Taran

Age: 29
Identify as: Cisgender man
Available on: Thursday 12-3 PM
Languages: English, Hindi 
Mode of communication: Phone Call

Hey, I am Taran (he/him), a 29 year old cisgender man based in Gurgaon, India. I am practicing peer support through calls with Safe Access as part of their community wellbeing project, after going through their training program.

I am a narrative art and design practitioner navigating my career path from commercial spaces to more intent driven work. My journey has led me from corporate campaigns and graphic work to the world of picture books, spatial design, and social impact projects. Lately, my work has grown beyond the screen and page. Through explorations in puppetry, movement, and somatics, I have been facilitating workshops and labs centered around play, bodily awareness, and honest curiosity.

I love exploring how our senses shape our emotional realities, and I really value slow, intentional conversations. 

There is growth in acknowledgement, and love in acceptance. These words came out of me one day when I was trying to summarise a piece of my work. I have been fortunate enough to be part of spaces that introduced me to so many different narratives and realities that exist around us.

I feel my journey with navigating communities started back in school, having to adapt every time I got shuffled into new class sections. It takes real effort for an introverted kid to build a sense of belonging in new spaces year after year. In disguise, that experience trained me to find my people wherever I went later in life, through college, internships, and work spaces.

A major turning point came when I started expanding my world and people vocabulary during a storytelling course. Entering the world of picture books made me deeply conscious of the identities and realities we represent and how we do it. Later, working with organisations like The YP Foundation and interacting with their cohorts put me in spaces where my own bubble of privilege kept getting burst. Being surrounded by so many different lived experiences helped me absorb the depth of what people carry.

That is why I believe the more we acknowledge, see, hear, and listen, the more we grow as individuals and as a community. When we choose to practice acceptance, we choose to practice love.

To me, peer support matters because it creates a space where you can simply breathe and be, especially in a society that often feels suffocating. Being able to offer a listening ear and help someone feel truly heard is something I care deeply about.

Through my own friendships, I have seen how transformative it is to build a comfort zone where people can share all parts of themselves without shame. Personally, I have carried societal shame at different points in my life, and my initial reaction was often anger or rebellion. Over time, I realized that with my peers, I was constantly trying to create the exact kind of safe, non-judgmental space that I was craving for myself.

Choosing to become a Peer Support Provider comes from that journey, along with a commitment to continuous self-reflection.

When you share a conversation with me, my hope is that you leave feeling lighter, valid in your experiences, and supported without any pressure to perform or fix everything all at once.