When Hyderabad-based business owner Bhaskar Chalasani booked a Rapido delivery last year, the same rider showed up twice for the same parcel — once for the original request, and again after a resend. By the second time, Bhaskar was paying attention. “He sounded very intelligent, very genuine. I asked him about his background,” he tells Business Outreach. 

What came out over the next 165 kilometres was not what he expected to hear from a bike taxi rider.

Raju Puli, 24, from Jagtial in North Telangana, had a computer science degree with a 7.95 CGPA, two published machine learning research papers, an IELTS score, active GRE preparation, and had been learning German on the side — all in service of a master’s degree in Germany he had been weeks away from applying for. 

He had turned down reservation benefits he was legally entitled to because, as he puts it, “I didn’t want to wait for the system. I believed I could get there on my own.” He took an education loan instead and kept moving.

Then his mother was diagnosed with final-stage esophageal cancer, and everything stopped.

A fight with cancer 

“We hadn’t recognised the symptoms early enough,” Raju says. 

“By the time we knew, it had already reached the last stage.” His younger siblings weren’t in a position to manage what came next, so Raju stepped in, the way eldest children in families tend to do. Germany went on hold. Any job with fixed hours was out of the question because chemotherapy sessions, radiation appointments and hospital consultations consumed most of each day. Rapido, with its flexible hours, was the only income source that could bend around a hospital timetable.

“I could drop her for treatment, go ride for a few hours, come back and pick her up,” he says. “No regular job would have allowed that.”

For the next year and a half, his days ran on a strict loop — up at 4 am, riding until 10, at the hospital with his mother from 10 to 2, back on the road from 4 pm until 11 at night or later. 

On a good day, the app showed gross earnings of Rs 1,600, which came down to Rs 1,000 or Rs 1,200 in hand after Rapido’s commission, fuel and bike maintenance. After his mother fell asleep each night, he studied for another six hours, rebuilding technical skills he was terrified of losing. “I kept telling myself I cannot come out of this with nothing,” he says. “I refused to let those years go completely to waste.”

A chance encounter 

It was during one of these rides that Bhaskar asked his questions and then did something unexpected — he offered Raju a job. 

Raju’s response was not the relieved, grateful yes that most people in his position might have given. “I told him, will this help me grow? Because I am already two years behind in my career,” he says. Bhaskar, recalling the moment, says that answer settled it for him. “He was a Rapido rider negotiating his own future. That is not an ordinary person.”

Bhaskar brought Raju on board as Project Engineer at Yellolife — Nature Greens Pvt Ltd — an F&B nutrition company now building aggressively into AI and digital infrastructure, at a starting salary of Rs 37,000 a month on a track toward regularisation and structured upskilling. 

The fact that Raju had no corporate experience to speak of was not, Bhaskar says, the point. “I wasn’t hiring his resume. I’ve seen polished CVs with nothing behind them. This boy had everything — just no certificate for it yet.”

For Bhaskar, the discomfort goes beyond one young man’s story. “He could have driven that bike 18 hours a day and never moved forward — skilled, educated, going nowhere,” he says. “We cannot build a nation on gig work and low-salaried arbitrage. We need skills with hope and real value creation. India has thousands of people like Raju on these roads. The question is whether anyone stops to look.”

Raju today leads digital integration at Yellolife and is preparing for the UPSC examinations alongside his day job, because a single goal was never going to be enough for him.

He credits Bhaskar with something more than a job offer. “In a world where most people judge you by your current situation, he chose to look further,” Raju says. “That is genuinely rare.” 

Bhaskar himself is characteristically brief about it. “I just asked,” he says. “That is all it takes sometimes.”