Rest Of My Family

Our Story

An initiative to re-discover our lost selves and our lost connection with the rest of our human family and world. We are a social work-through-art initiative working to take the process of social change and transformation to the level of individual person through content and practice. While also promoting empathy, kindness, compassion and inclusion as a way of life.

The whole of humanity is one big family but somehow, over time, we have lost that connection with one another. Our struggle for individual survival has taught us to draw a circle of 'me and my' around us. and we consider only certain people, places and things as our own. By the very design of this paradigm, the rest of the people, places and things in this world fall outside this circle of love and compassion.

And, in this societal race of securing more resources for ourselves and our loved ones, most of us have forgotten our relationship with one another at large. There are some of us that have fallen out of everybody's circle of 'my' or have been left too far behind in the race to survive. This project is an attempt to connect back, re-discover our relationship with and understand our responsibility towards the larger family that we are all a part of -- the rest of our human family. Hence, the name 'Rest of My Family'.

We, Piyush Goswami (documentary Photographer/filmmaker) and Akshatha Shetty (writer/journalist), have been travelling for a few years into the heart of rural India understanding, experiencing and documenting different cultures, social issues and common challenges faced by the people all across the country.

We are a story driven social-work-through-art non-profit. After preliminary research, we travel to neglected rural and tribal areas and live with the communities for extended periods of time. While we are there, we document the social scenarios, challenges and general life of individuals and communities. These stories, documentary films are then published in order to raise awareness and to start a dialogue in public space about these issues.

By showing various social issues to be a direct result of our selfish/competitive paradigm, we wish to encourage/support individuals and organizations to shift towards a more collaborative/co-operative attitude and world. This is a part of our awareness efforts.

We believe that indifference breeds on ignorance; ignorance both of the self and of the different communities and their struggles. We use numerous forms of art/expression to raise self and inner awareness apart from spreading awareness about subjective issues faced by different individuals and communities. We believe that all social issues arise from human interactions, and human interactions are themselves a product of human-psyche. That is what we want to draw attention to in order to tackle social issues.

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