q. What are your favorite memories during IIFM days?
There are so many great memories. It will be unfair indeed to categorize them as favorites and non-favorites. But…
I remember looking over Bhopal from IIFM hilltop, just after completing the admission interview, and telling myself, over a puff of Wills, that if I do not make it this year, I will take the entrance test again. This was when I already had admission offers from two well-known B-schools and was pursuing my Master’s at the Delhi School of Economics.
I remember speeding down the road (on my proudly owned new LML-Vespa scooter) from IIFM Mess towards Nehru Nagar in search of mess workers (of the erstwhile catering contractor whom we had sacked, and evicted, just that afternoon). The contractor forced his employees to leave suddenly (to prevent students from retaining them to run the newly set up cooperative hostel mess). After a frantic manhunt, I was lucky to have spotted “Chandu” (who till then was one of the contractor’s employees) and rescued him back to the hostel with two others. That is how the hostel mess, as we know it today, started. The rest is history.
I remember each student in our class (smokers as well as non-smokers) pulling out a cigarette and lighting it up to drive home a point to a teacher who had a habit of smoking while delivering his lecture(s). I think he gave up smoking that day.!!
I remember renaming our hostel block as SILVER OAK (the first block to be formally named) and then all of us celebrating the event by dancing in the impromptu discotheque created by the use of indicator lights of the hostel’s motorcycle fleet.
I remember the 120 KMs per hour midnight race from Sanchi Stupa to IIFM Bhopal between two motorbikes (one driven by me and the other by Ravi Gupta). We both are indeed lucky to be alive today (and also friends, as well as next-door neighbors).
I remember Prof. B P Pethiya, upset at a delayed assignment submission, eyes red with anger, holding a cane stick between his two hands and yelling (at the top of his voice!) “I am like this cane!,You bend me (cane is now bending), bend me, bend me, but I will bend only to a certain extent and then I will break (cane snaps) and become very “saarp”!!!!. Students on the floor, in splits, holding their stomachs, and Prof. Pethiya trying to figure out what did he do!! Long Live Prof. Pethiya.
This can go on ….. for a year!
Q. In hindsight, what was the biggest contribution (courses, faculty, library, friends, alumni, Anything else!!) or take away from IIFM that you think played a critical in shaping you as an individual, or professional?
My biggest takeaway from IIFM was Shubhra, my wife. She always scored more than me in academics, but in a moment of irrational belief in hope over reality, she agreed to marry me. Notwithstanding that faux pas on her part, we have been happily married for the last 28 years and are looking forward to the marriage of our elder daughter in December.
I went to IIFM with the purported objective of getting a degree. Real takeaways were long-lasting relationships that have stood the test of time and played a great role in my stability at work, and my ability to take chances when all others advised caution.
Several of our former teachers at IIFM are now family friends, philosophers, and guides. Be it J K Das (now Director, Fore School of Management) or Shashi Kant (now Professor, Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto), Vinay Luthra (retired as PCCF, Karnataka and now an authority on Eco-tourism), K. Jayaram (now a successful businessman in Brisbane) or NP Melkania (now a Dean/Professor at Gautam Buddha University, NOIDA).
So whoever played a role in shaping my destiny, I still have the privilege of having them around in close and treasured associations.
Q. The best buddies/ seniors/ faculty at IIFM. Some memorable tidbits that you would like to share?
We had no seniors at IIFM. So that makes life that much simpler. And I do not wish to lose buddies by naming just some of my fellow students as “best”. Most of them are dear to my heart. Coming to the faculty, most of the professors who tried their hands (albeit with very limited success) at teaching “me”, became lifelong friends, philosophers, and guides. All of them are very dear and very loved.
Q Tell us something about your weekends, hobbies, family, and anything else you want to add?
As a family, we travel a lot, at least one overseas and 2 in-country breaks each year, corona permitting. As an individual, I travel even more. My favorite vocation is road travel across the length and breadth of our country, as that gives you the opportunity to see, touch, and breathe this vast land of ours. Recent road trips have been to (ex-Delhi) to Tawang (Arunachal Pradesh); Puri (to attend the wedding of Palak, daughter of Deepak Khare); Munabao (Barmer); Lipulekh Pass (Indo-China-Nepal border), Mandu (MP); Navapara (Odisha); Sewagram (Wardha); Khardung La & Pangong Tso (Laddakh), and many more.
I am a lifelong student of geography. Books on political, historical, and economic Geography dominate the library that I have assiduously built over the years. I have just finished the riveting trilogy by Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens; 21 Ideas for the 21st Century, and; Homo Deus). I recommend all to read these books. They are truly eye-opening in terms of where humans, as a species, come from, where they are now, and where they are headed (and why?).
I live in Saket, New Delhi with my parents, Shubhra, and our two daughters (Chhaya and Vrinda). Chhaya is a post-graduate from King’s College, London. Vrinda has just completed her Master’s from NIFT, Delhi. Both of them are now working and enjoying their new life phase of being professionals.
I am perhaps the only one from IIFM in North India whose permanent, and current, the address has never changed. But so many things have changed so much. Anyone from IIFM is always welcome into our humble abode, for chat and laughter over tea/drink/meal. No dress codes to worry about.