The 25-year-old Singajogi Satayaveni, a trained tennis player was returning home from a tennis tournament in March 2013 when she met with a terrible accident.
“It broke my ankle. I had to undergo surgery and was bed-ridden for six months. I recovered but normalcy was a long process. I quit college and locked myself in a room to avoid interacting with anyone,” recalls Satyaveni.
Then in Jan 2015, she was taken back into surgery to set her leg. The surgery was a major one, one that left Satyaveni vulnerable to depression, sometimes letting even suicidal thoughts creep in too, she tells us.
The light at the end of the tunnel
Sometime in December that year, however, Satyaveni’s mother, Kalyani, decided that the best way to get her young girl over her moping around was by throwing a challenge her way. “She got me a Royal Enfield bike and challenged me to ride it in a day. I guess even at your lowest, there’s something alive and kicking, because I jumped at the challenge and got one of my cousins to teach me how to ride it,” says Satyaveni, “I haven’t stopped since.” Off her bike, however, memories of everything she had to let go because of the accident kept Satyaveni struggling. Sometime in 2018, though, her older graphic-designer sister Sangeetha stepped in, slowly and steadily pushing her into bike painting. While Sangeetha took on designing the sketch of the 3D painting on bikes and helmets, Satyaveni completed the artwork with finishing touches. “It took me a while to get the paintings right, but when perfection set in I began posting those images on Instagram. Soon, people began approaching me to paint their bikes. I sought Sa
ngeetha’s help to make this a full-time venture,” says Satyaveni.
Soon, Sangeetha quit her job and began helping her younger sister, naming their venture “Womeneoteric Customes”, which translates into “women who do creative innovation.”
Setting examples
Even as life slowly was getting back to a normal, Satyaveni soon hit against a mind-set wall. “Many people began commenting on me riding a bike. Some men even ‘recommended’ that being a woman, I should ride a Scooty,” she remembers.
Instead of affecting Satyaveni negatively, however, these comments only bolstered her will to keep at it. She even began teaching young girls to ride bikes — a vocation she vouches brings her much satisfaction. And suddenly, she began discovering how others saw her.
So, in November 2019, Satyaveni registered an NGO, calling it ‘HUSKYCAPERS-Passion has no gender’. Using the revenue she makes with her artwork on bikes, she offers two-wheeler and free self-defence classes to women. Satyaveni’s motive is simple.
