Lights of recycled solar lamps will guide you home...

When Ayan Biswas started tinkering with used bottles and paint to come up with beautiful artisan lamps at his Bengaluru residence, he had no plans of sharing his work with the world. Jump a year and he has pulled off an art-and-awareness trip to remote hamlets in Himachal Pradesh, where, with the help of discarded plastic bottles and some friends, he taught villagers to build solar lamps that add to both environmental and aesthetic richness.

From the beginning

"It all started one night in Kasol, where I've been trekking for the last four years. The rooftop of my hotel overlooked a village called Rashol, and I couldn't help but wonder how it'd light up if every house had a lamp at the doorway," says the 29-year-old software engineer, who admits to realising the environmental aspect of the project only later. The idea, born out of a whim, had several practical loopholes. While the use of cut up plastic bottles (for lamps) would ensure recycling for the non-biodegradable waste left behind by careless tourists, what about the bulb inside? Why would people who have limited access to electricity want to waste it on beautification? The dilemma led Biswas to scour the internet and put together a 5-volt battery, LED lights and solar panels – and his up-cycled solar lamps were born!

Comrades in arms

Few enthusiastic friends joined hands with him, once he realised that the project would be far more sustainable if he taught the villagers how to build their own lamps, instead of handing them over. It was decided that Biswas would kick-start the trail on September 9, to be joined by three young professionals – Aniket Mitra from Mumbai, Sudipto Pati from Kolkata and Dipanjan Chakraborty from Bengaluru – a week later.

Kasol at the centre

Having picked out two villages in Kasol (Mateura and Grahan) and two in Spiti Valley (Langza and Komik) for the project, Biswas was still unaware of the ground-level challenges that awaited him. When he approached families at Mateura, dismissals were accompanied by cold logic – "Ye kar ke kya hoga? Hum jaise hain theek hain (What's the point of doing this? We are good the way we are)". But Biswas approached it with renewed vigour by shifting his focus from families to the local school. Assisted by an enthusiastic principal, he spent three days teaching around 400 kids how to build solar art-lamps out of the plastic waste that litter their otherwise quaint village. "After one session at the school assembly, everyone I met down the street knew who I was," recalls Biswas. With this access to the locals, he motivated them to gather the base material (plastic) themselves and even taught them to self-generate the only expensive ingredient in the découpage process (where one can imprint designs on a foreign surface) that he uses to make the lamps. "These are not people who can afford to step out and buy gesso (special primer that helps retain paint on the bottle's surface) worth Rs 700. So instead I taught them to mix fevicol, plaster of paris and white acrylic paint to create a similar solution," he explains.

The second village on the itinerary was Grahan, also around Kasol, but even less accessible. This time Biswas roped in the supervisor of the hotel he was staying in – his free pass to the young and enthusiastic population of Grahan, since the man also turned out to be the village Math teacher. Things took flight organically thereon, with the comic interlude of locals quipping "Bhai, bomb banane aye ho kya? (Are you here to build bombs?)", once he moved on to the wire and circuit part of the process. After two days of interaction with around 40 kids, he trekked to meet his friends for the next leg of the journey.

Signing off from Spiti

Leaving behind the velveteen apple and pomegranate orchards of Kasol, Biswas and team Light Your Art reached the windy, arid slopes of Spiti, but only after their bus broke down and left them stranded few kilometers from Kaza, Spiti's frontier village. But one could brush off the ordeal as serendipity, as it eventually put Biswas in touch with Ecosphere, an organisation working with locals to manage waste out of Kaza. Together with Jo Smith, an independent after-school support provider, the team made their impact in Kaza before moving on to their original destination of Langza. "At this point, the journey turned into a social exchange, as I found local kids teaching me how to make soft toys with sheep wool," says Biswas. After a short but successful tryst with Langza, with merely 15 houses, the friends found out that a monastery festival at Komik meant their demonstration would have to be cut short. "It was not that disappointing. We basically ended a good run by soaking in the festivities ourselves," Biswas points out. Having stocked up the locals at all four stops with additional art material, Biswas is now counting days till the next phase of his project, this time in Assam's Majuli island. "Just a few more months and I will be off again," laughs the man who likes to light up lives, quite literally, every time he nabs a break from his big city routine.