BENGALURU: Take pride in your culture. Ignore what everyone else says, writes Orgil from Mongolia. Feza Nashagiro from Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the other hand, offers two words of advice: Look around. Chandri from India offers her own learning: It is important to not feel guilty for my own decisions.
Welcome to World Wisdom Map, a website and project that documents the life lessons and stories of people from each of the 195 countries in the world.
“This consciousness project combines visual and wisdom anthropology that exists in the world and sparks awareness about the diversity of lifestyles, as well as the coping mechanism that people employ to create a meaningful life,” says Deepak Ramola, who conceptualised the idea and leads it as a project director. The 29-year-old, who is also the founder and artistic director, Project Fuel, adds, “
Laced with death tolls due to the coronavirus, we were looking at the world through the lens of loss. We wanted to feel more hopeful ourselves and share that resource with the world which came from learnings of commoners.”
The project, which Ramola terms a ‘New Year’s gift to the world’ since it was launched towards the end of 2020, gained the support of Singapore International Foundation and took 11 months to put together. The team had to plan personal and public outreaches through volunteers, and social media shout-outs in order to gather their current collection of life lessons.
“At large, this formulated in a meaningful collection of learnings from countries that were remote or little more inaccessible than others,” says Ramola. Open to everyone, the lessons shared can be anything, as long as it is an authentic story. The goal, he adds, is to reach a million lessons by 2022.
“We have a life lesson from a six-year-old that says, ‘When you are done using the bike learn where the brakes are’ to a 78-year-old offering the advice, ‘Take life by the scruff of the neck and do your best with what it throws at you. It is often the things we don’t try in life that disappoint us more than the things we try that fail’,” shares Ramola.
Besides the lessons, the project website also includes education modules, art and data narratives. “In collaboration with 10 South-East Asian artists and over 50 students from five Indian and Singaporean institutions, artworks have been created inspired by the life lessons,” he says.
This includes works created by Bengaluru-based Nori Norbhu.
The illustrator created three artworks based on lessons that came in from countries like Cyprus (about seeing the world differently when one lies down on grass), Nepal (about a grandmother who was introduced to a new world once her granddaughter taught her how to read) and Lebanon (suffering is universal). Norbhu spent a week interpreting each of these life lessons in a visual way.
“We may not speak the same language but at the end of the day, we all go through similar things,” she says.
Details available on worldwisdommap.com