I did not know monotony till the Covid-19 pandemic was declared. With India being on complete lockdown and all the time spent at home doing chores, monotony really started getting to me.
Here’s when I really started to appreciate life, here in Jaipur, and the many options I hadn’t even considered I had. One of them was being a part of Jaipur Creative Commune.
JCC is a community of creators and learners started with an objective to connect creators and share creative skills with each other.
JCC Tribe members
The community was started by Rachna Ghiya in 2019 as a platform solely to connect with fellow artistic minds and it has been an amazing journey since then. While she has started this community, she likes to reiterate that every tribe member has equal responsibility to grow it further. When asked about what made her start this community, she simply said that she loves meeting creative people and the idea of creation excites her. It started as more of a personal networking initiative to connect with creators after mostly being surrounded by entrepreneurs.
Snippets from a recent meetup at Warehouse Cafe
She wanted to meet creative minds, and having an already established entrepreneurial circle, she loved the process of creation. It all started with a simple post on Facebook where she just mentioned a meetup and it has been quite a flourishing journey. With a meeting with just 7 members, it has now grown to exceed Whatsapp limitations and now has 300+ people joining in a more organized Facebook group. The meetups started becoming more frequent and few members opened up their doors to community dinners, and then the venues changed to various cafes that were ready to host such an enthusiastic bunch.
You can join JCC as a creator or a learner. If you are enthusiastic to learn creative skills or to share them, this group is for you. Fill up the application at bit.ly/JoinJCC and then join the Facebook Group.
You can even be a storyteller, potter, baker, photographer, painter, portrait artist, writer, singer, guitarist, calligrapher, musician, or anyone with any creative skills and still be a part of it.
It has some rules to keep it active and engaging, so you could read them on the page before you sign up!
The JCC tribe connects best over food. 😉
Rachna started JCC with a personal motive to connect with creators. Over time, she realised that art is perceived wrongly as just painting. She developed another goal to demystify the common myths around art. Art can be anything you create. If you’re a writer, your writing is your art, if you’re a photographer, your photography is. You can be a learner or a creator and create/share any form of art with the community. This is the binding philosophy of JCC for the years to come.
The best way to connect creators and learners is organising frequent meetups, workshops, and interactive events. A noteworthy mention was a craft-walk to Bagru to one of the block-printing sites. where one got to know about the creative process of this age-old art form of Rajasthan. The motive behind this art-walk was to understand the different art-forms done by different creators of Rajasthan. The creators at JCC even got a chance to try their hand at block-printing. Aren’t the pictures amazing?
JCC is a self-sustainable community and the charges for the workshops / meetups are fairly communicated with the members so as to keep the community alive.
JCC usually has weekly meetups but in these social distancing times, Rachna had to think differently.
Social Distancing Strategy:
“We were not able to have any meetups, and we didn’t want to stop what we were doing. Since JCC is all about sharing, I thought of starting the 7 days of sharing campaign’ where each day an artist goes live at 5 pm and shares the process of creating their own art. The core of every discussion is creativity, and we had to keep this time meaningful.” – Rachna Ghiya
Soon after the 7 days of sharing campaign the 21 day lockdown was announced and Rachna came up with the #21daysofcreating campaign where artists can use the hashtag and share the art that they create in this troublesome period. A brilliant way to spend time and to connect with fellow creatives, now online.
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Besides this, they are going live with an initiative called ‘Art Beyond Paper’ where people can share their art which is beyond just painting. It can be macrame, string art, crochet, DIY items from waste, upcycling or recycling or any sort of different art form.
Rachna is a curator at EnTRIPreneur, Project Shoonya, and the Founder & CEO at CrispTalks. I have no idea how she juggles so many things and yet is able to devote so much time to this brilliant community encouraging the creative process.
Cheers to such amazing creators and artists! Thankful to have a platform such as this to connect in the stressful times of a global pandemic and complete lockdown.To know more about Rachna- read her blog.
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