At the end of 2020, I quit my job. I wanted to pursue my dream of launching my own product to make learning toys for INDIAN languages.

The story of Lipi Tiles® starts with multiple threads. I was dyslexic and had trouble reading and writing. Fortunately, my Mother being an educator diagnosed it early and with effective intervention through hands-on activities, I caught up fast.

Growing up, we shifted a lot. I have faced the distance that language barriers can create all throughout my life. English, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada. Tamil even!
As a 10 year old, I realised that unless I spoke the lingo, I would never be accepted into the tight friend circles in school. With all the determination in the world, I got down to conversing fluently in Hindi in less than a year and learning Gujarati with my 2 year old neighbour.

Everywhere I went, I tried to embrace the language of the land. In Bangalore, I'd try to read signboards on my bus journeys and correlate with characters on my Google Indic keyboard.

College was a huge experimentation ground for the theme that I was passionate about - education. In one of my projects, I did some basic market research about the kinds of language learning toys available and found that there was a HUGE dearth of toys to learn INDIAN languages. I developed a simple and cute modular toy and tested it out with a government school, got great feedback and then it got shelved. 3 years later, with ants back in my pants, I wanted to restart it and see where it goes.

The new NEP places importance on having primary education in one’s mother tongue. The fact that I cannot think in one language consistently has impacted me deeply. I do not want this for upcoming generations. I want to do my part.

Hence was born Lipi Tiles® in 2021 January. Several iterations later, I had a learning toy for Hindi, modelled after plain old building blocks!

It's been less than a year since product launch, and it's already garnered a huge amount of interest among parents, educators and schools, and orders are pouring in!

There is still a long way to go. I've been working on making this a reality for other major Indian languages, making it affordable for lower income groups, and spreading the word.

 

Working during the lockdown has been challenging because as a micro-entrepreneur, there are a lot of restrictions and limitations to procuring materials, optimising the supply chain and completing deliveries.

But I have learnt to keep moving on and not stall with the fear of failure looming over me. Building a small community of parents and educators has helped me push myself forward with their feedback and encouragement.

 

This is going to be big. I know it!