When Clubhouse helps you be vocal for local: Lakshmi Menon's 'Traveli' adventure

Clubhouse's strong community makes for a great guide to local treasures

lakshmi-menon-clubhouse Social entrepreneur Lakshmi Menon | Instagram

 Around roughly the same time that news outlets in the West proclaimed Clubhouse’s boom to be over, citing a drop in downloads and search traffic for the social audio app and the advent of rival Twitter Spaces, users in India immersed themselves in the platform. This tide has helped it maintain steady numbers: Just a week ago, the app logged 600,000 daily active rooms.

In Kerala, where usage of the app has exploded, Clubhouse became a novel way for Malayalis to connect in an age of lockdowns. For social entrepreneur Lakshmi Menon of “Chekutty Dolls” fame, it has been an irreplaceable part of her life ever since she joined on May 27. She spends between six to seven hours on it each day, balancing chores with the experience of joining in conversations from across the world.

“I can still get all my chores done because I just have to plug in earpods and just listen. I'll be designing, posting on Facebook, emailing, eating, helping Mom at home or driving,” she says.

One aspect of Clubhouse she has noted is how it can relieve loneliness. In her hours on the app, she has met a few who were using it while hospitalised or bed bound.

“In a couple of sessions, I started meeting a few individuals who were paralysed from the neck below, or paraplegic, or blind,” she says. For many, they were used to isolation when their family members or carers were away from home, leaving them with few avenues besides listening to the radio or browsing social media. “With Clubhouse they feel they get to listen to people and they get to speak with them, just sitting in bed. They felt that it is like having 25-30 people around the bed all the time, when they were in these rooms,” she says.

After months on the app, Menon saw the spectrum of potential it afforded ordinary Indians. From the Dinapathrangalilude (Through the News Dailies) group, where people from around the world take turns reading their morning newspaper, to business networking groups where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas and plans to veteran businessmen, to paid concerts for musicians hurting from the death of live events, Clubhouse has turned into a lively ecosystem for Indians.

With such a wealth of freely available knowledge on hand, Menon decided to use Clubhouse to see a new side of Kerala.

Her recent initiative, Traveli (a portmanteau of travel and “Maveli”) , saw her travel from Kochi to Kasargod and back across five days—guided to places, restaurants and people by her lively Clubhouse following, who accompanied her through the app—her phone paired with her car stereo system—and turned the social-audio experience into an act of collaborative travel.

Menon kept her plans flexible to be able to make use of the local knowledge of the 50-60 people in the Clubhouse room. A traffic jam up ahead? A local would suggest an alternative route. One place has a regional variant of the naadan ariyunda (rice laddoo) that you won’t see on Zomato? Take a brief halt to savour and acquire (her mother later said it tasted as good as what her own mother used to make).

The guiding principle behind all this was to find and support local businesses. Explaining her rationale, she says, “The main feature of Traveli was to support the local economy and not make just Jeff Bezos a trillionaire. [Instead of ordering online], if you want to buy a toothbrush or something else, buy it from the local Kirana shop. We are all consumers. But we are not doing conscious consumerism. So only when you support locally, that we as a community can go forward.”

Knowing the ability of her Clubhouse friends to aggregate microlocal information, she turned her travel into a social mission. With her niece on social media duties, posting videos and pictures of her travels, she set up a Clubhouse room and with about 40-50 people in tow, started out from the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) campus in Kochi.

From there, her followers introduced her to a wealth of local wonders. From the unique enterprises in KSUM itself to the Clayfingers Pottery studio in Trichur, to an off-the-road Sidda Samaj ashram and nude commune in Vatakara, her journey and free spirit led her to places she may not have found at all—without Clubhouse.

Speaking of the collaborative aspect of her travel, she said, “It was like a train ride...The format was a hop-on, hop-off. Anybody can join in their own car and they can drop in or drop off whenever they want.”

“In Payyanur, somebody said he knew somebody who makes the most unique broom. A broom made out of a weed that grows after the harvest is done in the paddy field—spikey but not as stiff as the usual broomstick. It could be sold in FabIndia tomorrow,” she says.

chekutty-traveli-lakshmimenon

She has had experience turning ideas into reality and benefitting local communities in the process: Her Chekutty Dolls initiative in the aftermath of the devastating 2018 Kerala floods made use of the material from handloom sarees destroyed in the floods, upcycling this to make dolls that later became a symbol of hope. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her Shayya brand used the leftover material used to make PPE suits in order to make mattresses.

With her characteristic entrepreneurial spirit, she says she plans to pitch the broom to the Travancore Devasom Board. The broom was being used to clean the sanctum santorum of temples, and she plans a “Temple Traveli” where she will take the broom with her, to hopefully have the Devasom Board take note.

Her other treasures from Traveli include an ancient basket, a basin with a hole in the middle that makes for a useful cooking supplement, a unique banana halwa, and many, many experiences.

She has already conducted another Traveli session to Muziris, and plans another on the food, art and music of Alleppey. While she plans to share this across social media, it will be Clubhouse that drives the flow.

"This is a simple audio platform. I never thought I could connect to people through voice so much," she says.

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