It’s hard to resist the allure of quitting a regular life and taking to a life on the road. With our social media streams filled to the gills with pictures of near-perfect holidays, memes in praise of wanderlust, endorsing the idea that travel expands your perspectives and opens your mind, travel is severely fetishised among urban audiences. And yet, there are people turning this typical, glossy picture of travel on its head by taking a different kind of journey.
Bengaluru duo Akshatha Shetty (29) and Piyush Goswami (31) have been on the road, travelling across India, for about a year now. Engineers-turned-documentary makers, they’re on a journey they call #DriveForChange — a project to discover untold stories from the places they visit, document the lives of people, and explore ways to actually make a change in their lives. It is travel to reconnect with society and impact destinations positively, rather than merely travel to gratify wanderlust.
It began as a crowd-funded project they called Rest Of My Family — to reconnect with and rekindle relationships with the larger human family that is often neglected in our quest for development and amassing resources. “We realised that merely documenting lives and sharing stories wasn’t enough,” says Shetty. #DriveForChange is an effort to take that journey one step forward, to address social issues as they see them.
“As we got deeper into the lives of various people and began understanding the issues they were facing, we learnt a valuable lesson. More than often, these people feel used by us urban folks who approach them with fancy gadgets, cameras and laptops. They are faced with empty promises and have, therefore, lost their faith in humanity,” says Shetty.
Last year, in Dhanushkodi, Shetty and Goswami interacted with a fishing village that has no public infrastructure like hospitals, post office, or schools. The people spoke of needing a community vehicle to help them travel to the nearby town to buy supplies and reach essential services. With Kara Foundation as the project’s primary funding partner and through funds raised via the project page on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo, the duo was able to set up a community bus and is currently working on a couple of solar rural electrification projects and a healthcare project.
“We are doing something or the other to support every community we have spent time with, based on what seems to be their primary necessity. But while we have been able to support some people and communities, our thoughts lie with all those we couldn’t reach out to,” says Shetty.
Shetty and Goswami’s journey is far from glamorous. Away from the comforts of regular life since 2013, their lives are uncertain and uncomfortable. “Summers have been extremely harsh and physically draining. Sometimes, we have had to sleep in our car on hot, still nights,” recalls Shetty. But, she adds, “Home is a state of mind and not necessarily a place.”
Difficulties pale in the face of the experiences they have gained. “Travelling is a humbling experience. It opens you up to new possibilities,” they say, talking of how they have been forced to break out of their cocooned existence.
In his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered , E.F. Schumacher says, “Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.”
A simple tenet about returning focus to smaller entities and fixing micro-systems to make them healthy, self-reliant and flourishing. The journey that these two are on.
Revati Upadhya, based in Goa, writes on food, travel, culture and lifestyle.
