EDII has met some highly unusual people in its journey of developing development professionals. One of them was Tejas Merh Desai. A development sector specialist, a financial whiz and a trained chartered accountant, Tejas surprises you yet again with her multi-lingual abilities. In addition, she is a trained Kathak artist/ danseuse who seems to step straight out of a Barbara Cartland novel with her pert nose and a very expressive face.

A single girl child of unconventional parents, Tejas spent her childhood in an almost live edition of National Geographic as her father was a Geohydrogeologist and lived very close to nature. Tejas travelled extensively with her father to the far interiors of Saurashtra, an arid region which was almost always parched of water. At a very young age she saw suffering borne out of the scarcity of water both in terms of acute poverty and the emotional toll it took on people. This resulted in an awareness of the “other India”, the India that people usually prefer to blinker out. Her mother was a professor of journalism at Saurashtra University and later worked on freelance assignments and translation work for the development sector, which further sowed in her the seeds of ‘be the change you wish to see’.