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Magnetic Fields Festival, Echoes of Earth, NH7 and more – India’s festival space is thriving with more and more springing up across the country, giving people a wide variety of locations and genres to pick from. Attending a music festival is like entering a whole other world. Food, music, art and diverse groups of people – they become microcosms of their own. Festival culture has grown to include so much more than just the music and the performers, we’ve seen this around the world and India is no exception. They’re community gatherings with people coming together to enjoy a day, or night, of great music and company. But when such a large group of people come together, there is bound to be some conflict, tensions, uncomfortable situations and uncontrollable circumstances – that too in crowded public spaces.
Whether it’s social anxiety, panic attacks, claustrophobia or the use of drugs at festivals (however clearly organisers state that it’s not tolerated, let’s be honest, it still happens before and during shows) – a person’s well-being, mental and physical, in such spaces is rarely something we consider as important or worth looking into when it comes to a festival space/experience. This is where TATVA comes in.
A Goa-based mental health and wellness organisation and residency, TATVA is managed by mental health professionals Kripi Malviya and David Stanton, and their team of professionals and volunteers. For 4 years now TATVA has been organising dedicated Wellness Areas at festivals. These are safe spaces for people at the festival under duress that focus on arm reduction and psychological first aid (if need be), or even simply, just lend a listening ear and a supportive shoulder.
The need for mental health support at festivals is a new conversation being driven by the TATVA duo. For several years Stanton, who has a thirty-year long career in the space of mental health, was involved in organising wellness areas at the Glastonbury festival in the UK and, after forming TATVA with Malviya, saw that no such avenue existed at the myriad of festivals in India.
“I realised that there were a lot of festivals that didn’t have anywhere for people to go when they were overwhelmed or need psychological support. Support doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve ingested substances or taken any kind of drugs, they just might be feeling anxious, might have lost their friends at the festival or just not having as much of a good time as they should be,” Stanton tells Homegrown.
He emphasises that for them, in this Area they don’t only mean catering to substance abuse nor do they condone it in any way. “We started this because people needed that space to go to and talk about how they were feeling. That can range from somebody having a bad experience because of ingesting something without fully knowing the consequences of it or talking to somebody after having a row with their friends. It’s a safe space for people to go to without fear of judgement or major escalations.”
Stanton and Malviya approach a number of festival organisers and planners when they were starting, but they say they only got a positive response from Magnetic Fields Festival, run by Wild City. They agreed on giving us a trial. At that time it was just the four of us, David, I, and two other people that we work with, running the welfare area for 72 hours. Later, we collected data through feedback forms that proved how important such a space is and ended up being for them,” explains Malviya.
Talking about the first experience with the wellness area at the Magnetic Fields Festival they tell us briefly the kind of help people had come to them for. Some were too drunk, others had taken things (mind-altering substances) unknowingly from a spiked bottle that was given to them and there were people who had terrible fights with their friends and just needed a place to sit quietly.
“They would get scared, get dehydrated or get into fights. They are usually brought over to the welfare area where they are offered tea and they can lie down. If they feel cold, we have a bonfire all night so that they feel warm. They can share their experience or just do art if they feel like it. Remember, we are not trying to do therapy here, we are just trying to make people feel safe. Sometimes they feel completely fine after a few hours and rejoin the festival,” they share.
Malviya and Stanton share that they have now started working with artists at the festival as well, something that is important to them – we’ve all been witness to the silence surrounding mental health and the music industry for far too long. The two of them have access to the backstage where they inform all performers that they’re available if needed – if they’re feeling anxious, or have stage fright or need to be talked down after indulging in too many drinks, whilst remaining anonymous.
“We also pass around condoms and talk about safe sex practices and tell them about what not to mix with what. The basic foundation is that when people make informed choices, they are safer,” adds Stanton.
The need for such a space at art and music festivals in even more understandable and agreeable after speaking to the TATVA team, but then the question arises, why aren’t there more of them – why the apprehension? “The main reason that people don’t want to engage with anything that we are doing is fear. Fear of not understanding what it is, denial of the fact that people at their festival have these experiences despite them knowing what happens every year and in the end, I think it’s about taking responsibility. People are scared of taking responsibility and say that ‘I see that this is required and I am willing to invest in it’. A lot of people just want to have it for free.”
“To go to festivals whose production cost runs into lakhs and for them to expect us to work for free is disheartening and we don’t really go for it because it is about the cost of the wellness area and for making it valuable for both parties. So, it is a combination of fear, denial and this idea that serving to/preserving the health of the people should be cost-free. There’s also this misconception that if you have a wellness area you are condoning the use of substances and this is the same argument that was used when we set-up the harm reduction network of India in Delhi where we wanted to distribute condoms to truck drivers and do harm reduction work. We are not saying go ahead and do what you want, what we are doing is just providing a support system in case it does happen (use of substances).”
Malviya and Stanton say that they aren’t trying to shame people who have made the choice to take substances but educate and support them to reduce any possible harm. People in such positions are usually wary of authority figures, fearing the repercussions and don’t approach them for help. Tatva, here, comes as friends – friends that are also trained professionals with years of experience and research backing them – to support you emotionally and physically with a team of trained volunteers.
“Many times when a person sees someone else going through a bad experience they walk away because they don’t know how to help them...When the festival organisers saw this they realised how much it really works...If you have resources to invite artists from all over the world to come and perform at your festival, you definitely have them for setting up a wellness area. One needs to position themselves as someone who cares for both their artist and the audience. We have the research to back up our work and a lot of international help, so we hope this could be a call of sorts to festival organisers,” they sign off.
For any reader that will be attending, there will be a TATVA wellness area at the upcoming Magnetic Fields Festival, open to people of all ages, genders and sexual orientations. TATVA is currently working to expand this initiative to create more such non-judgemental spaces across festivals in India and South Asia and has already been signed up for one that will happen in Indonesia.
Anyone that has been to an art and music festival can relate to the bad experiences that people can and have gone through if we are to be completely honest – drug use or not. Festival organisers do have a responsibility when it comes to creating a safe, enriching experience which includes the well-being of the attendees. TATVA’s wellness areas are something we hope to see spread across each and every one of them.
There are a number of intensive programmes and workshops that will begin in October of this year, you can view the entire schedule, check out all their services and contact Tatva center on Facebook and their website.
Featured image courtesy of Vishakha Jindal//Rolling Stone India.
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