Take Two

Zarina Screwvala, Managing Director, Trustee and Co-Founder of Swades Foundation and Ronnie Screwvala,Co-Founder and Director of Swades Foundation and CoFounder of UpGrad, talk about their love of a good challengeand the large-scale social change theyre envisioning through their work post UTVs divestiture.

- Priyanca Vaishnav

Having often heard of, and sometimes also witnessing the far-fetched personality manifestations behind show business’s first modern successes, one expects to encounter a flamboyant pair of figures to greet you. When you enter the sunny third-floor office of Swades Foundation in South Mumbai’s Worli area, neat rows of desks on the left, and lounge seating in bright handloom colours lining conference rooms on the right engulf you in warmth. The short walk down the aisle brings you to Zarina Screwvala’s colourful haven adjacent to Ronnie Screwvala’s functional corner chambers, where you spot him peering over his reading glasses onto his laptop screen on a desk facing a wall. A few more rows of desks face his office at the opposite end. Between the erstwhile producer pair that defined the TV content revolution of the 90s, you can see they’ve made conscious effort to remain accessible to their team whilst being mindful of their duties towards them.

Zarina and Ronnie Screwvala connect the dots between today’s Swades Foundation (earlier SHARE — Society to Heal Aid Restore Educate), and their intrinsic love for a great challenge and the dextrous creativity that the partnership employs to conquer it. A demand for the structure of the imminent interview replaces a swift enquiry for refreshments. As the dialogue begins though, you realise this entrepreneurial couple is amenable to no sequence, for they are both used to making sense out of chaos. What follows is haphazard rumination that leads to a battle of scribbles for me on paper.