BENGALURU: Actress Deepika Padukone recently hosted ‘Care Package’, a first-of-its-kind audio festival that focused on having meaningful conversations about care and love, self-care, and mental health. Experts and artists such as Jay Shetty, Sriram Krishnan, Paul Davison, Raghava KK, and Prateek Kuhad, who prioritise ‘care’ were part of the conversation that took place on the social audio app, Clubhouse.
“This festival was very important because care matters now more than ever before. I believe that we have the tools and technology at hand to either destroy ourselves or create the best version of ourselves. And the differentiator is to care, what do we care about and how do we care,” says Raghava, the multidisciplinary artist and entrepreneur.
He spoke on self-care and his relationship with it during the festival. Further, Raghava said that the festival crashed the Clubhouse app servers, and it acted as a vision for participants. Raghava believes that Clubhouse as an app is important for two reasons- voice and relevance. “Voice has care expressed in it. There is so much you can hear in someone’s voice. It is becoming an important factor as it gives you privacy and communicates empathy that the audience is missing on other platforms,” he says.
Raghava expressed his joy to see how social media was being used purposefully. People joined to have a real and transparent conversation, and not to comment how one looked “amazing”. “The key takeaway from the event was how every artist said the same thing in so many different languages. When Prathik Kuhad was singing, I could feel everything that had been heard or spoken about during the talk,” says Raghava, who began his career in art as a newspaper cartoonist.
According to Raghava, events similar to the care package festival is important especially for young people as it will make them aware of the choices they have. “When you are exposed to different realities, it broadens your mind. When it broadens your mind you choose who you want to be and who you want to live as. And when you see someone living it, there is nothing more inspiring than that,” says the self-taught artist.
For Raghava, though self-care is universal; it is also personal and different for everyone. To him, self-care is a lot of things. The essence, he explains, is forgiving yourself and others, absence of judgment, and being “woke”.
“Don’t pursue happiness, pursue the feeling of being alive. Don’t judge any feeling, accept [your emotions] and feel it. Only then, will you feel alive and if you don’t feel alive, why are you alive? That is called woke,” he concludes.