What is Black Swan?

What is the best job in the world? If you ask us – we’d say “That’s a no-brainer”. For us – it is travelling, meeting people and the unique experiences it brings, and if we are being paid for it, who are we to complain! Reading travel books and magazines and watching travel shows on TV was as far as we got to our dream job. Stuck in our 4 x 4 cubicles staring at the moronic monitor day-in and day-out, we contended ourselves by looking out into the world through the internet and wafting in an out of dreams. Two-week breaks just didn’t seem enough, but what could be done? Winning the lottery was, well, never going to happen. All we could do was read and surf.

During our dream salvaging days (by that we mean our internet explorations on travel and culture) we stumbled across the knowledge that of the 6000 languages spoken on earth right now, 3000 are not spoken by their children. Practically that means that in one generation we are going to have our cultural diversity halved. Each time an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture our entire philosophy, a body of knowledge about the natural world bettered over centuries goes away. This added depth to our perception about the kinship of travel and culture.

And with that came the realization that maybe one day we could stop dreaming and do something about it. Procrastination followed and then came little baby steps. Now, we are proud to offer you Black Swan – an attempt to connect tourists with local communities and their history, way of life, and culture. Black Swan is a development & conservation oriented travel idea… One that is educational, responsible and provides a rich, shared cultural experience, a conservation tool, a platform for local produce and markets.

Can we combine tourism with conservation? Can tourism sustain and nurture local culture, art forms, forests, wildlife and the age-old wisdom passed on through generations? We hope to find a few answers along the way.

Curious to know how we named our enterprise Black Swan? One would wonder what’s so special about a ‘Black Swan’. The book Black Swan by Nassim Taleb espouses that Black Swan events are high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare beyond the realm of normal expectations. For centuries, people thought that all swans were white. A black swan was a symbol for something that was impossible or could not exist. With the discovery of black swans in Australia in the 18th century, this theory metamorphosed the term to connote that a perceived impossibility may actually come to pass. Can this be true of tourism too? We believe so. It has the power to change one’ world view through the unimaginable and unexpected experiences it throws up…

Right from the day we conceptualized our venture, the goal was to strive and offer our customers an experience which would either be difficult to predict, or rare or have an everlasting impact, or in an ideal scenario, all of the above.

With Black Swan as our mascot, we hope to unravel to travelers the mysticism of leaving behind familiar ground and exploring new territories – en route experiencing new people – is nothing short of tracing back the footprints of our lives!www.black-swan.in