About Lakshmi

With about two decades of experience in the publishing industry - in different formats of publishing, from being a sub-editor at an English Evening daily at Mysore, STAR OF MYSORE (1993); to book publishing at Prism Books Pvt Ltd, Bengaluru (1995); to academic work at Regional Institute of English South India, Bengaluru - in assessment of existing curriculum of English textbooks in Karnataka State Board schools, Tamil Nadu state board schools, to creating content for teaching English Grammar to middle school students by the Karnataka Government through the EDUSAT program in 2003-4; to creating content for Laughter Yoga website of Dr Madan Kataria, to ghostwriting for books (2004); to being a co-author of a book “A Time for India” published by Vantage Press, Inc., USA in 2003 (the first edition) and the second edition published in 2023 by BookBaby Publishing, USA; to heading Production of business magazine in print and digital media - Cybermedia India Ltd, Bengaluru (2010); to heading the Content Quality team for an e-learning company, Dexler Information Solutions Pvt Ltd.(2011).

The end point of my corporate career came on February 1, 2012 with a major disagreement with the management of my last employer and that became the turning point in my life when I decided to work with children as young as 5-years-old, to develop smart skills and thinking skills in children so they become capable of thinking out-of-the-box, regardless of what their background is. I picked to work with children in the age group of 4-17 years.

I started my skill development centre for children, My Den, as a franchisee of a Mumbai-based company on February 29, 2012 where I was trained as a Course Instructor in Abacus, Handwriting Improvement and Vedic Maths. My main objective was to start the centre for my own children. I added two new programs at the centre in April each year, until 2019 including Phonics, Rubik’s Cube, T-20 Multiplication Tables program, Dermatoglyphics Consultation, Midbrain Activation and became an internationally certified Career Counsellor and Career Coach.

With my experience in training students in these programs, I did attend multiple trainings in these courses with the objective to enhance the delivery of the training so that the per student development output increases significantly and I found wonderful results. The word of mouth referrals haven’t stopped till date.

From 2017 I have been successfully training Course Instructors in Abacus, Handwriting Improvement, Vedic Maths, Kalfun, Phonics. With a strong team of trainers, we did teach Abacus, Handwriting Improvement, Vedic Maths at various schools as part of curriculum or as activity.

I did run multiple centres in Bengaluru from 2013 - at Electronics City, Harappanahalli (Koppa Gate), Jayanagar, J P Nagar besides the main centre at Panduranganagar where I started in 2012 (all these at preschools or school) and moved to my own rented commercial space at Arekere Mico Layout, Bannerghatta Road area, in 2016 (Skill Centre for Excellence).

The centre functioned in the offline (physical) mode from the start in 2012 to March 13, 2020 when the first lockdown happened. Post the lockdown, I transitioned thoroughly to online mode and started online classes in July 2020. I launched the Kalfun Tool program in the online mode and conduct abacus, handwriting improvement, Vedic maths, phonics, midbrain activation programs, career counselling and psychometric tests, in the online mode.

In my experience I have found in almost all the programs the productivity per student in the online mode is as high as 200% as opposed to the physical centre. To elaborate, at the physical centre, our task as Abacus trainers is to train the students to learn and complete four pages in the two-hours duration. However, the maximum we achieved in the offline days was 2-2.5 pages in 2 hours. And from the time I launched my online only mode of classes (one session of only one hour duration) I have observed that students comfortably complete anywhere between 2 to 4 (and sometimes even 5-6) pages in a single one-hour session

During my time with the franchise, my abacus students have participated in state-level, national level and international abacus and mental math competitions in India and abroad ad have won the top 3 prizes in all the events. The international competitions in 2014 and 2016.

Many students have won the top prizes in the Handwriting competition at the state and the national level. Based on the prize winning performance of my students I was awarded the Best Course Instructor Award top prizes for four years between 2013 and 2017.

Our students have also participated in international Rubik’s cube competitions as well.

From 2016 to 2019 I have achieved excellent results in children through the midbrain activation program as well, having trained close to 200 children and adults.

I have had the great satisfaction of being able to guide parents with customised-parenting tips and partner with parents to develop their children by enhancing their children’s innate abilities to empower the child to develop the potential to excel in all areas, even beyond academics. This has been possible with Dermatoglyphics Consultation.