Day 1 - A Merry Christmas on Train

We started from Mumbai on 24th evening on our Jagriti Yatra Train and we are going towards Kanyakumari :)

Confusing? Was for me as well. Jagriti Yatra (https://jagritiyatra.com) is this fantastic 2 week journey through various parts of India to engage the young Yatris or participants to develop social entrepreneurship ventures in small town India, hinterland India, rural India or middle India as we call it in the Yatra.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Jagriti Yatra has gone digital and has been able to engage many more hundreds of participants than they were able to do so in their physical train journey. I talked about this change in mode in my article on fellowships earlier this year (https://www.jagranjosh.com/articles/what-are-academic-fellowships-all-you-need-to-know-1617102216-1).

I first got to know about Jagriti Yatra in 2009 through one of my first corporate mentors, Mr Vidyadhar Prabhudesai, who himself is a globally awarded change maker (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4A0hbiO6ks5e6tCbilYQzp?si=lyWzKVIqRSCxu-iRqKgdpQ). I was fascinated by it. For an Indian engineering graduate, such things in 2009 were still unknown and mysterious. I couldn’t apply that year. I got selected as a Yatri in 2013/14 but due to falling sick, couldn’t make it to the Yatra once again. This year, I decided to give myself a gift on my birthday - I decided to take out time during the last week of December and first week of January 2022, not go for a vacation or some party marathon and instead do the Yatra!

I sent the application on the last day of the first round of applications in May and received the selection confirmation in August as a facilitator on the Jagriti Digital Yatra (JDY) 2021-22 to be held between Dec 24 to Jan 7. A facilitator is a guide to other younger Yatris who are students and working professionals, here to learn, create ventures and build India.

I am so proud to be a facilitator out of some 100 other facilitators participating from all over India and abroad. There are some 800 participants who we shall be guiding and empowering during the next 2 weeks. The facilitators and participants have been divided into groups according to skills and passions, and I am in a group focussing on Education. In my group, I am joined by another facilitator, an amazing social worker from Mumbai, Ms Madhavi Shah, who is currently working as a program coordinator with DigiSwasthya Foundation (https://digiswasthya.org). She has spent 2 decades working with people with intellectual disability and more recently with paediatric cancer patients before joining DigiSwasthya. She is also an artist who would like to sell her art to raise funds for a social cause. She applied as a participant but was promoted to be a facilitator :)

My cohort’s participants come from different parts of India and from different backgrounds, age groups, education, passions, life stories and motivations. It is just amazing to see people from such diverse stories to be together on one forum, and to think that we will be working and learning together itself is such a beautiful testimony for JDY and the Jagriti Yatra team. I will have the privilege to mentor Jyoti from Jaunpur working towards up skilling young engineering diploma students; Pavan from Yavatmal district, currently pursuing Masters in Social Work from TISS Hyderabad and also pursuing the Gandhi Fellowship, and wants to create ventures to change the farmer suicide tragedies in the region, as he lost his uncle in a similar fashion; Nithish, a recently graduated architect from Tamil Nadu, wants to design public spaces in a better way and work towards protecting wetlands near Chennai. And Yashica from Delhi, Monanki from Mumbai, Nayan from Ratnagiri, Vaibhav from Yavatmal, Dr Darshana from Rajkot and so on.

I would like to highlight one co-Yatri in every journal entry I do. Right now we’re just absorbing the wonderful sessions conducted by the Mumbai Dabbawalas, Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Founder and vice-chairman, Info Edge), V C Sehgal (Chairman and Co-founder of Motherson Group) Dr Vanita Vishwanath (Board Member JY), Shashank Mani (founder of JY), Ashutosh Kumar (CEO of JY), Chinmay Vadnere (COO of JY) and just interacting with other Yatris :)

See you in the next journal!

Also published on:

https://medium.com/sn-mentoring

https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/author/saurabh_nanda/