When Creativity met Law.

Call it Serendipity. Or Destiny. But my start-up All About Animation’s first collaborative effort – (the workshop “‘Self-defense’ for Creative People“) came about thanks to a series of events that began from TRHS 🙂

The Back Story

I’m an aspiring Entrepreneur building my startup in the field of art education. I have no business background (I graduated in Fine Arts and come from a regular middle-class background where almost everybody has been in jobs and the one or two who tried their hand at business, failed miserably!). So I turned to scouring the internet for information, devouring knowledge from any and every source that I could find. I wished there was some sort of a crash course that taught the basics of running a business – the laws and regulations and stuff like that.

While doing my routine research on online education in India, I stumbled upon Ramanuj Mukherjee’s article on the Rodinhoods forum. The last paragraph was particularly significant for me as it perfectly captured the philosophy of my venture. Beneath it was a small link to his blog – https://startup.nujs.edu

When I saw the website I experienced the equivalent of a 1000 Bollywood mandir bells tolling all at the same time! The home page said:

National University of Juridical Sciences presents a diploma in
Entrepreneurship Administration and Business Laws

For entrepreneurs, working professionals, and anyone who is serious about business.

Here was just the course that I needed! After a bit of background check and a little ‘investigation’ of the validity of the course and the authenticity of its founders (Abhyudaya Agarwal and Ramanuj Mukherjee, both of whom are fellow Rodinhooders) and after exchanging a few emails, I signed up. I really liked their enthusiasm for sharing their legal knowledge and helping entrepreneurs. I was impressed by their method of teaching law to people from diverse backgrounds in a way that was easy to grasp and completely relevant to their respective businesses.

I thought – these guys just might have the solution to a problem consistently faced by creative professionals like me.

The Problem

We ‘creative’ people (artists, illustrators, designers, animators, writers, photographers, filmmakers…) perpetually face the problem of clients and agencies who don’t pay or arm-twist us into signing unfair contracts. Copyright, trademark and IP protection, Agreements, Contracts and NDAs, defaulting clients and money recovery – all these become just too much too handle for creative professionals who work as freelancers or run tiny studios. Most of them are ill-informed, wary of lawyers and mostly unwilling to seek out the information that can actually save them a lot of time, effort and money.

As a freelance designer and writer myself, I have battled many of these problems for years and saw that my friends and colleagues did too. But the only way we would deal with it was to rave and rant about it when we met or on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Art/Design/Film schools & colleges don’t teach you how to deal with the Big, Bad World of Business and Clients. Besides, most people in the creative fields have no patience for enrolling in business school or reading up books & documents on the subject. Many of them can’t afford lawyers to chase after defaulting clients and the agencies & clients take full advantage of this.

The Solution

So one day, I casually asked Ramanuj what he felt about teaching the basic ‘legal stuff’ to a focussed bunch of creative folks – something like a Business & Legal 101 for freelancers and small studios in creative fields. I was not sure whether he would be interested but to my delight, he jumped at the idea. Over a few more chats, email exchanges and just one meeting, the workshop took shape. One that would speak to artists in their language. Demystify legal jargon. Teach them ways to protect their creative property. And thus was born – ‘Self-defense’ for Creative Professionals.

We’ve announced our first workshop that will happen in Mumbai as a collaborative effort between my venture All About Animation and their startup – iPleaders.in and we hope to reach out to a lot of creative professionals & freelancers. 

So thank you Alok and TRHS for bringing together Creativity and Law and for helping me connect with two really smart legal-eagles – Ramanuj and Abhyudaya, and making it possible for us to create something which is much needed and I hope will benefit the creative freelancer community in a big way.