The Man who quit his job at Google and created ‘WWW’

How often do we hear or say, "I have to work in big tech companies like Google" or "Working in Google is my dream job". But here is the story of Arun Krishnamurthy who quit his full-time well-paid job at Google to clean the water bodies full time. Admirable, right? 

“I Quit...Google”

Getting placed in a big company like Google can be a huge deal for any individual, and so was it for a small-town middle-class boy named Arun Krishnamurthy. A whole new world opened for him as he joined Google. While he held the position of Account Associate, his calling towards the planet was not left abandoned. One of Arun’s managers advised him to run towards his passion where he can make a huge impact. “Even without you, Google can function. But will the dream of your Environment Foundation of India function without you?", he said.

These words made him take the bold decision without any second thought or dilemma. He left his prestigious comfortable job at Google and got back on the mission to Save Mother Earth. 

Love for Water Bodies

Arun Krishnamurthy is fascinated by water bodies culture and civilization which he believes has a different story to tell and considers them as a magical element of the environment. For him, water is a habitat that hosts life for one frog, that one tree sapling, or that one rainfall that fills up that lake, it feeds lives with so many memories and conserves the several water bodies in the way forward. He gave a different outlook to three 'www' that people usually refer to as the World Wide Web. He introduced the concept of ‘World Water Wildlife’ for environment conservation which is not a choice but common sense and compulsion. 

The Chennai-based environmentalist love for the water bodies seems infinite. He had a childhood special relation with a pond near his house. However, watching garbage being dumped in a pond turned things around and he decided it was high time to take action. At that point, Arun decided to become a conservationist to make efforts for conserving water bodies like lakes, ponds, rivers etc. 

Turning the solitary venture into community 

Krishnamurthy's love for water bodies made him start a movement, cleaning lakes and ponds by removing garbage to maintain an ecological balance. The movement that began with a single person, Arun Krishnamurthy himself, got many people inspired and joined him in his initiative to start cleaning the water bodies altogether. This solitary venture movement turned into a community then and has now become the Environmentalist Foundation of India (EFI).

Environmentalist Foundation of India (EFI) is a non-profit organisation for wildlife conservation and habitat restoration. It has cleaned and restored more than 93 freshwater bodies across 14 Indian states. The organisation’s biggest success is the kind of people it attracted and mostly volunteers aged between 11 to 17 contributed to the change of tomorrow. There is no single template methodology it adopted to clean and revive water bodies. Every lake is taken at once and diagnosed based on its needs and requirements; they do not receive any funding from the administration, but depend solely on government permissions. ‘To pool all these resources takes time’, Arun claims that the problem that has been in existence for three-four decades cannot be solved immediately.

Introduced the "environ-tainment" concept 

Arun aims to ensure that people find the lakes, ponds, rivers as equally exciting as their favourite cricketers and movie stars. Thus, he came up with the term "environ-tainment" - a combination of environment and entertainment. He wants to make the environment conversation notion entertaining to people. For this, he presents the most artistic and entertaining street plays, dance, musicals, and documentary films to sensitize the people towards environmental issues.

Hoping to channelize the youth’s energy towards the love for nature, Arun now aims to draw people out from their “desktop conservation” and make them interact with the real world rather than the virtual world. “My goal is to restore 50 lakes and ponds every year,” he says.

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