Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Live
This DU graduate is teaching people a new way to live life, sans money
D o you need a hand for any chore? This 31-year-old chap is all up to help you, and learn something in the process, too. Wondering how much will he charge for his services? Well, nothing! Meet Pratul Jain aka Prat, and know the blissful way of living life sans monetary transactions. “I realised early in life that if you remove money from any equation, then life becomes beautiful,” says Jain, who belongs to a business family of Indore, and studied B Com (Hons) from Delhi University’s Hansraj College. Later he took to fashion designing at National Institute of Fashion Technology.
Talking about the time when his life turned upside-down, he says, “Coming back after judging a fashion show at a college, I agreed to stay back at my friend’s place. The next morning, my friend suffered a brain haemorrhage. In her paralytic state, she told me to follow my heart. Her words echoed in my mind, and I decided to explore life in a very filmy way.”
Jain then dissolved his fashion designing business, donated the money to four lesser-known villages, and took a train to Kanyakumari. “I decided that I will only live in the homes of locals, and started offering any help that they required. In return, I would ask them some space to live and food. This process made me learn so many things, and I started travelling to different parts of the world with the same ideology,” says Jain, who has till now worked as a bamboo house maker in North East India, baker in France, an inspirational orator in Kashmir, and a scuba-diving instructor in Australia among others.
When people asked him to write about his life experiences, it took Jain a while to push himself back to social media — a task he had given up along with his business — but once he revived, he started getting emails from all parts of the world. He says, “My life even became a case study for a group of experts from Europe researching on people who live life differently.”
The website and Facebook page Backpack With Prat soon became a way of living, and at present, he takes people on tours to live life like him: “You don’t have to be [Nelson] Mandela or [Mahatma] Gandhi to help people. If you have something new to teach, I’ll come and work for you for free! I’ll be introducing a festival in India, where youngsters from urban cities and some unsung heroes will travel to a small village near Manali, and get to know each other and the locals.”