Lighting up the mountainside

It was on a muggy July day that Aniket Mitra got a phone call that would take his life on a pleasant detour from his nine to five job as a consultant at Deloitte, Mumbai. It was his friend Ayan Biswas, maverick, art-lover and fellow traveller, from Bangalore who was calling to ask Aniket to go along with him on one of his adventures. “Ayan and I travel together a lot. We’ve been to Rann of Kutch and Pondicherry together and were supposed to go to the hills last year. Then this year he called up and asked if I want to come along with him on a project he was doing in some villages in the Himachal. Here, he was going to teach people how to make arty solar-powered lamps from recyclable material. It seemed like a great plan, so I agreed to go,” recalls Aniket.

The next step for Aniket and his fellow travellers, two of whom, Dipanjan Chakraborty and Sudipto Pati, were going to be joining them from Bangalore and Kolkata, was to collect art supplies. Here, a few well-placed posts on social media and on Ayan’s website got desirable results, and with a bagful of donated craft material, Aniket set off for Delhi. “I met a friend from Jawaharlal Nehru University, who also had a bunch of material that she had gathered from people she knew in Delhi,” he explains.

When Aniket met Ayan, he had covered two remote little hamlets near Kasol. “The idea was to teach them to create bottle art so that they can sell it at the local markets, and also help light up the more remote villages, where electricity is limited in supply,” says Ayan. The 29-year old had spent a year tinkering with bottle art and then a month experimenting with solar cells to create a cheap but functioning version of a solar lamp with art on plastic and glass bottles, using Fevicol and plaster of Paris instead of primer to cut down on the cost. “I tried going door-to-door at the first village, Mateura, but soon realised that it wouldn’t work since people go off to work every day. So, instead, I went to the village school and taught the kids how to make the lamps. It worked, so that was the model we used for the rest of the villages,” he recalls.

The team already had a working model in place. As such, it should have been smooth sailing. However, a few twists and turns were awaiting them. “We were travelling through Kunzum Pass, when the bus broke down. We were stranded there in the cold for five hours. Somehow, we managed to make it to a nearby village called Losar, which is roughly 50 km from Kaza — the capital of Spiti, which was our next destination,” Aniket reminisces.

Once in Kaza, it was smooth sailing. The rest of the group picked up on how to make bottle art and taught the local school kids as well. “When I say school, I don’t mean the kinds of strong, erect buildings that we see in the metros. It was more of an after-school education centre run by a New Zealand-based woman named Joe Smith. We set up a light at the gate of the school and taught the 15 or 20 odd kids how to make the lamps. The next stop was Lanza, where we all had some breathing trouble seeing as it’s at a very high altitude. But with the help of the kids we did what had to be done,” says Aniket.

What had started as a romantic dream to see the hills lit up turned into an exhaustive project to help a community gain an alternative livelihood. “Initially, I had wanted to see what those picturesque villages on the hills would look like with a light at every doorstep. But when I started working with them, I realised that I wanted to help them find a way of making a living from converting scrap to works of art. I plan to do the same thing in Assam. A lot of work needs to be done, but I hope I can do it sometime next year,” Ayan signs off, with an open invitation to join in.