‘The Cultural Way’ with Vandana Vijay

Vandana Vijay, The CEO and founder of an amazing travel company –“Offbeat Tracks”– a prolific traveler bitten by the wanderlust bug as she quit her corporate job at  Facebook to launch her own travel based company and share the joy of travel with all. As an Army Officer’s daughter and having all privileges of growing up in all parts of India and enjoy the diversity our country offers, it has always been her dream to make others realize and visualize the inner extremities of hidden places across India and work with the rural folk at the grass root level.

Offbeat Tracks an experiential travel company focuses on the unique travel within India and a few destinations around the world with the essence of rediscovering and rejuvenating the soul. Offbeat Tracks also concentrates on encouraging their guests to travel like locals and experience the local way of life.  Offbeat defines itself by proving to promote the concept of rural ecotourism and inculcating rural micro-entrepreneurship amongst semi-urban and rural service providers such as Homestay owners, farmers, taxi drivers etc and thus making them extract better means of life and let them be proud rural folk of India. ‘Offbeat Tracks’ inception took place in the year 2016 and is based out of Hyderabad. Through Offbeat Tracks, Vandana also promotes her observance that she has experienced a great shift in people’s choice of travel. People don’t want to be tourists rather were inclined into exploring the deeper aspects both culture and aesthetic sense that lies in the locales of a place.

Vandana undertook a very noble initiative of solar energy electrification in one of the remote villages of Ladakh, Takmachik.  There were  14 students in all from California who visited the village for the project to provide electricity to 10 houses which were too far from the basic approach to the amenities because they were a couple of kilometers away from the main village.  After a deep analysis, while working with an NGO, Vandana could realize that there are so many untouched Villages where the electricity doesn’t reach and the mud houses become pitch dark at night. This reflected the struggles of the villagers and motivated her and her team to work intensively on it and lessen the use of kerosene and so the collaboration with a California based group ‘Lighting for Literacy’ came into existence where they suggested a ” Service-based retreat program”.  The program beamed and as it offered their students a chance to experience the local way of life which would include Yoga, Trekking, meditation etc. and in turn, they would build micro-solar units for 10 houses and was carried out by 14 middle school students from California along with Vandana.

In the road to success and several accomplishments there lies a truth of courage in accepting the hurdles on the way and reproduce it in a different &  in a more efficient way. Likewise for Vandana while in this project logistics became a hurdle. In the eleventh hour, the authorities denied carrying the batteries in the flight and were a few people had to stay back to arrange for the transportation of batteries to the village while others had to fly to Leh and arrange for temporary batteries to get the work going. It apparently took a week’s time to get the batteries transported to the destination and these were the stated logistical hassles during travels.

Vandana also mentions that living with the 10 host families and experiencing their life and hospitality was altogether a different picture life could portray and quotes “It is the memory that stays forever and ever”. She adds and describes the smile on each and every villager after the installation of the solar units were done especially when they could switch off- switch on the light and she could see the glowing wide angle of happiness on their face.

This project in vast helped promote Eco-tourism in the village and assisted the villagers in building an additional source of income. Over a span of 5 days in the village the total earnings by the community amounted to 1,00,000/-   which gave a tremendous boost to the village and its economy. Vandana believes India being a tropical country is blessed with abundant sunlight  and the future of solar power is bright provided every household works for conserving the solar power and understand the usage, India will definitely turn out to be a country with no power crisis as solar energy has got tremendous potential to meet the energy requirement and bridge the demand-supply gap!

Apart from how Vandana and her team work for the noble cause , Vandana being high spirited and having been carrying the guts to self-explore places around the world and with the zeal to find out amongst them, which would be a definite boon for the Eco-tourism , she visited Nagaland with the aim to identify villages which could be potential destinations for promoting Eco-tourism in the state. She could identify a village named Kigwema close to the capital city Kohima and very close to Kisama which is the destination of the annual Hornbill Festival held from every Dec 1st to 10th. This place also shares a history of a Japanese invader who stayed there for six months during the second world war. Since the village is self-sustained and the people there weave their own clothes, baskets, and source a lot more from what is readily available, Vandana importantly wanted to showcase the unique lifestyle that resides through ‘Offbeat Tracks’. 

As Offbeat Tracks is culturally inclined it focuses on how its guests would rather spend their time in getting culturally involved with a place and its people than just roaming around as a tourist for sightseeing. It brings into play the mental connect and the pull to know and get educated on how beautiful one culture is and what the lifestyle talks both about the people and the place and hence Vandana created a network of  passionate people who have their homestays, taxi drivers and guides from the village that get together and showcase their culture thus providing the inception to grooming grounds for locals to display their culture and promote micro-entrepreneurship.

Photo Source: Vandana Vijay