Let’s begin the Journey

8th of April was my last day as a steady income earner. I was confident that this new phase of life will be equally exciting. I knew the path I wanted to take was not about getting a group of people to sit in a conference room and ideate. It required travel to different parts of the country, understand the way of life of different communities and in the process identify what we could learn and take back to our lives. This is the genesis of Zishta and we hope to keep it that way. We thought of starting where we belong – the state of Tamil Nadu, with its rich culture, traditions and immense knowledge residing within different communities. We thought there is a lot to learn from doing a road trip to different parts of the state. Peak of summer and we did not want the sun’s efforts to go in vain. Our road trip was set to cover more than 2000 kilometers over a period of two weeks. We leveraged our parents, grand parents, relatives and all their contacts in different towns to identify key places and people to visit.

We got a few contacts on whom we should reach out to in each of these places. This would help us with a start in each of these towns and we had also planned for a lot of exploratory work. Our plan was to cover Mayavaram, Kumbakonam, Nagercoil, Tirunelveli, Karaikudi, Madurai, Salem and Coimbatore in this trip. The effort was to meet as many rural artisans as possible and learn from them. The dates were fixed, my cousin and I were ready to hit the road with our backpacks locked and hearts filled with expectations.