Komal Dhiwar, 27, from Pune, moved to Chennai for three months for a consulting job. In a new city, with no connections and a language barrier to boot, Dhiwar began to feel like she was on her own. “I realised that I didn’t have friends around who I could rely upon”, said Dhiwar.
So, she signed up for a strangers’ meet in the city. “I didn’t go with any specific expectations, but thought it would be a good platform to meet interesting people from the city”, said Dhiwar.
At the meet-up, along with others, she participated in games and activities planned by the organisation. “It helped everyone at the meet-up open up. I found a group of friends there and a week later, all of us went to Mahabalipuram”, she said.
Dhiwar had attended a meet-up hosted by ‘The Yukai’, an emotional and social well-being impact driven startup which aims to facilitate wellness and build communities. Founded by psychologist Rishabh Anjankar, 27, it runs two verticals, one, to provide mental health and emotional well-being services and the other for social-well-being services.
In only four months time, The Yukai hosted thirteen meet-ups across cities such as Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Nagpur, Kolkata, Jaipur, Mumbai, Delhi and Bhopal and also a retreat to Bir in Himachal Pradesh. Apart from strangers’ meet-ups and Ghazal sessions, people also participate in online dance parties.
All of this is an effort to tackle loneliness among youth settled in urban spaces. “There is this time, after college, you get placed in a different city, move away from family and friends. The new city doesn’t always come with new connections. So this is an intervention at the social level, to create a space that is welcoming, warm, kind, full of love and acceptance”, said Anjankar.
He also highlights that India as a country is not individualistic, and the systems currently in place are pushing towards that. “Our values are different. We come from a tradition of joint-families or smaller cities, where neighbours maintained relationships with each other. But now due to jobs, we are being forced to be isolated and that is causing problems”, said Anjankar.
Anjankar is an MA Applied Psychology from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and has worked in Madhya Pradesh on community mental health project for survivors on child sexual abuse, caste atrocities and migrant workers etc. He has also worked on UNICEF Project with Department of tribal welfare in Bastar, Chattisgarh for psychosocial well-being of students in tribal residential Institutions. Leaving his life of full-time job behind, Anjankar is now solely focused on building the Yukai.
He says that being a mental health professional helps him understand the kind of insecurities people might have and knows how to establish emotional connections. “The activities we conduct, I have learnt them as a part of my training. We take extra care to make people feel welcome and to let their guards down. The first interaction we have with blindfolds on, so when people are not conscious about their appearance and that doesn’t hinder the process. There are many such meet-ups hosted by different organisations, but if not tended with care, people might feel more vulnerable after being up there, that shouldn’t happen”, he said.
Anjankar soon plans to go live with his mental and emotional well-being vertical to help people get in touch with the right professional for their mental health issues. He is currently in the process of onboarding psychologists, psychiatrists, rehab centres, etc.
To sum it up, he says, “I have always been a people’s person and I have many many many good friends and I want others to have it too. I just want people to have people they can go to movies with, go trek with, just chill over chai, call and cry, I just want people to have meaningful connections”.
Similarly, Renuka Patil, 27, who did her post graduation in educational psychology from Symbiosis, Pune, has been hosting journal parties since January 2022. In her journal parties, Patil shares a prompt with attendees, for example – what does the word art mean to you? What is your favourite memory? What is a memory you want to create? What does the word free mean to you, and so on. The participants then write, draw, create works related to the prompt given, and at the end all of the members share and showcase their artwork.
“The idea of starting journal parties was to make the public aware of the difference between being creative and being artistic. In India, people think that if you have a good handwriting or you can draw it means you are creative, but that is not the case. Creativity is a mindset and we are always creative without being artistic and you can learn to draw with practice but creativity is a part of your thought process”, said Patil.
Her start-up, Kioky creations, started the journal parties with 8 participants in Pune and now hosts meetups across India.
Patil also said that she wanted to own a stationery brand since the age of 4 as she loved being artistic and creative. “India has a lot of stationery brands but very few that manufacture stickers in India from scratch. While pursuing educational psychology, I came across visual communication and how it helps illustrate how you feel via pictures, and that is how I thought of starting my own endeavour”, said Patil. Patil keeps her meet-ups limited to 15 to 20 participants and aims to introduce journaling, as a new hobby which does not require any artistic skills, but to make a daily habit of being creative. She aims to get people to use paper colours to express themselves, which she says is more stimulating than digital mediums.
Founded by psychologist Rishabh Anjankar, 27, 'The Yukai' runs two verticals, one, to provide mental health and emotional well-being services and the other for social-well-being services. 
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