Tag Archives: CEO

Raising A Rennu: What Parents Should Know

Genius Kids founder Rennu Dhillon says our greatest fear after death is public speaking — unless we make some incremental changes in our education system while we’re alive. 

“Confidence is critical,” Dhillon says. “You have to learn how to take control of your life. Compassion, communication, eye contact — these are the kinds of soft skills that we as parents and teachers need to instill in our kids today.” 

Her personal odyssey — long before she became a Bay Area education mogul, Radio Zindagi talk show host, and community activist — is its own story of confidence and coming into one’s own. Dhillon grew up in a tightly-knit Kenyan suburb, much like our Bay Area cities littered with extracurricular activities and educational pursuits. 

“My mother, being the typical Indian mother that she was, enrolled me into practically everything from music, art, piano, and sports,” Dhillon says and laughs. “But my father, a medical practitioner and the local Deputy Mayor was very deep into politics. So one of the big things that he really wanted us, kids, to focus on was communication. They enrolled me into a drama school called the Little Theater Club at the age of three.” 

Dhillon’s childhood in Kenya marked the intersection of so many rapid changes, from an early wave of the feminist movement to political unrest in India following the death of Indira Gandhi. The young actress put pen to paper, drafting impassioned poems and letters for the local newspaper.  

“I was a very, very controversial figure in my town,” Dhillon says. “I mean, I was always expressing my views, especially when it came to women’s issues. And my dad didn’t even know half the time when I was writing to newspapers. It would only be when we would get anonymous phone calls at home threatening me about something that my dad would look at me and say, ‘did you write that?’ And I’ll be like, ‘yep.’ God, I caused so much drama at home.” 

Twenty years later, the outspoken Kenyan pre-teen, after completing her Pharmacy Degree in the United Kingdom, and Doctorate of Science,  launched into two very successful businesses of her own – a matrimonial dating agency and recruiting firm in the United States. She then ventured in Recruiting CEO’s for start up’s and went from hooking people and people to people and jobs. As a single mother navigating the labyrinthian American Dream, helping young men and women find love offered startling insight into the role of ‘soft skills’ within the South Asian American community.  

For Dhillon, the devil was in the details. From critiquing her client’s fashion choices to providing advice on eye contact and tone, she realized how the simplest features of personal interaction paved the way to success. Her experience as a dating coach and recruiter molded her vision when she opened up a Fremont-based daycare and accelerated learning center named Genius Kids. 

Unlike mainstream education programs, Genius Kids instills public speaking and collaborative skills in students from a young age. Founded in 2001, the organization quickly caught on among Bay Area parental circles. Dhillon’s effortless relationship with kids, paired with her knack of combining learning strategies with the latest technology, brought in more families than ever. 

“I think kids learn with smart and interactive technology,” Dhillon says. “We were actually one of the first preschools to ever introduce smart boards into the classrooms. Even the toddlers will come up on our stage, look at a screen, and point to the answer with their little fingers. These are our ways of teaching children. To stimulate students’ curiosity, I don’t want anyone memorizing stories in my classes. I want discussions. I want kids to tell me the story back in their own words — add their own flavor to The Three Little Pigs and use their own imagination. This is how we access a child’s voice and build on their confidence.” 

For the second time in her life, Dhillon embarked on a writing journey, this time penning a parenting book titled, Raise Confident Children: Today’s Kids, Tomorrow’s Leaders. The book has different sections dedicated to Dhillon’s ‘Cs’ — compassion, conflict resolution, charisma, control — the different elements that shaped her experience in both teaching and parenting.

“There’s a need to simplify parenting into its basic ingredients,” Dhillon says. “It’s not something that always comes naturally — especially now that we have all these distractions. The world was very different for my great grandparents, grandparents, and my parents. Now, we’re living in a crazy world — completely insane. And if you don’t prepare your child to be able to face a world of the unknown, your child won’t have any control over their life. So I’m a huge one for books. I’m always on the search for new material and information because learning never stops.” 

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, there may be no better time for Dhillon to release Raise Confident Children: Today’s Kids, Tomorrow’s Leaders. As lockdown restrictions force schools to adapt to a virtual learning environment, every parent must challenge their preconceived notions about testing, college admissions, and academic life. And perhaps there may be no better writer to release this book than Dhillon herself. As a woman who ventured across borders, within new industries, and into the lives of hundreds of children, Dhillon seeks to embody the very experience she chronicles in her book — a journey into the precarious unknown, where learning and adapting is always essential. 

“Don’t underestimate your children,” Dhillon says. “Let them pursue and find their path. And most of all, listen to what they have to say.” 

Stay tuned for Confident Children: Today’s Kids, Tomorrow’s Leaders, which releases on October 6th on Amazon! Click here for further details.

Kanchan Naik is a senior at the Quarry Lane School in Dublin, California. Aside from being the Youth Editor for India Currents, she is also the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper The Roar, the 2019-2020 Teen Poet Laureate for the City of Pleasanton, as the Executive Director of Media Outreach at Break the Outbreak. Connect with Kanchan on Instagram: @kanchan_naik_

Tech Mahindra For A Safe Global Reopening

To be sure of the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 screening technology that he was considering for his employees, Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani, suggested testing it on himself and his household members. That decision may have saved him and his family from having to be admitted to hospital —as actors Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan were last week. As it turned out, everyone in the house received a clean bill of health, except the two sons of his cook who were diagnosed as high risk.

As the Bachchans too must have done, Gurnani had had his domestic staff take all necessary precautions, remaining distant and wearing masks. His cook’s sons did not show any visible sign of infection, yet were potential Covid-19 carriers.

The fact is that the testing techniques in common use are inadequate, and social distancing isn’t always possible. RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) tests have ‘false negative’ rates of 20-67%, depending on when they are taken. Also, temperature screening and contact tracing fail to identify the presymptomatic spreaders who, according to mathematical modeling, could be responsible for half of the infections. When Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain showed symptoms, his first RT-PCR results came back negative. But they were positive the very next day.

The technology and techniques I had persuaded Gurnani and Tech Mahindra to pilot — and that I had a hand in developing — are based on understanding an individual’s risk and performing monthly testing. The reality is that even though Covid-19 can be devastating for a few, not everyone who gets infected will have serious symptoms. We can identify the people at high risk with reasonable accuracy based on studies from around the world and data from India. And we can give them special treatment.

For example, it is well established that men above 65, whose health is chronically compromised by diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or obesity, are at higher risk of severe outcomes. Further, severity can be predicted by a number of tests, including those for hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, and measures of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and D-dimer.

Businesses in the US have considered offering these types of tests. But the costs and logistics of doing so are usually prohibitive, with the most basic tests costing more than $100 apiece, and requiring the shipment of samples to labs. A single comprehensive screening for an individual could cost over $1,000, and is usually not covered by insurance plans. It can take days to get basic test results.

This is where India has an advantage over the West: it has developed screening devices, such as HealthCube, which can conduct a range of biochemical and physiological tests for a tiny fraction of the US cost. These include 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECG), tests for blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood glucose, hemoglobin and cholesterol, and rapid diagnostic tests for infectious diseases.

With HealthCube, an entire regimen of tests, including a test for Covid-19 antibodies and severity markers, can be performed for less than Rs1,000 within minutes. The technology has received Europe’s CE certification.

The Covid-19 risk screening program underway at Tech Mahindra on the HealthCube platform uses patient risk factors — age, gender, medical conditions, potential exposure, recent travel or being in a crowded place, public health data, aggregations from previous screenings, patient symptoms, etc — to compute a risk score for patients. Those at high risk are checked for markers, such as D-dimer and troponin, which are elevated in those who develop the severe disease (which indicate heart ailments). These tests are followed up by teleconsultations and further testing, as appropriate.

With more data and testing, the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms become increasingly accurate, and people are given an individualized screening and testing protocol based on their risk factors, rather than being treated like machines that need temperature checks.

Antibody tests have been controversial largely because the first generation of tests performed worldwide were mostly from China and were low quality and defective. There have also been doubts about whether all Covid-19 patients develop antibodies and, even if they do, how long the immunity lasts.

The newer generations of tests, made outside China, are highly accurate. Swiss pharma giant Roche, for example, claims that 14 days after infection, its test can detect antibodies with 99.8% specificity and 100% sensitivity. HealthCube claims that its India-made tests have 98% specificity and 96% sensitivity. These are both a huge leap from the 5.4% accuracy of the tests that China first sold to India.

There is substantial evidence that within 19 days after symptom onset, 100% of patients test positive for Covid-19 antibodies. And as Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch explained in the New York Times, ‘After being infected with SARS-CoV-2, most individuals will have an immune response, some better than others. That response, it may be assumed, will offer some protection over the medium term — at least a year — and then its effectiveness might decline.’ Even half a year will buy us time to understand and develop better approaches to prevention and treatment — and administer vaccines to those at high risk.

Gurnani told me that his personal experience, and the testing Tech Mahindra has conducted on a few hundred employees, have convinced him to offer the full health screening to the entire India Tech Mahindra employee base — including third-party employees, who typically can’t afford the test and are the most vulnerable because they stay in crowded places. He says that he puts his employees’ health above any business needs and cannot allow even one person to be at unnecessary risk.

Gurnani’s ambition is to show India — and the world — how to safely and sensibly open businesses and economies.

Vivek Wadhwa is a distinguished fellow and professor, Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, Silicon Valley.

This article was republished with permission from the author and can be originally found here.