Most people, when confronted with a mound of elephant dung would wrinkle their noses and hurry past but not Mahima Mehra. She bent down for a closer inspection. A psychology graduate from Lady Sriram College, Mehra had been smitten by the art of making handmade paper for a while before the novel idea of turning elephant dung into exquisite paper came to her. “I was in Jaipur, and we were walking up to Amer Fort. There are a lot of elephants in that area and we’d see these huge mounds of dung every

few steps when suddenly it hit me that elephant dung looked very fibrous and could probably make an excellent raw material for handmade paper.”

Fortunately for Mehra, her paper producer Vijendra happened to be at her side when the idea came to her. She narrates how even the prospect of collecting vast amounts of elephant dung did not faze Vijendra, “but that was just the first step, we performed various experiments for a year and a half, some too disgusting to even talk about, before we managed to produce a single sheet of paper made from the dung,” she recalls.

Despite having found the formula, it was a while before Mehra could convince the staunch Rajputs in Jaipur to actually touch dung. “The process involved manually cleaning the dung and there was no way these people were ever going touch any kind of animal waste,” she says. When she failed to convince anyone, Mehra devised Holy Poo! “I told them that the elephant was like Lord Ganesha, and there was no shame in recycling the Lord’s waste into something that people could use,” she says. That did the trick, and soon Mehra’s producer had enough people helping him to sort through the dung to turn it into paper.

Since then, Mehra’s unique brand “Haathi Chaap” has been making waves in international markets, with Germany being her largest buyer. She has been exporting paper made out of elephant dung for the last 4 years but shudders at the thought of retailing it in India. “I am terrible at all things business and retailing is just going to be too much work,” she says. Her loyal fan base has however convinced her to start a mail order service.