WebElement Click() showing NullPointerException in Selenium - selenium

Question

I was trying Selenium automation testing in https://www.yatra.com/etw-desktop/ . My objective was to click an Image Button named 'Asia' which will redirect to another page (Images attached). I copied the full XPath and tried but I am getting a NullPointerException. Please give some suggestions since I didn't find anything wrong with my code.
package com.stackroute.SeleniumProject;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import org.junit.AfterClass;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.BeforeClass;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.FindBy;
/**
* JUnit project.
*/
public class Yatra {
public static WebDriver driver = null;
#FindBy(xpath = "/html/body/my-app//app-drawer-layout/app-header-layout/iron-pages/my-home//div/div/div/div/paper-material[2]/div[1]/div/a[2]/div[4]")
WebElement Asia;
#BeforeClass
public static void setup() {
String chromePath = System.getProperty("user.dir") + "/lib/chromedriver.exe";// directory of chrome driver
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", chromePath);
driver = new ChromeDriver();
}
#AfterClass
public static void close() throws InterruptedException {
driver.close();
}
#Test
public void test1() throws InterruptedException {
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.get("https://www.yatra.com/etw-desktop/");
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(4000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
Thread.sleep(5000);
// the error is in the below line Asia.click()
Asia.click();
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
Thread.sleep(2000);
Assert.assertEquals("page not found", "https://www.yatra.com/etw-desktop/city-list", driver.getCurrentUrl());
}
}
Image showing the element to be clicked
Image of web page after click operation

Answer 1

You are using PageFactory(from page object model), so you will need to init() the webelements.
For this you will need to import
org.openqa.selenium.support.PageFactory;
An before starting the test, you will need to initialise the elements:
PageFactory.initElements(driver, this) // where you pass the driver and this class to know which webelements to start.
You can take a look here to understand the approach and another POM framework easier to understand TUTORIAL