SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT
For a long time, Jaytirth Ahya’s father thought he ran a travel company. And who can blame him? Ahya, 27, has been organising trips for four years and has taken participants to destinations as varied and trendy as Spiti, Nagaland and Sri Lanka.
But travel agents don’t ask applicants to fill in a 24-point form to go on a trip that applicants pay for.
They don’t hold interviews to pick who comes joins in. They certainly don’t get 800 entries from 9 countries for 16 slots, as Ahya did this year.
Ahya could call himself an experience designer, talent curator or collaboration engineer — terms born of (and best understood by) the start-up generation. But the Bangalore resident prefers to be seen as the founder of RTX aka the Roadtrip Experience Project.
Its fourth edition, in November, was a 13-day trip to Vietnam.
Ahya got a set of creative people from diverse fields to collaborate on projects en route. Filmmakers shot with musicians, photographers and poets joined forces, muralists worked with light designers. Think of it as an elite networking opportunity for people who abhor the term.
BETTER UNITED
“I realised four years ago that India’s creative scene was growing, but meeting spaces were stuck in the 1990s,” Ahya says. “People needed new conversation avenues that were built on trust. RTX is not just about meeting new people, it’s about collaborating with them and locals.”
For Vietnam, the team ranged from a 22-year-old illustrator to a 48-year-old French photographer. Participants signed up for reasons just as diverse. For Ruchi Shah, a 35-year-old design strategist from Mumbai, it was a way of leaving her solocareer cocoon to “see how other people were doing what they were doing”.
For Ankita Shah, 24, a poet who set up a collective called The Poetry Club, the trigger was an evening of boredom. “Meeting artists on a journey sounded exciting,” she says. “I was up till 3 am, filling up that 24-point questionnaire.”
One of the questions is: What is your dream project? How you answer is key. “I’m not picking 16 people but 16 energies,” Ahya says. “When you read 800 dream projects, it’s inspiring and motivating. Some dreams are so simple, you just need to find the right people to help make it happen.”
For India’s emerging creative freelancers, short-term gigs trump the tedium of doing the same thing month after month. And the chance to experiment is more attractive than a steady paycheque.
In such an environment, collaboration is not just desirable, it’s essential, says Sanket Avalani, an early adopter of collaboration as a driver of entrepreneurship.
His company, Design Fabric, creates gifs and stickers for Snapchat and launched Taxifabric, a project where graphic designers showcased their work as the interiors of Mumbai taxis — an exercise that grew into a studio practice and a publication. “Things have changed in the last decade,” he says. “The need to collaborate is now global. Whoever is up for understanding its value and hustle for it, is the one who benefits.”
#MAKERSGONNAMAKE
The creative freelancers are also looking to learn from experience not instruction. “The trip taught me that everyone has the same anxieties; that they may be big on Instagram, but go through the same hustle,” says Ruchi. “I’m pretty possessive of my paintbrushes but one photographer, 10 years younger, was happily letting us try out his drone camera. It was a lesson in letting go.”
Ankita worked on a travel-themed poem that was set to music by two team members and one local and recorded in a studio. “Seeing how a song is created was a new experience for me,” she says. She also worked alongside a photographer to create text for a visual series about working women. “Poets rarely collaborate across disciplines,” she says. “The trip offered a lot of scope to look at another practice.”
It wasn’t always happy camping. Fulltime office drones will tell you that getting 16 strangers to work on 5 projects over 13 days is foolhardy. At RTX, participants also had to grapple with new locations every few days. It became, ultimately, a lesson in managing expectations – not every dream came true.
“We started off with everyone wanting to be the star – my style, my idea, my plan. But you learn to adjust,” says Ruchi.