Bond over breakfast

The next time you decide to get up early on a Sunday morning for a change, find your way to ‘Creative Mornings’, a series of free breakfast lectures being organised around the City. 

For the last one year, Bangalore-based production house ‘Canvas Creations’ has been attempting what few others have – an initiative that urges people to leave the comfort of their beds and find pleasure in food and conversation instead. 

Started by Tina Roth Eiesenberg in New York, the series has gained popularity in 65 cities across the world. In fact, the Bangalore chapter is the first-of-its-kind in India, followed by Mumbai, which took to it recently. 

   “We wanted to create a platform for creative people to come together. How it works is that the New York headquarters send us different themes per month and we find people from different walks of life in Bangalore to come and talk.

We’re experimenting with different days because in most other cities, it happens on Friday mornings. But here, it only works on Sundays. We also try collaborating with different venues like Suchitra, Jaaga, Alliance Francaise and KalaRasa Art House,” explains Vishwesh Shiva Prasad, founder and creative head of Canvas Creations. 

   He adds that the core committee includes Karishma Rao, Vikram Shenoy, Vandana, Varun Pai, Kiran Midigeshi, Sachin and Santosh Kumar.
 There have been a multitude of speakers at these events, including the likes of Archana Prasad, founder of Jaaga; theatre personality Prakash Belawadi; artists John Devaraj and Premjit Ramachandran, comedian Kanan Gill and martial arts trainer Ashwin Mohan among others.

The breakfast itself is another matter of indulgence, with it not only being free for the enthusiastic early birds but delicious too. “We try to keep a combination of Indian and Western foods. So for instance, we could have vadas and kesari bath being served with bread, butter, jam and donuts,” shares Vishwesh. “How it works is that the venue opens at 9 am, which is when we have ice-breaking activities and get people to interact over breakfast. 

The lecture starts at sharp 10 am and is a crisp 20-minute presentation followed by a Q and A session. It takes time for some people to open up and connect to the topic but this is also because of the crowd demographics – we get creative people like architects and designers as well as curious people who aren’t artists,” he elaborates.

Asked about the general response to the concept, Vishwesh reveals, “Initially, there used to be around 15 people per talk who were from our circle of friends. We now have a 400-strong community in Bangalore and get over 70 registrations for most talks. There’s no registration fee because we don’t want to restrict our audience but we encourage online registrations to make our job easier.”

Speaking about the challenges faced, he says, “The main challenge is in getting the right speakers because people look at that name and show up. Following this, speaker availability and coordination is the main task. Another problem we face is sponsorships though we’re slowly growing and gaining the support of like-minded people.”

For details, log on to http://creativemornings.com/cities/blr