What does it take to build a national team that beats the best in the world -- with no government funding, no salary, and players who have never seen a football?

India had never fielded a blind football team that could trouble the world's powerhouses. Sunil Mathew built one anyway -- starting from a 20-minute demo game and turning it into teams now ranked in the global top five, on a fraction of the budget of the nations they beat.

In this conversation, we go inside a sport played entirely without sight -- four totally-blind outfield players, a sighted keeper, a ball with a bell inside, and three voices guiding play -- and the moments that made Sunil's mission: the player offered surgery to restore his sight who turned it down because he "cannot play football without this," the 13-year-old who promised "I will fight for you, I will die for you" before scoring at the World Cup, and the boy who fell from a jackfruit tree and now captains India with a road named after him in his village.

We also get a clear-eyed look at the work -- roughly 15 million visually impaired Indians, 75-80% of that blindness preventable, no government funding, and a coach who refuses a salary -- plus how India went from importing footballs from England to manufacturing them in Jalandhar, and the assistive-tech device Sunil is building to catch a fall within the golden hour.

This one is for anyone who's been told the odds, the budget, or the obstacles are too big to start.

Connect with Sunil & his work:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-j-mathew/

- India's blind football team: The Home of Blind Football in India - Home
- SRVC (Sunil's NGO for the visually challenged): SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED
- Heart2Heart Orchestra: SOCIETY FOR REHABILITATION OF THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED

Building something interesting?
- Reach out to Arjun: Arjun Thomas
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunthomas

Building Real is a podcast about how things actually get built -- without the highlight reel gloss.

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Startup education | social impact | founder incentives | Founders For Change | entrepreneurship beyond exits | next-gen founders

Supriya Panchangam has spent a decade in rooms full of young people and arrived at one uncomfortable conclusion: the biggest problem with the next generation of founders isn't their ambition — it's what they've been taught to aim for.

As co-founder of Founders For Change (FFC), she's building a different kind of startup education: one that teaches founders to build for impact and sustainability, not headlines and exits. We go deep on broken incentive structures in the startup ecosystem, why optimising for Forbes covers is failing a generation of builders, and what it actually takes to rewire how founders think about success.

Topics:

- Why the startup ecosystem's incentive structure is broken for most founders

- How FFC teaches mission-driven building to the next generation

- Why non-STEM students are being excluded from the innovation conversation

- What sustainable, community-driven company building looks like in practice

- Fixing the gap between startup culture and real-world impact

Guest: Supriya Panchangam, co-founder of Founders For Change (FFC)

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

AI and creativity | children's books | illustration | human vs AI | creative career | author story | taste as competitive advantage

Vinayak Varma is an author and illustrator who has spent years building a creative career in children's books — a category that is, on paper, one of the most replaceable by AI. His answer to whether AI can kill human creativity is more nuanced, and more useful, than either camp usually admits.

The argument: AI can generate infinite content. It cannot develop taste. It cannot decide what is missing from the world and fill it with intention. And in a landscape of infinite generated content, curation and judgment become the only durable moats.

This is a conversation for anyone building a creative career in 2026, anyone asking whether their craft is worth protecting, and anyone curious about what "human" actually means in a world of AI-generated everything.

Topics:

- Why taste is the moat AI cannot replicate

- Building a sustainable creative career in children's books

- How AI changes (but does not end) illustration and storytelling

- What it means to build something durable when tools are commoditised

- Creativity as a discipline, not a talent

Guest: Vinayak Varma, author and illustrator

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Non-toxic home | formaldehyde in textiles | sustainable home furnishings | The Yellow Dwelling | consumer health | India startup

Nanda Kumar discovered that most home textiles — sheets, curtains, pillows — contain formaldehyde. The same chemical used to preserve dead bodies. It's legal, unregulated, and in products sitting in your bedroom right now.

Instead of writing a blog post about it, he built a company: The Yellow Dwelling, a non-toxic home furnishings brand that has turned a hidden health hazard into a business with a genuine reason to exist.

This episode is about building a mission-driven consumer brand when the problem you're solving is invisible to most customers, convincing people to care about something they can't smell or see, and how to build supply chains that actually hold a principle.

Topics:

- The formaldehyde problem hiding in home textiles

- How to build a consumer brand around a problem people don't know they have

- Supply chain integrity in sustainable home goods

- Validating demand for a non-toxic product category

- What mission-driven building looks like in consumer goods

Guest: Nanda Kumar, founder of The Yellow Dwelling

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Mental health startup | Southeast Asia | social impact | tech career pivot | Chengal Centre | founder story

Barry Ooi was an economist turned data analytics entrepreneur, comfortable in the corporate and tech world — until a loved one's struggle made the gaps in Southeast Asia's mental health infrastructure impossible to ignore.

He walked away from a lucrative career to build Chengal Centre: not an app, not a wellness product, but actual mental health infrastructure for a region that has almost none.

This is a conversation about the kind of building that doesn't make headlines — quiet, structural, and more urgent than anything trending in tech. Barry talks about why Southeast Asia is decades behind on mental health systems, how you build institutions when there's no playbook, and what it actually costs to pivot from financial security to social necessity.

Topics:

- Why Southeast Asia's mental health gap is a structural problem, not a cultural one

- How to build institutions when there's no VC-backed template to follow

- The real cost of leaving a stable tech career for social impact work

- What "mental health infrastructure" actually means at scale

- Lessons from building in a space that gets no glamour

Guest: Barry Ooi, founder of Chengal Centre

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Food business | Airbnb experience | Mad Onion Slicer | India startup | deportation | culinary entrepreneurship | founder comeback story

Dhruv Shanker got deported from the United States. His startup had folded. His visa paperwork was a disaster. He came back to India with nothing obvious to build on — and turned a balcony, four aunties, and "boring Indian food" into the highest-rated culinary experience on Airbnb in India.

This episode is about what happens when the plan completely falls apart and you have to build something entirely new from scratch — with the assets you already have.

Dhruv talks about the pivot nobody saw coming, why calling Indian food "boring" turned out to be a marketing superpower, how he built Airbnb's #1 culinary experience without a restaurant or a commercial kitchen, and what it takes to turn a setback into an unfair advantage.

Topics:

- Getting deported and rebuilding from zero

- Why "boring Indian food" became a brand differentiator

- Building Airbnb's #1 culinary experience in India with no restaurant

- The business model behind curated food experiences

- Authenticity as a competitive moat in the experience economy

Guest: Dhruv Shanker, founder of Mad Onion Slicer / Boring Indian Food

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Deep tech | sewage treatment | infrastructure startup | India | EcoSTP | founder story

What do you do when your apartment's sewage treatment plant overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For Tharun Kumar — former engineer turned deep-tech founder — that moment became the starting point for EcoSTP, a bacteria-based sewage treatment company now operating across 24 Indian states.

This is not an AI startup. It's not a quick-flip consumer app. It's infrastructure that runs on biology, scales through municipalities, and actually makes money doing it.

Tharun breaks down how he validated the market in a space nobody wanted to touch, built a supply chain from scratch, convinced large institutions to trust a startup with sewage, and how profitable infrastructure gets built when everyone else is chasing exits.

Topics:

- Deep tech that runs on bacteria, not code

- Scaling infrastructure across 24 Indian states

- Why India's sewage problem is a massive business opportunity

- How to build in a sector that gets zero Silicon Valley glamour

- Profitable unit economics in environmental infrastructure

Guest: Tharun Kumar, founder of EcoSTP

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

Find us: buildingreal.com | @buildingrealpodcast on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok