Experiences at Anant Fellowship — Sweet and Salty memories

A week’s time with family for Diwali breaks was a sweet brief period. The home visits during the fellowship period seemed like a vacation of army personnel coming to visit his family and still engaged in his duty. Every step would be left to thinking how could we make our Live-action project (which I spoke about in the last article) worthwhile, what could be done more, how should we collaborate?

Image Credit- Rohan Shenoy

With these thoughts in mind, I returned to the hostel with homemade Besan ke laddoo relished by all. It reminds me of the fact of how distributing sweets also made some believe that my family runs a sweet business. The act of sharing food is close to my heart and this is how I connected with my co-fellows and the fellowship team.

The sweetness increased when we all travelled for outstation modules. One such experience was during the module in Zainabad. Though not outstation but a few 100 km from Ahmedabad we went for a self-growth module.

The 7-days of the module was about listening to each fellows’ story and life experiences. The stories shared brought in retrospective images to others of similar incidences and introspection of their own life events. The sharings caused the proximate closeness amongst the fellows to get together and be comfortable with their personalities and generate empathy and bonding. This couldn’t have been possible without the ambience of the place. The villagers, the aroma of the fresh soil and cow dung mesmerised everyone in its enchantment.

Image Credit- Prajakta Nene

It also allowed me to fly after a long time. The feeling was strange but sweet. The module concluded by some of us extending our stay to watch the meteor shower. The bliss of it couldn’t be well explained by the fact that almost 25 fellows slept in the desert of Little Rann of Kutch stargazing in the cold winter of December. Perhaps, one could say it to be one of the best and the toughest modules of the fellowship.

We bid adieu to the village, came back to urban life and began working on our projects. ‘Team Nature’, as we called ourselves, was all set to execute our project with our fortunate client. The first of the teams to make any progress with an execution plan. The client was convinced of the idea to grow their own food in their terrace of the house.

Image Credit- Ajay Narayanan

We all worked tremendously for setting up the place. The budget seemed tight so we decided to get our hands into the mud. Not only this, but we also procured materials, loaded and unloaded the same. We were involved in tough physical labour. Sometimes reflecting back I question how did we manage all that within a short span of the fellowship. I was elated to have begun somewhere. Nonetheless, the plan couldn’t be taken further for the financial instability faced by the client. Due to which the project had to stop in the initial stage of execution. This also affected the team dynamics but we didn’t lose hope and continued our search for people interested in growing their own food. It was exuberating to work for LAP though most of our days would be spent in attending and working for the class modules, the book reading clubs, debate hour and writing support.

Image credit- Dhawal Darjee

The LAP sessions provide us with certain frameworks as a guiding path such as empathy mapping, the theory of change and etc. These mapping helped us understand our clients, actors and mentors. Every term we updated about the project progress through presentations to the LAP committee. The concept of Urban Agriculture wasn’t new and many case studies had been conducted before. The committee could recognize our zeal to work for the project but questioned our objective of doing replicas of a project.

I guess we were emotionally biased towards working for the project and didn’t pay much heed to what unique we could bring to the project. Lacking the ability to bring up something innovative was building pressure upon the team. LAP demands an innovative approach. We exercised upon it but the execution phase was more interesting to lead us to think differently. We couldn’t get ourselves out of the thought to grow the foods quickly and show it as the results. However, we slowed down after our first clients retracted. Steadily we visualised the broader picture that it isn’t about just executing a project but living the process of it as well.

It was a crucial time as the team dynamics was being questioned and so the USP of the project. The four of us wanted to continue further and started from scratch for the Ahmedabad design week 2020 event. We themed it to explain the concepts of Permaculture, different ways of growing food, and how it’s easy to grow your own food. We aimed to get a good exposure for the project and indeed there was a plethora of crowd from all walks of life and a few interested spoke well about the project and boosted our motivation.

However, I understood then some projects take an early start, but need time to be executed which we didn’t have for that academic year. This way the team decided to drop the current project and begin a new project as many challenges are yet to be undertaken for making the world a better place. Meanwhile, we all went for our next trip to Bhopal to explore the culture of museums.

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