Learning for life, freedom and friendship We Are Vodafone

For our second episode of this series, Cara is joined by Hema Kariyappa and Rekha Devadiga, two inspiring women who discover they have a lot to learn from one another. Meeting for the first time on the show, they discover they’ve both grown up in Mumbai, India, and have a lot in common.
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To read the transcript, please scroll below:
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SPEAKERS
Rekha Devadiga, Cara McGoogan, Hema Kariyappa
Cara McGoogan: Welcome to We Are Vodafone, a new podcast series where we'll bring together people from very different parts of the organization to hear their opinions, theories, fears, passions and successes. Over the course of this series, we'll explore the subjects that matter most to you, and how they impact on your life.
 
Cara McGoogan: I'm Cara McGoogan, a journalist and podcaster and in this second episode, we're gonna talk about the theme, learn, relearn, unlearn. My guests today, are Hema Karyiappa and Rekha Devadiga. They join me remotely to talk about challenges they faced and opportunities they found in their lives. To start off, I asked them to introduce themselves to each other.
Hema Kariyappa: Hi everyone, I'm Hema Kariyappa. I recently joined Vodafone about three months ago, as a solution architect. I live in the beautiful city of Bath, in the southwest of England. And I moved to UK in 2003, from Mumbai, India.
 
Rekha Devadiga: Great to e-meet you Hema, this is Rekha Devadiga and I'm based out of Pune, in India. I take care of the communications team in Vodafone Intelligent Solutions.
 
Cara McGoogan: It's great to have you both on the show today. We thought it was really interesting how you both grew up in Mumbai. And we're going to be talking about learn, relearn and unlearn. So it might be really interesting to start with how your backgrounds have shaped you as people. Hema, do you want to go first?
 
Hema Kariyappa: Yeah, sure. I will. I was actually born in South India, my parents migrated in the 70s, to Mumbai, from the south of India. And I think a lot of what I am today, I owe it a lot to my parents, largely to my dad. So my dad actually took night classes to learn English and to find a decent job. So that has always been running behind my mind to know that he always leads stress on education. And my Dad encouraged me to study. Although I wanted to grow up to be a neurosurgeon, computers had started becoming quite prevalent in the 90s. And so when I wanted to choose my vocation, instead of medicine, I actually picked Computer Engineering. I worked three years in India, and then I moved to Bath. So most of my working life has now been in UK.
 
Rekha Devadiga: I believe Hema, that we were destined to meet. And probably we might be soul sisters, and I'll tell you why, okay. Both my parents are from South India, too. And they migrated to Mumbai for a living. My father, he took night classes to learn English, he really wanted to become a journalist. However, because of financial conditions he could not and he started working in a hotel as a waiter. And he worked near the airport, his guests were primarily people who used to travel and he used to tell wonderful stories about their travels to me, whenever he used to come back from work. He is the one who encouraged me to study, to travel as much as I want. And oh my god, I just can't believe that, you know, we have so many things in common.
 
Hema Kariyappa: We have such similar backgrounds.
 
Rekha Devadiga: I think probably it's the podcast team or destiny and Vodafone that got us together.
 
Hema Kariyappa: Probably, yes.
Rekha Devadiga: Brilliant. Yeah, so my childhood was quite a difficult one. However, I suppose I was the most happiest at that point in time, because though we did not have the resources as much as we could. We had wonderfu