Introduction to 'Rest Of My Family' Social-work-through-art project

[Piyush Goswami]

Greetings from the road Family,

Hope you are all well.I am a documentary photographer/writer/film maker from Bangalore. 

 I am writing to share my social-work-through-art project called 'Rest Of My Family' with the group. 

Two years ago, Akshatha shetty who is a writer and I gave up our home and most of whatever we owned to live a life on the road. Since, then we have been travelling extensively into rural India understanding, experiencing and documenting social issues.

We are both Engineers by academic qualification. I am a Mechanical Engineer while Akshatha is an Electrical and Electronics Engineer. After working in the corporate world for about two years, we realised that our purpose in life lay elsewhere. We quit our lucrative jobs to pursue what we were truly interested in.

We launched our social work through art project titled 'Rest Of My Family' officially a few days ago. This project is an attempt to connect back, re-discover our relationship with and understand our responsibility towards the larger family that we are a part of -- the rest of our human family. Hence, it is titled 'Rest of My Family'. 

The project came to life very organically. Overtime as I continued documenting human interest stories and social issues I realised that documenting social issues and human interest stories alone added no practical value to the lives of individuals and communities that I documented about. We realised that documenting alone was not enough to achieve the social impact and relevance that we sought to achieve through our work and life. We knew that we needed to do something more. 

Hence as a part of 'Rest Of My Family' project we will not just document social issues and lives of different individuals and communities but also follow up our documentation work by extending necessary support to these individuals and communities that we document about. We will raise funds to extend necessary support with help of crowd funding campaigns and fund raisers.

Through this journey, we will focus on highlighting social issues and human interest stories, documenting the triumphs of the ordinary man despite all the hardships they face constantly, and help these stories reach a larger audience and wherever necessary extend support to the individuals and communities that we write about.

All details about the project can be found on IndieGoGo Campaign: http://igg.me/at/restofmyfamily/x/5395024

Also this talk with Polka Cafe about Rest Of My Family is in great detail: 

http://www.polkacafe.com/rest-of-my-family-interview-1900.html

We feel that in it's spirit and philosophy the project resonates with TZM philosophy. Hence we wanted to share it with you all on this group. 

We set the campaign live from the road and are spreading the word on social media... as we are travelling through the rural and tribal regions of South India :)

You can see our work here:

Wordpress: restofmyfamily.wordpress.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RestOfMyFamily

Twitter: @RestOfMyFamily

Instagram: restofmyfamily

Warm Wishes

Piyush