Summit Nayak, co-founder of Ekank Technologies spoke about enabling storytellers from all over the world via ThisDay to tell stories about art, culture, and heritage.
Q. What motivated you to start a platform that promotes a niche subject like history and culture?
A. We cherish stories and the art of storytelling. India’s history, art, culture and heritage are varied and rich in diversity; we know these make up the best stories for people from all walks of life. Be it a child or a senior citizen, everyone enjoys stories about their culture, provided it is well presented in a fun and entertaining manner. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single platform targeting these domains as a whole, and we wanted to change the dynamics of the same. Additionally, our co-founder Chetan has a profound interest in Indian culture and history and felt the need to make it accessible for our generation with little attention span. He loves telling and re-telling stories and sharing cultural trivia.
Q. What is the idea behind giving the brand name ThisDay?
A. ThisDay is the first product under the banner of Ekank Technologies, a full-stack culture company. The vision is to enable storytellers from all over the world to tell stories about history, art, culture, and heritage and collaborate with other creators to make them accessible all over. The name was envisioned to denote that we have one fun story for everyone.
Q. What stories does ThisDay encourage on its platforms?
A. Our platform embraces any quality non-fiction tale, but we are currently focusing on the Indian context. India, as a country, is as diverse as it can get. For the time being, we aim to bring these amazing stories by leveraging the creator pool that this country has while ensuring the dull information is successfully converted into captivating stories. We are looking at empowering everyone to become a creator and brand ambassador of their culture and do not want to limit our creators with the medium or the choice of topics.
Q. How helpful is the platform going to become for the creators in terms of upskilling their talents?
A. The most significant boost any storyteller gets after associating with ThisDay is access to the community. In addition to the community, our team is planning a series of workshops and upskilling sessions for creators to help them grow further and explore different formats and ways of storytelling. We are in touch with professional writers and storytellers for workshops for the community on various skills and avenues that can help the creators grow. With the advent of the digital era, it is imperative for a storyteller to be able to reach their audience without limiting the media format. This is what we are enabling on the platform – someone with an amazing story, working with a pool of other creators to make that story accessible in multiple languages, and media formats while learning all the way.