It’s been over seven years since I arrived in India this time around.
Mahima Creations is well established on Etsy; we’ve expanded into three other venues (our own website, eBay, and Amazon). The ladies are happy and know what they need to do. In fact, they have got it down so well, that often they will be busy re-knotting malas because they found one bad bead – they take quality control very seriously! But what about the future? How will we all succeed and prosper into the future?
The ladies of Mahima Creations
Looking towards the future,
I will be going back to the States eventually. I know what I want to do, and have laid down plans to accomplish my next chapter – a yoga teacher, and not all about the Hatha Yoga, Asanas postures of which only three of the 195 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is dedicated to the postures. That’s just 1.5% and paradoxically, today in the external world, we equate yoga with asanas. I look to teach yoga as a way of life. ( More on that later, and probably filed under personal odyssey.)
Back to my current-into-the-future responsibility to my ladies,
which I can not and do not want to avoid. To wit, I am making plans for them to continue when I am no longer here sporadically and/or permanently. This has required hiring a man to work with us. I would have loved to hire another lady, but they, the ladies:
1) will not go to the post office to drop off packages
2) will not go down to the market to deal with the vendors and suppliers
3) do not read/write English, which is required for packing orders.
4) in short, they do not deal with anything outside the home.
Vikash is doing all our packing and running around.
Enter…Vikash, and some of you may have received cards from him in your orders. He has been working with us for about three months now and, while there’s always a bumpy learning curve, I think he’ll do ok.
Currently, he’s working part-time, but once he’s confident enough, we’ll bring him on fulltime.
The proof is in the pudding,
when I’ll be traveling to the States, then returning with my daughter to tour India for a month and a half this summer 2018. The ladies and Vikash will be running the show all by themselves! I’ll still be checking in every day, and for now, will still be handling all the book work and printing out orders. But in the day-to-day running of the shop, they will be on their own.
A great step in independence for us all.