This year I got to attend this festival in Vizag as a panelist and loved all the interactions with youth on different topics around Travel & Photography. Ground Zero Festival is an event for youth from different parts of the state and student leaders from institutions. When I attended the festival, one of the theme was to make students aware about various career options apart from standard set of options like Engineer, Doctor, Pilot etc and share detailed insights.
There was a diverse set of panelists and people who took sessions on entrepreneurship, business, travel, art, photography etc. Folks who joined had impressive background and the experiences. It was interesting to attend these sessions and hear some inspiring journeys of people in different walks of life.
I was part of a panel to discuss Travel, Tourism & Blogging in India. It was fun to interact with fellow Travel Bloggers and photography enthusiasts. My main focus was on responsible tourism in the country and how influencers can change a lot in this direction. Tourism in our country is increasing at a very fast pace and doing it right is extremely important. Habits of Indian tourisms at a generic scale are not very encouraging when we look into future. There is lot to do in terms of educating tourists, enabling local businesses to think about ecological system. Students had some very interesting and challenging questions. And to be honest, many of those questions invoked new thoughts in our heads.
After successful panel discussion on Tourism, we headed to other venue of the festival which was close-by to interact with Photography community of Andhra Pardesh and discuss opportunities in stock photography and how it needs different approach towards shooting objects around us by keeping the demands in mind and still keeping the frames creative & unique. During this discussion, we had some accomplished photographers from Andhra Pradesh who joined us and shared some very interesting photography journeys. Photo Journalist from The Hindu was also part of the panel and this discussion was sponsored by an Indian based stock Photography platform Picxy.in.
After both these talks we had some own time to interact with photographers on 1:1 basis and also enjoy the views of Vizag beaches from roof-top of one of the hotels around the beaches. Above photograph was shot after the discussion about importance of story telling through photographs and everyone who participated are part of the frame except our own Desi Traveler, who doesn't like to be clicked.
After the festival, we spent a weekend around Araku Valley of Andhra Pradesh with other fellow bloggers. Above photograph was clicked outside the Vizag Airport before we headed towards our own journeys.
Overall it was great experience to be in Vizag city and for such a brilliant fest called Ground Zero fest.
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