If Palkan had a rupee for every time her eyes welled with tears when her name was called in Grade 4, she would have a tower of coins as tall as herself. Her classmates would describe her as an unusually silent girl with neatly tied hair, sitting in one corner of the class, who wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. Nine-year old and sixteen-year old Palkan looked almost identical, almost afraid of every loud word around her and delicate in every small way. To everyone else, she was just another girl who had grown used to being invisible. But was there more to her than what met everyone’s eyes?
The first hero a daughter ever finds is undeniably her father who makes this giant daunting world under her feet look smaller. Early in her life, Palkan began to copy her father in the tiniest of ways. “If he adjusted his watch, I would adjust mine. If he crossed his arms when talking, I would cross mine as well. And so, since he was an engineer, I grew up to study engineering too.” And this was no act of blind imitation. “Being the eldest of all his brothers and cousins, I saw my father do the most work and be the responsible man of the house. I saw him give more than he got. I wanted to be just like him.” But then, the toughest part of being just like her father was also learning how to become a rebel in a glass house.
There is this one child in every Indian family who’s the apple of everyone’s eye. Palkan, being the firstborn in a family of 24 with uncles and aunts aplenty, was showered with all the love in the world. She, drenched in affection, was sent off to her nani’s house for the summer vacations. “That’s the best way for my mom to get rid of me,” she laughs melting in the nostalgia. Being an extra pampered kid, also spoiled for choices, she was extremely stubborn. “I would only eat Monaco biscuits, orange candies, kaju and dosa at my Nanis. I got stacks of them to stuff myself with. Dare anyone to make me eat anything else.” Her Nani, of course, would make her delicious crispy dosas three times a day.
By 17, she was able to move out of her little introverted shell, spoke more freely and had a small circle of friends by the time she joined college. Because she was so surrounded by care, she grew up to be very picky. She had her own little rules about whom she spoke her heart with. She was a back-bencher for all her programming and law lectures, but easily a subject topper when it came to physics and mathematics. Palkan glued her sights on engineering to mirror her father and took up a dual degree in engineering and marketing. Her first couple of years at NMIMS were surprisingly relaxed. Yes she really did work hard during exams. But it was only when her third year internships had her doing field sales and desk jobs that the ‘work-life’ a girl raised in a bubble of love had only seen through the glass walls, had to be faced.
Palkan's first Conference
“Because my father had built his own business, I always had a safety net to fall back on. I have to be honest, I was lulled into joining him several times." Someone with that privilege would eventually consider it to be wise choice. “As I grew up, I overanalyzed the different ways we were held. On this side stood my younger brother whose career was treated as a huge bet on success. And I stand on this side where a job or ambition wasn’t always a big deal. I was being loved, yes, but was never expected much of.” Palkan being a rebel at heart, could not let things happen to her. And for all the care she held for her family, her choices were very mindful. She kept at work to have a small window to herself, before ever needing to fall into the safety net.
The buffer of college life was thinning. “Frappe came for campus placement. I got to sit through and clear the first 2 interview rounds. For the third round, I was called in the office where I sat across from Rushabh. I remember being asked about my role model, my life goals, rather than any consultation cases. I was also very clear that I intended to work only for two years and have the rest of my life to be figured out later.” Hired as a consultant, she found her first 18 months to be super swamped. She’d start her days getting on calls with customers and speaking to polite faces about ERPNext implementations. Gradually, then all at once, her days looks monotonous where she had to explain the same process a thousandth time. She was losing herself in that slow, mundane process which at times made Palkan want to pull her hair out. With the leeway you get to switch teams at Frappe, she thought it to be a safe bet and trying a different ride. “This was during COVID, when our main event, the ERPNext Conference (now called Frappeverse), was conducted online. I saw the event getting delayed by a month due to shared bandwidth among volunteers and no single man. I got involved toward the final stretch and was able to keep many pieces from falling and causing further delays.”
Palkan decided to get involved in a few marketing activities as a substitute of a marketing consultant who was hired for a very short stint. She was all alone with a mountain of ideas and only her instinct to guide her. “Everywhere I looked, some medium of communication was missing. I realised we didn’t have a dedicated events page, or even a testimonial page. I tried to go beyond and dug out some testimonials from the community. I was also pissed by the broken link behaviours, so I ran an audit to get everything fixed. I got along with a few folks and made videos and blogs too.” She threw herself into managing conferences start to finish, and ERPNext Conference 2022 was her first big project. Every little detail rested on her shoulders, right from booking the venue, social media outreach, looking for sponsors, scheduling mocks, the budget, the lights, the mics, you name it. “We expected a turnout of 180 people to the conference. But to my surprise, we were all booked with a house full of 330 community folks on the day of the event. I was shook and proud in the best way.” The community keeps growing and so does the number of people showing at Frappeverse over the years. “I do not have a single dull moment doing events. I’m always in awe to see the entire community together under a roof, and getting to set that platform gives me immense joy. A good memorable experience is then worth every sleepless night of preparation.” The later editions of Frappeverses have not seen registrations below 1000. (She was not lying when she said she loved math). The rally of events continued with her taking up Mumbai FOSS in 2023, Frappe Build and Frappeverse India 2024 and our flagship events, Frappeverse Mumbai in the same year. You can easily bribe her into talks that revolve around bringing conferences to other countries, which seem to already happening with Frappeverse Africa and Egypt now.
Frappe community for the win
Doing events is Palkan’s childhood equivalent of building little kingdoms full of magic. For Frappe, the magic now happens year round through smaller, more frequent meetups. Five years and she’s still counting on the number of new events she gets to plan for the years to come. That being said, there are days that drag you into hollow spirals of restlessness. “People have different ways to spend their tough days. For me, I’ve always been the one who trades peace for purpose. I have tried my hand at violin, kickboxing and painting, as I’ve held a brush since I was a child. I like to think that someday, when every road in this life has been walked, I’ll find myself stained with colors, painting in an art gallery of my own.” Though childhood had her hidding in corners of the classroom, she now stands at the center of the stage under the spotlight and addresses a classroom full of Frappe folks.
Days when Palkan gets artistic
