The Traveller’s University -
Indian Multiversities Alliance

Vision

To support youth to find their highest purpose and place in the world.

Mission

To enable youth to uncover a range of learning/unlearning opportunities to understand themselves and their realities through encountering new worlds.


We would like to put travelling at the centre of our pedagogical process. Travelling is an initiation into the world-at-large. It brings us face-to-face with new lands, new cultures and new challenges that demand that we become a new person. It expands us, unravels us and can transform us. It is enlightening, beautiful, frightening, and at times painful — as the rebirthing processes usually is.

“He who returns from a journey is not the same as he left”

- Chinese Proverb

Concept

“To travel is to take a journey into yourself.”

- Danny Kaye

Education, indeed, has an integral role to play in the journey of a person from childhood to youth-hood to adulthood. And to achieve real education for the challenges of the 21st century, it is important to experience life. However, these experiences cannot be gained while sitting within the boundaries of four walls or reading a textbook or watching Discovery Channel. We have always believed that “travel is our best teacher”. When one steps outside their bubble, one gets to meet new people, see new places, learn new traditions and gain different experiences. When we travel, we experience or become part of a lot of things that we would have otherwise not been able to do. Travelling forces, us to drop stereotypes, exit narrow-mindedness and leave superstitions behind to widen our perspective and horizon of the world and people around us.

Travel and transformation cannot be separated from each other. In another words, one’s education is incomplete without travel. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kutch to Kalimpong, there is such extreme and varied diversity in India, that there is no end to learning. There is history, architecture, agriculture, environment, folk music & dance, traditional art and so much more to learn that we never get to read about in our text books.

Rites of passage, or initiation, are powerful and transformative experiences where an individual undergoes a dramatic shift in awareness and social role — immature youth to member of the community, from know-nothing to keeper of the secret doctrine. The crux of the rite of passage / initiations that on one end of the experience is the uninitiated person — the novice, child, commoner – and on the opposite pole of the experience the same person has become the adept, adult and insider. Individual and collective journeys played a major role in the rites of passage.

In many cultures of the past (and many, though perhaps fewer, still today) everyone went through an important initiation experience before they gained full membership into the group / tribe / community / religion. These rites are important threshold events that prepare the individual for the next phases of life.

If we investigate the history, it is full of examples of great leaders, authors, change makers, entrepreneurs, scholars, spiritual leaders, who traveled before achieving great heights and making an impact on the world. Be It Huan-Tsang, Columbus, Mahatma Gandhi, Earnest Che Guevara, Earnest Hemingway, Elizabeth Gilbert, J.K Rowling, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more. Travelling was a major part of their rites of passage.

According to a research study conducted by ‘Student Youth Travel Digest’ in USA 68% student says that “The trip they received has changed their life forever”. 76% student says that “Nothing compares to the practical experience and exposure they got from their travel”

As per the research, how travel impacts the learners

This shows how travel opportunities and learning from travel can help you as a person to influence your future decisions. Unfortunately, the irony is that though India has been the land of pilgrimages, Indian youth today don’t have enough opportunities of travel during their academic life and early careers. Therefore, we want to create a platform where youth can travel within a low budget and venture outside of their academics and work life in India to encounter radically different viewpoints and lifestyles. We want to challenge the perceptions that travelling is expensive, travelling is unsafe, and travelling is unsustainable. Travelling is not just about consumerism and taking selfies.

Primary Target Audience/Learners: Youth between 16 to 40 Years

What we aim to offer

1. Design and implement thematic learning journeys to explore different aspects of life, and other career streams outside the mainstream education, in the direction of creating sustainable systems

2. Organize travellers meets to build the culture of travel-learning in India and to build a community of travel-learners who can support each other

3. Host workshops for travel-learning about essential skills, cheap travel, earning while traveling and designing their own learning journeys.

4. Create an inclusive web-based portal where we can document and share the stories of all travel-learners’ experiences with rest of the world.

5. Facilitate and coach travel-learners to design their learning journeys.

Team Members

Rahul Karanpuriya

(Founder-Director)

Rahul is a poet at heart and speaks the language of love. He is a passionate traveler and explorer. Dissatisfied with the existing system, from an early age, he often found himself pondering over real issues of education, social injustice, the role of money etc. When he realized his questions and inquisitiveness does not have a place in his education setup, he decided to walk out of it in pursuit of learning from alternative modes of education and worked with various grassroots movements to deepen his knowledge. He extensively traveled across India and created a gap year project ‘52 Parindey’ to bring out the stories of change by common people and expand his understanding of deeper issues such as climate change, sustainability, and education. He is now determined to create a platform that facilitates self-designed learning through travel and space that celebrates such questioning and deep enquiry.

Chetan Kanoongo

(Facilitrator)

Vibhuti Aggarwal

(Facilitrator)

Vibhuti is a natural learner at heart. She thrives on learning new things. She travels to different places to learn about herself and about the spaces. She has found a deep passion in clowning and loves to be her authentic self with the red nose. She Is a freelance facilitator and designs various programs related to alternative learning and un-learning. She has designed and facilitated various travel experiences with CERES, Melbourne, Youth Alliance, Delhi. She has travelled with various groups around India, learning while on the go. She also loves to travel because she gets to eat amazing new food and hear lots of stories. Shifting from a urban-based, outward-looking life to a simple inwards looking life in the hills is what is on her mind presently.

Manish Jain

(Mentor)

Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse knowledge systems and cultural imaginations. He is one of the strong voices on deschooling our lives. He has served for the past 19 years as Coordinator and Co-Founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of the Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Walkouts-Walkon network, Udaipur as a Learning City, Families Learning Together network in India. He has travelled to over 50 countries around the world and has been profoundly shaped by these journeys.

Partners


Action Plan for the Next 6 Months

1. Design and execute calendar of learning journeys (July end) from September 2018 to March 2019
September:

Cycle Yatra: A gift culture-based cycle journey to explore abundance, wisdom from our ancestors and hospitality and love from strangers.
Peace Pilgrimage: A walk with Yogesh Mathuria from Pune to Bangladesh to serve humanity, to understand unconditional love, to accept all and serve all.


October:

Vimukt Shiksha Yatra: In collaboration with Indian Multiversities Alliance, it is an exciting 10- day journey of self-discovery, learning & unlearning, collective dreaming on new models of higher education in southern part of India.


November:

Explore Pune as learning city: A journey in and around Pune to re-discover different kinds of learning eco-systems, to unfold and highlights different visions, dreams, experiments which are more sustainable and local community driven.


January:

Wisdom of Tribes: an extraordinary journey to understand real meaning of sustainable living and to be a part of nature with the tribes of Orissa


February:

Explore the Art and River Culture of Brahmaputra: A journey through Brahmaputra’s islands and learn about their grassroots realities and community living


Organize two workshops on how to travel consciously and cheap and documentation skills while traveling till December, including local partners and facilitators in these workshops.

August:

Hack travel- how to travel consciously/sustainably and be a smart traveler


Travel myths and how to hack them

There are certain myths around traveling like it is costly, it takes time and in current scenario the new myths are, it is unsustainable for planet too. As fantastic as traveling is, it can be stressful at times. Not only for us but also for the planet and local communities. It is important for us to understand learn some important hacks of traveling to be a smart traveler. 360-degree documentation: How we effectively share our travel stories with the world through videos, photo stories, articles, social media

Each story matters and we need to share it

As difficult as it can be at times, we must share our stories of travel. Stories are one of the strongest medium to bring the change. And when we travel we not only gather experiences, but we also collect stories. Each story gives voice and life to actual people and places around the globe. Each story can change lives and empower others.

Organize a travel-learner’s meet in January In Bhuvneshwar

Already working with two travel-learners, we are coaching them in designing their learning journeys to start during first week of July and October respectively.

Meet Our First Two Travel-Learner

Ashik Krishnan

Ashik is a graduate in Automobile Engineering. As a Gandhi Fellow, he worked with Thane Municipal Corporation schools in Maharashtra for two years on Headmaster Leadership and strengthening of school processes to foster student learning. Now he is in a quest to explore the underlying ideas of 'Education' and 'Development' in today's context. Ashik is delving into the opportunity cost associated with 17 years of institutionalized education and the neo development principles that deplete natural resources and biodiversity in first place and cause inequity in sharing of resources in the other. He is going to travel in 5 states of India in next 4 months to meet individuals and visit organizations to seek

Mohit Gupta

One thing Mohit strongly believes in is “Small is Beautiful”. He is a CSE graduate, worked in different parts of India. He is a passionate biker and loves to travel. He recently quit his job to fulfill his dream to be a traveler and storyteller. He was never satisfied in his 9 to 5 job, sitting in cubical, living a mundane life and not able to contribute the society. He wants to travel north east India to find deeper meaning of life and to bring out the stories of wisdom and beauty underlying beneath the simple and sustainable life of the people who lives close to the nature.

Create a web portal for travel stories and collaborate with web partners for sharing of travel stories

Possible Partners