The Blank Paper
A treasure hunt for expressions, emotions and dreams
Arani Roy and Prachi Saxenahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyktkvLPLPg
If you just look around you'll see people writing blogs, Facebook posts, Whatsapp status and wearing clothes hosting catchlines. And even if you're looking at all of those expressions you're barely scratching the surface. Hundreds and thousands of opinions, fascinations, dreams, emotions placed all over the real and virtual world. That is what we seek. That is what we hunt. That is what we nurture. That is where our story begins.The only purpose of RedPaper.in is to celebrate creativity. We wish to be a digital art gallery holding thousands of tangible thoughts.
The Machine
We host content of all shape and form- articles, poems, one liners, cartoons, photos, love letters, puzzles, sketches and any other creative form known to humanity and supported by our website. The website content is curated via 2 channels. One is the write (www.RedPaper.in/write) section of our website. The UI of the section is fairly easy and people can just come and submit their work there. After some quality checks, we host their work on the website. The second channel is gathering content by hosting the RedPaper.in Talent Hunt in schools and colleges. We believe that every young mind in our country has a story to narrate and they just need a platform to unleash their thoughts. We conduct competitions in various cities, first at the institute level and then at the city level, identify the talent and mentor them. We encourage, promote and host your imagination.
The Ideation
Third Person Narrative
Arani and Prachi did their MBA from Indian School of Business (ISB) and joined corporate giants in finance and IT sector. Bag full of money and the colorful presentations articulated their perfect progression towards the righteous path of glory. Arani, also an author has always had a passion for writing but he consciously drew the line between career and passion. Its said that nature finds a way, and that's what happened...a personal tragedy made him susceptible to change. Barely finding solace in excel and presentations he found heart in what he has always wanted to do...write...but the courage, the entrepreneurial mind was missing. That came over a conversation with Prachi.
Prachi joined ISB to bag a leadership position in a tech firm, which she got. The left side of her brain was in total control and initially it used to be fun also but gradually when she got to know the people at work at a personal level, she saw in them programmed minds with restricted focus on promotions and salary hikes. She knew immediately that neither could she afford to be re-modeled like that at a personal level nor were the the takeaways from the premier MBA aligned with such monologue. The conversation took place right at this juncture. An apt use of the phrase 'Leap of faith' and both Arani and Prachi decided to venture into the space where they would strive to resurrect the creative streak in people which has been over-ridden with ambition to succeed professionally. And thus RedPaper.in was born.
The Roadblocks
The choice was hard...really hard. We are graduates from one of the best B schools in the world. We left huge money jobs to get into something really really new and do remember, this is not a super tech/ app cool model...its old school...we are a creative platform...period. We struggled to gather content everyday, to make people understand the cause, to have schools and colleges join the cause . We could see talent, intent and aspirations scattered all over the place...making it look like the biggest unorganized sector we have ever come across. Pacing the whole proposition seemed increasingly difficult with red tapes, lack of enthusiasm and surmounting doubts. But that's the whole point of calling it a creative revolution.
The Adventure Update
We have been receiving content everyday now...sometimes to the extent of more than 50 articles a day, have been invited to pan-Asia entrepreneurship forums, have launched our very own Comic Character in Bangalore Comic Con 2016. We are now present in Bangalore, Bhopal, Kolkata and Hyderabad, where we are receiving speaker session invites...but what thrills us is when we get mails everyday...’Mam/ Sir give me a topic to write’...or when we get texts...’sir can we write anything about the heroes in Indian army who are risking their lives to protect us?’ Six months since we are live and we have been receiving a plethora of write-ups on a number of contrasting topics. An article titled “My long distance love” tells a story that how the distance makes the heart grow fonder. We also hosted an article which compared Vibhishana to Peter Pettigrew! The article was titled “The twisted tales” and it strongly questioned the definition of heroes and villains. Then there was this poem titled “The Teenager”, written by a 14 year old and was full of raw emotions. “The Midnight Supper” celebrated the fact that a diamond-on-the-finger is no longer a woman’s ultimate dream and “Celebrating Hijabs” depicted the age old hijabs as a fashion symbol! These different genres and school of thoughts provide us a constant motivation and reinforce our belief that “everyone has a story to narrate”.We were recently communicated by one of the schools from Hyderabad. When we pursued we realized it was a kindergarten school. And that the fact they were conscious about hosting content made us realise what a commitment we have made to celebrate creativity across demographics and geography.
What’s Special
Simplicity is our speciality...you pen down your creative thoughts/art on our website’s dedicated write section and we publish it on our website. We believe that there is something creative in every one of us, it just needs a nudge, some sort of motivation to come out in its truest form. We want to be that nudge!
