Mukta Darera helps people chase their dreams

Are you an engineer with a passion for wildlife photography? Or perhaps a doctor who would love to spin some techno tracks for a hip, young crowd on a Saturday night? Or maybe a lowly hack who cuts back on copy editing time to Google recipes from MasterChef Australia? Time for you to meet someone.

Say hello to Mukta Darera, 26 years old, an engineer-turned-entrepreneur. Her Bangalore-based outfit iReboot is a life-orientation company. iReboot helps people discover their passions and turn them into a profession whenever possible.

Darera was an engineer by profession. Some years into her job she had a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction. “I was not doing anything meaningful,” she says. It wasn’t a situation she was ready to live with. She looked around and realised that she wasn’t the only one in this kind of a limbo. “About 80% of people I knew were doing jobs they didn’t like,” says Darera. There was a common refrain of unfulfilled dreams. “You just had to listen and people would make statements like ‘I want to be an author’, ‘I wish I was a photographer for National Geographic’, all indicating they were in the wrong place,” she explains.

“I had an abstract idea that people should be able to live their dreams, fulfill them, even if it was for a couple of days.” She wanted to give shape to this thought and the concept of iReboot, a place where people would come to for rebooting their lives, was formed.

She pursued a course in entrepreneurship management from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and finally in August 2008 Darera launched iReboot. It got a brilliant response from the outset and there was no thinking two ways for Darera.

iReboot has today four full-time employees to handle marketing, sales, design and collections and more than 20 consultants on various topics who come on board as and when required. For a self-funded enterprise, it seems to be doing pretty well, her revenues last year being around Rs18 lakh. She has catered to over 1200 participants, each coming her way to seek their ruling passion.

iReboot has a number of programmes (their website suggests “life is a menu, take a pick”) on a vast variety of fields. They cover diverse aspects like wildlife photography, travel writing, bartending, stock trading, staring a restaurant, fiction writing, music production, wardrobe styling and more. For people who are unsure of where their interests lie, iReboot offers a course ‘Discover Yourself’. They use psychometric assessments and group discussions that aid people identify their passion.

For their other courses they have professionals, in the respective fields, who come and teach modules in the capacity of consultants. “We typically use more than one consultant so people get differing perspectives,” says Darera. Each programme offers two to eight classes, all held on weekends. The charges range from Rs2,800 to Rs12,500, the most expensive being the course of fiction writing.

“We have two national award winning authors, Madhvi Mahadevan and Kirti R, on board as consultants for this course,” she says. The participants are taught about plots, characters, dialogues and more. The short stories written by the participants are shown to publishers afterwards. “We are going to launch an anthology of short stories written by our participants shortly. Titled Under the Urban Tree, this is published by Pothi,” says Darera.

iReboot sees participants from all walks of life. “These are mostly working professionals and one of our most popular courses is the one on starting your own restaurant,” says Darera. Some food for thought!  “While we see a clear conversion rate for 10% of our participants who straightway change their professions, we see a lot of others who move on to the transition phase to decide on the logistics,” she says.

A charming part of iReboot is the Gift a Dream concept. When people see their loved ones needing a different kind of experience or harbouring a long-cherished dream, they resort to iReboot. These are bespoke customised services that a person is offered and iReboot custom-makes a programme around them. The best part of it is that you need not confine yourself to the modules iReboot offers. You can either suggest ideas or get into a brainstorming session with the iReboot team to find the best solution for the person concerned.

iReboot also has a corporate training programme. The modules here cater to both groups and individuals. If one module teaches people about team work, cooperation and collaboration, another is directed at senior management and provides personalised training on voice modulation, interpersonal skills and leadership.

iReboot has a wing in Mysore already and Darera is looking at Bombay and Delhi for franchisees to expand this further.

Contact: Mukta Darera 9886295353
mukta.darera@ireboot.in
http://www.ireboot.com
    m_anindita@dnaindia.net