Everyday Heroes Who Turned Game-Changers For Society

Hyderabad: Uday Shankar began writing his book ‘Game Changers’ with a question that had begun to bother him. Public attention, he felt, kept returning to cricketers, politicians, actors and businessmen, while others — a Hyderabad man who feeds the hungry, a Telangana sarpanch who changed sanitation in her village and a Galwan officer from the state — rarely get the same public space.

The Hyderabad-origin author, now based in Bengaluru, has placed such lives inside ‘Game Changers: Lessons on Resilience and Success from Everyday Heroes’, which Jaico Publishing House will release on June 10. The book has 20 chapters; among these, three will have Hyderabad’s flavour. They deal with Azhar Maqsusi, a Hyderabad-based founder of Sani Welfare Foundation; Meenakshi Gadge, the sarpanch of Mukhra in Telangana; and Lt. Col. Santosh Babu, the Telangana officer who died in the Galwan clash.

“Day in and day out, we talk about cricketers, politicians, actors, businessmen. But why don’t I showcase these people who are doing a job as good as the others or better than others without expecting anything?” said Uday Shankar, the author of Game Changers. He spent about two years researching and writing the book.

Shankar grew up in Hyderabad and graduated from Osmania University in 1977 as an Electronics and Communications engineer. He left for Mumbai in the 1980s to work for ONGC, later worked in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Hyderabad, and settled in Bengaluru around 2011.

“Whenever somebody calls me from Hyderabad, somehow I become very nostalgic,” he said. Shankar had written for newspapers during his corporate years, and finally, the Covid lockdown gave him time to write his first book, ‘Untold Tales from the Mahabharata’, published by Bloomsbury, followed by ‘Ancient Secrets of Soft Skills’.

Unlike earlier books, ‘Game Changers’ takes its material from recent lives, but Shankar insists the moral ground remains the same. “These people have gone through the path of dharma,” he said. “You do your duty. Don’t bother about the result.”

The book covers people from across India, including anti-human-trafficking activist Pallabi Ghosh in Assam, beekeeper-entrepreneur Nazim Nazeer in Kashmir, missile scientist Tessy Thomas, Metro Man E. Sreedharan, a Sanskrit-speaking village in Karnataka and more.

His Hyderabad account is Azhar Maqsusi, who looks back at his work to an encounter under the Dabeerpura flyover in the Old City — a woman named Lakshmi had not eaten for about three days. Maqsusi went home, got food cooked and returned to feed her.

“It was a moment of awakening for that boy,” Shankar said. The book says Sani Foundation now feeds at least 10,000 people daily across 50 cities and towns.

Meenakshi Gadge’s story begins in Mukhra, Adilabad, a village Shankar described as marked by filth, open drains and remote sarpanch rule. Gadge, who could not study beyond Class XII, became sarpanch in 2019 and worked on toilets, open defecation, drains, solar systems and compost-making. Compost sales earned about Rs 8 lakh to Rs 10 lakh from neighbouring villages, he said.

Mukhra became one of the cleanest villages, and Gadge later received the CNN Woman of the Year.

However, Shankar’s most personal chapter is on Srikanth Bolla, founder of Bollant Industries. Bolla had no sight from birth, faced rejection from IIT, entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology, returned to India and built a company that employs more than 500 people. “I somehow resonate with this man since I lived with partial blindness from congenital cataract for nearly 37 years,” he said. “I know what it is to be visually handicapped. So, follow and harness your passion. That will drive you through insurmountable obstacles.”