 "Meet Ananya Birla, a young entrepreneur looking to strike gold as a musician")
At 22, most educated urban girls in India have yet to find their true calling in life. They are a storehouse of energy and dreams – some achievable, some fanciful – and they are raring to make a mark for themselves. The only thing they usually lack is a direction and clarity on where they want to make their mark.
That, however, is not true of this scion from the Birla clan. At 22, Ananya Birla, daughter of Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, is not only the founder & chief executive of a microfinance company but is also a musician with enough confidence in her skills to go pro. Birla is releasing her debut single, ‘Livin’ The Life (LTL)’, on Sunday.
Co-written and produced by Jim Beanz, who has worked with Nelly Furtado, Cheryl Cole and Demi Lovato, LTL was presented by Universal Music Group at a private event on Saturday evening, amid fellow musicians and enthusiasts from the global music industry.
Birla’s love affair with music began early; she was inspired by Ed Sheeran, Cheryl Cole and The Fray. She had started playing santoor when she was only seven, and guitar for about six years now. She writes lyrics and composes music and is planning to launch a soul and R&B album. “It sounds rather silly and clichéd but reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull (by Richard Bach) has really turned around my life,” she says.
Even as a student at University of Oxford, she had begun singing and playing guitar at live gigs, and it was during one of her 70 such performances over two years that she realised her calling as a musician.
'Livin’ the Life’ is all about celebrating life and spreading love and kindness in the world. By coming out of adversity, one can start to see beauty, and that’s how the song came about,” the Bombay Times quoted Ananya Birla as saying.
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Celebrities seemed to be in the awe of Birla’s debut international single.
“When beauty meets talent and expresses from the heart. Ananya Birla, your voice has magic. Protect it, nurture it, then change the world with it,” actor Hrithik Roshan tweeted.
“Congrats Ananya Birla. Fantastic performance and great track! I’m definitely going to get your album ‘Livin’ The Life’,” VJ Andy wrote in a Twitter post.
Adorning a tattoo that says ‘conquer’, Birla, the CEO of Svatantra Microfinance, has truly conquered quite a bit. The loan book of her microfinance business currently stands at Rs 500 crore; and she plans to turn it into a small finance bank. She also has another start-up ready for launch.
This fifth-generation entrepreneur from the Birla clan has proved that she is quite prolific. Truly “Svatantra” of her family legacy, her ventures so far have been her own legacy. “I literally follow my heart,” Birla, who counts start-ups and music as her two passions, had told Business Standard in an earlier interview. “I think a combination of these two can make a great difference to the world.”
Svatantra Microfin, whose name means independent, lends to woman entrepreneurs in rural India. It provides technology-enabled cashless disbursement and is working on a cashless collection mechanism that will require the use of digital wallets. Her next start-up venture will entail selling inaccessible artwork over an e-commerce platform.
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Earlier, she had been a student at Oxford, where she pursued a course in economics and management as part of her undergraduate degree programme. “I was all by myself, completely independent. I made amazing friends and discovered my passion for start-ups and music while studying there,” she told Business Standard.
Birla is clear about her priorities and values leadership creation more than formal education. She feels that if, two years down the line, she is able to mentor three more leaders within her organisation, that would be more valuable than gathering a few more degrees.
Her younger brother Aryaman Vikram plays cricket professionally for Madhya Pradesh and her schoolgoing sister Advaitesha “has taken Kathak lessons and is full of creativity”.
Ananya Birla drives A BMW Z4, priced around Rs 75 lakh, and loves long drives, which she finds relaxing.
Birla also values her dog, Sky, the most. “She is like a sister — I don’t think of her as a dog. She gives me so much unconditional love,” she had earlier said about her Yorkshire Terrier. On a serious note, she counts her work and her relationship with her parents, siblings and friends, as her other important assets. She is closest to her mother, Neerja Birla. “All relationships are like start-ups — one has to keep working on them as one is bound to have misunderstandings.”
She has had her share of hardships, too. She started her first venture when she was 17 and it failed due to a bitter fallout with her two partners. “Being an entrepreneur every day since the age of 17, with no support from anyone, made me grow up fast,” she says.
“My parents don’t offer financial advice — unless, of course, I ask for help — but it is thanks to a lot of reading, research, on-the-job learning, and of course my stint at Oxford that I have reached here,” she says.
After lending to India’s poor, she launched her second venture Svatantra Online Services Pvt Ltd, which runs e-commerce luxury website Curocarte.com in September. The website sells handmade products sourced from around the world to India’s elite and also to a global audience, according to a Livemint report.
She had been working on Curocarte for 14 months. The company, according to Birla, will cater to young people who aspire for more; those from SEC A1, A2 and B1 households are the company’s target audience.
Curocarte will source home décor products from nine countries across Europe and Asia, including India.