Sayali was fifteen the day she saw more than an elder daughter should've seen. Until then, her world was small, within a tin-roofed chawl, and an unadorned childhood that asked for nothing more than getting through the day. She rose from a bare hunger to see better and give her mom and younger sister a life free from the weight of struggle.

Frame from Frappeverse India 2025

Born into a family of government servants, many assumed Sayali would inherit a stable, handed-down life, where she would never have to shed a sweat to earn a living. Growing up as an average kid for most of her life, Sayali had a heart that felt too much for the world’s liking, but was also as stubborn. In class eight, Sayali’s class-teacher made her the class-monitor which pulled her hesitant self to stretch and earn some confidence. A year later, Sayali dared the impossible. Coming from an English medium background, Sayali’s class-teacher would sometimes look down on the Marathi medium kids and treat them as inferior. The unfairness was too present to let slip by. In a little while, Sayali filed a formal complaint against the very teacher who appointed her as the class monitor. The teacher was removed from the role of tenth-grade class teacher soon after, and Sayali became the talk of the school.

The only thing that spoils Sayali is the summer vacations at her native place. Every year, she’d go to her village, Wai, to stay with her grandfather and feast on mangoes and other fruits. “I saw my elder uncle do farming. I would carry the plough to the fields with him. I’ve dug soil and have pressed seed and watered the earth till I see some small greens. Then we’d sit under the sun, bare foot, hands caked in mud, and eat our tiffins.” She wished to pursue agriculture formally but for a young lady from the city to move into farms was not a debate that people around her were ready to have. So, like many before her, she chose the safer path or maybe the more acceptable one, BCA in computer applications. Her early years were spent coding and growing deft in the language of machines. “I can remember it’s a chain of events. One of our professors made an effort to bring opensource to our syllabus. Then in the third year, we had a project where we checked for 3-4 companies using ERP.” Sayali cracked an internship at GNU Khata, IIT bombay. The project was to spread FOSS through Spoken Tutorial, an online video series. For an introvert who once had to be forced into the safest bets of her life, the stakes changed. Her first workshop on Linux had her mind racing and heart pounding as she stood in front of a 100 students. “I felt the weight of the room on my shoulders. Will anyone even get what I’m saying?” self-doubt sat wide on her chest. Yet, she took every chance to take the floor and pass on what she learned. A guest lecturer later at GNUKhata mentioned about ERPNext as an easy alternative to Tally, which hooked Sayali to put ERPNext to her own test.

She left GNUKhata with enough hunger and an itch to scratch in opensource. “I began freelancing for FOSS across regions. I also taught myself ERPNext and took some back-to-back workshops.” The interest was piling up from beyond her region of interest. After 2 workshops down in Kerala and 1 in Assam, Sayali co-founded FOSLIPY (FOSS + Linux + Python) with a close associate. She began from Maharashtra and delivered first few lectures in the Mumbai university, mostly teaching python and ERPNext. “Some students from VJTI would squeeze into the back row to attend” she remembers. “I once looked up mid‑session and realized the hall was full, too full, more than 200 faces were listening attentively.” The rooms kept getting bigger, and FOSLIPY was ready to see more of the India. This was where she took her turn from writing code to becoming a teacher for students from all walks of life.

“We would get a newspaper everyday at home and my dad would scan and read every corner of it. As a clerk in the Indian Railways, he never let himself fall behind on current affairs.” She eased into the memories of her father. “My father began with very little. It was his grit that held him and kept him standing for his family. His willpower was contagious.” But life tests even the strongest of hearts. Sayali was almost 15 when her father started returning home in a different state, tangled in poor choices and a regrettable circle of friends. The traces of poor health were so evident that her father had multiple seizures and was on medications for almost 7 years. One morning, on her way to Pune for a workshop, Sayali’s mother called. “Mom’s voice was trembling and shattering, and I could sense the grave news before she had to say anything.” Her father’s health had terribly collapsed. “He had fought so many battles and had come out of ICU so many times. I thought he’d too this time, but I was wrong.”

Opensource workshop at GNUKhata

Even the bravest in the room can feel trapped in an endless loop of grief. Sayali spent half a year with a knot in her chest, until she sought some counseling to vent things out. She had left FOSLIPY by this time and walked away from teaching, toward some uncertainty. She started working at a production house called Gulbadan Talkies. “I did scripting and writing for their YouTube infotenment channel, Vishay Khol. Politics has always been my family’s favourite banter and the channel pulled me right into the thick of all political debates and leaders under microscope. I managed the channel for about two and a half years until COVID slammed brakes on everything.” In the late 2020, Sayali tied the knot with her husband and took a short pause from all the spinning plates of her work and life.

The intensity of events in Sayali’s life seemed to recede from this point. “My friend was implementing ERPNext for his school and asked me to help. I, for some reason, got very invested in it and decided to return to FOSS, with a bit of luck in hand.” She spotted an active talk on Frappe’s forum about hiring a trainer and took it as a sign. She slid into Rushabh’s inbox, aced the interview rounds and landed at Frappe. "The start was nerve-wracking, explaining things to people was little scary on such a visible platform.” She began with partner trainings and then got running her first Frappe School batch on “ERPNext Certification”.

Region-wise trainings

When you dwell fully in what you were born to do, the gaps and the voids come seeking you. “When we started with certifications, the pool of talent seems to be very small. We could sense the increase in eyeballs on ERPNext, we could just not spot them all at one place. So we decided to reach Navgurukul, an NGO looking to train people into ERPNext. I was lucky enough to take the lead and train the whole batch of 50 students, many of whom faced barriers either skillwise or financial. From that group, we were able to welcome 10 of them into the Frappe ecosystem as full-time members. If you ask me one favourite time out of my whole journey, this would be it.” Sayali adds, containing her joy as she looked back on the memory.

Shot at Frappeverse India

The highs and lows of this life define the magic you ultimately become. Getting back at teaching, Sayali has been at Frappe School for almost five years now. And you might love to say hi to her cute little friend, her 1 year young baby girl. “I’m lucky to not have a debate on work-life balance ever at my home. It’s always 50-50 from where I see.” In an alternate life, Sayali would choose to put her hand to the plough, sink it into the soil and live as a farmer. Maybe the line blurs where you lose track of certainty and live the small tremors of life. And through it all, the teacher in Sayali seems to hand you a lesson, “a little patience and a mind free from biases can help you rewrite the “script” the society hands you.”