Key Takeaway
An idea can be strong, but turning it into something real requires a surrounding system: people, communication, structure, and execution.
Live by ONC (Oru New Culture) was a community and cultural initiative based in Thiruvananthapuram, designed to bring people together through shared experiences.
The initiative began with a group of seven students from Christ Nagar College. Rather than organizing standard commercial events, the goal was to create spaces where people could meaningfully engage with culture, creativity, and each other.
### A Focus on Experiences, Not Just Events
One of the ideas I took from ONC was that community could be built around shared interests and active participation, rather than simply bringing people together as an audience.
To test this, the initiative experimented with different formats and community activities, including:
- Music nights - Creative and participatory workshops - Crochet - Nature-inspired art - Stone balancing
### Approaching the Work as a Founding Team
In my experience working on the early stages of ONC, roles were not rigidly isolated into conventional job descriptions. Because we were building something collaboratively, I observed that the seven of us had to develop the structure alongside the events themselves.
My involvement across the initiative focused on marketing research, strategic direction, social media, event coordination, and team building. The objective of our marketing and social media wasn't just to announce dates and times, but to communicate the identity and feeling behind the initiative, ensuring we were reaching the right audience.
Simultaneously, we were learning how to build a team. A major part of the early work involved coordinating people, organizing workflows, and structuring the business side of the initiative so that ideas could actually be executed.
### What the Early Events Taught Us
When we started, there wasn't a finished blueprint. We didn't know exactly which formats would resonate most strongly.
Instead, the initiative evolved through experimentation. A typical event required us to move through a high-level process of:
**Idea → Coordination → Event Planning → Promotion → Execution → Learning**
By observing what people responded to and how the team worked together, we refined our approach. By February 2026, when the initiative was featured in *The New Indian Express*, ONC had conducted more than seven events across these varying formats.
### The Bigger Picture
ONC represented an important shift in my journey. While previous experiences taught me how to work inside an operating business, ONC gave me the opportunity to help build something from an early stage alongside a team.
It taught me that an idea can be strong, but turning it into something real requires a surrounding system: people, communication, structure, and execution. It strengthened my interest in entrepreneurship and building systems around ideas, rather than only working within existing structures.