These five students have opened a venue for fun and art events in Thiruvananthapuram

Called Space, the venue allows you to host and attend events, sell or buy artworks, and even functions as a co-working space.
These five students have opened a venue for fun and art events in Thiruvananthapuram
These five students have opened a venue for fun and art events in Thiruvananthapuram
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Shilpa raises her head from behind the laptop screen. The way to the comedy night is through that door, she tells a visitor. After making sure the visitor is fine and the performances are going well, she comes back to the laptop. Shilpa has her semester exam in two days.

She and three other engineering students from Thiruvananthapuram, along with Shilpa's brother, decided to begin a startup to have more fun and art events in the city. ‘Space’ had its first event in February this year, an open mic on the theme of love for Valentine’s Day. The Saturday night open mic comedy is also part of it.

“We felt that there were not enough events happening in the city for students and art enthusiasts. There were the traditional stuff, but there was no platform for the kind of art that youngsters would like to see. The kind you have in Bangalore. So we thought, why not bring it here, instead of cribbing about it,” says Shilpa.

She hands over a green brochure – ‘host and attend events, sell or buy artworks, find a co-working space, find your tribe’ – all that Space is about.

Inside Space, there is Vinay Menon, Kerala’s most known stand-up comedian, speaking to a small audience in a yellow-lit room about being an English teacher who knows that the education in the country is ‘screwed up’. It is new to Thiruvananthapuram, stand-up comedy as a performance. There are short, inhibited laughs from corners and Vinay urges them to laugh out loudly, openly, that it is alright. It is an open mic show, which means anyone from the audience could try their hand at the act.

Performers of stand-up comedy at Space

A young woman enters after Vinay’s introduction, and cracks people up by making science jokes. Another young man with a cleanshaven head declares ‘Bald is beautiful’. Sabareesh Narayanan, a professional comedian, is standing in queue to make his entry, after an act by yet another engineer – and in Vinay’s words, all engineers would end up doing comedy, like him.

This is a space that the capital city had clearly lacked before. Shilpa has turned a room on the upper floor of her parents’ house into the performance venue. Her friends volunteered to create art on the walls, and behind Vinay, you can spot several fictional heroes raising their heads – the Pulp Fiction duo, Schwarzenegger from Terminator, Shaktimaan, Yoda from Star Wars, and more.

“We’ve got workshops too. There was one on bipolar disorder for mental health awareness, and others on character design, applying henna and playing the ukulele,” Shilpa adds. The other co-founders are Sidarth, Greeshma, Ahmed, Midhun – all of them in their final year of engineering, except Midhun, Shilpa's brother. Not that studies or exams have brought a gap in their events.

Shilpa’s engineering course will be done next year but she has no plans to drop her pilot project. She plans to take a gap of one year to solely look after Space. Here’s to more fun events in Thiruvananthapuram.

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