Dissolving Borders

It was in November 2013 that an idea struck a chord with 20-year old, city-based writer, Sameer Kulkarni. A part of the Bangalore-based online youth magazine Campus Diaries, Kulkarni pitched his idea to Sumit Saurav, co-founder of Campus Diaries. The idea soon materialized into a full-fledged project, Roobaroo- Beyond Borders, an initiative to bring the youth of South Asian countries together by establishing a human, ground-level socio-cultural exchange between the youth communities in India and its neighbouring countries. The first chapter of Roobaroo is called  Pune2Peshawar and attempts to undo the differences between India and Pakistan by connecting youth communities in both the countries through an exchange of articles, stories and dialogues revolving around topics such as culture and lifestyle, media, music, pop culture, visual arts and literary arts existing in both countries.

Roobaroo, that originally commenced on December 20, 2013, today sees the participation of over 150 budding authors from India and over 50 authors from Pakistan. The official page of Roobaroo shows 138 stories, 29 notes and 30 pictures that have been exchanged between the youth communities from both the nations. However, when asked about promoting friendly relations between the countries, Saurav stresses, “Roobaroo is not a peace project. There have been a lot of them by the respective Governments and nothing has yielded something productive. We just believe in sharing our cultures and knowing Pakistan’s culture closely through literature.”

The journey from Pune to Peshawar was not an easy one for the authors and the contributors. There were speed-breakers on their way and there was solution to that. Commenting on the same, Pune-based student and the co-curator of Roobaroo, Nandini Verma shares, “The ride was slow.
One of the major problems that we faced was communicating with Pakistani writers. Social network sites came to our rescue. We started dropping messages to various pages and gave a brief about our project.
Surprisingly, the response from Pakistan was not just positive but very encouraging. Then the message slowly spread through word of mouth. Today we have friends and colleagues from Pakistan we discuss cultural issues and exchange ideas and suggestions with.”

Speaking about the growth of the first season, Kulkarni recalls the initial days when it was about the six of them (core committee) sitting around a table and figuring how they’d go about with the project. “Besides the outreach of the project, there has been a significant rise in the content that is being shared by the youth of India and Pakistan. It is not only the amount of content that has been on the rise, but also, the shared content is diversified around many verticals of content. RFood, music have been the popular choice till now. We have roped in artists like the Mekaal Hassan Band, Soch and Faridkot who have applauded the project and have given their opinions on the cross border exchange of music and its development,” informs Kulkarni.

#Pune2Peshawar ends on December 31, 2014; therefore, when asked if there were any future plans for Roobaroo in the pipeline, Kulkarni smiles and conludes, “Roobaroo is an open forum. It is, what you make of it. There may be another season down the roadmap, but for now, we pretty much have our hands full with #Pune2Peshawar. However, I, personally would love to do a #Banglore2Berlin for a second season.”