10 Sept 2021

Dear Parents,

Happy festivities to all! Today is the occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi and also Jain Samvatsari. Former signifies the celebration of new beginnings and the latter is a celebration after a week long penance through fasting and renunciation. Hope such days occasionally reminds us of how much inner work there is to be done. 

Now, let us see how this week turned out for all of us.

Judiciary

The main agenda of this week was that some of the kids are not attending sessions even though they had signed up for it. Before anyone signs up for a session they can try and see if they feel interested. Once they sign up then they have to attend because that will show that you are committed to it. In thought this is seems perfect. But the reasons for signing up could be varied is what we found out. 

Some kids are signing up only because their friends are. Sometimes they are signing up because they think they have to oblige. Some are genuinely not interested in some of the sessions because it didn’t turn out how they had expected. Contrary to this, one of the child who didn’t sign up for geography seemed interested and signed up this week. 

Anyways, we decided that this is a place to pursue what interests us and so if anyone is uninterested then they don’t have to be bound to it. They have to genuinely try and express their disinterest and give their feedback to the facilitator.

Guest Speaker

Rachit who is a friend of LC’s had visited us to talk about Entrepreneurship during our Finance session. He along with his wife Deepa run a patisserie and confectionery business. He shared his story about how they couldn’t find a nice premium cake for their friend’s birthday. Since both of them were foodies they really delved into the intricate details of the cake making business. They hired a consultant, hired and trained their staff, got a place for the bakery, all of this in 4 months. Then they did trial runs for a month. He explained how they dug deep into every aspect of their business. Finding out what is pure chocolate? What is the right amount of smoothness for a mousse? How moist should a cake be? 

Rachit elaborated on how to start a business, how to pick an idea for starting one’s venture. Why it is important to pick an idea that lies within one’s interest or passion. How to identify a market gap? He asked the kids to go crazy with idea generation and think about viability later. But stressed that we should think about what need of the customer are we fulfilling by means of our business. Why should a customer come to you, he asked us to think about.

He listened to everyone’s plan and gave feedback to them. He asked everyone to do some more research and come to completion of their ideas. He said all ideas can be workable, provided we think through.

Drawing Session

Sheikh Sir started with his first session in drawing this week. Most of the kids were enthusiastic. He is a traditionalist in terms of teaching but very soft spoken. He explained everything in the minutest of details in terms of light, shadow, reflective light, mixing of colours, shining, etc. Some kids were squirming in their seats and I feared boredom will set in. But the magic was yet to happen. He picked up an ordinary object and told them to draw and shade. He showed how its done and they saw in front of their eyes how things go from being simple lines to a 2D object then to a 3D object that pops out of the paper. He could keep the attention of the kids for an hour and a half, which as you can understand is a big thing in LC. Many of them sat and completed their task zealously. 

कर के सिखो

This time the theme was sound and music. The team started with some curious questions. Can we see sound? Can animals hear sound, do they hear more or less than us? How do bats fly? How do we see babies in their mother’s womb? To understand sound we sat 2 mins in silence and observed what all sounds we could hear. And then the team started some sound at a frequency of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz and asked all of us to observe as to when do we exactly start hearing them and when do we stop hearing the sound. All of us started hearing at range of around 190 Hz and stopped hearing after 17,000 Hz. Few of us elders had a very compromised range. We also made a tonoscope, which is a device that’s made with an empty plastic container whose mouth is closed with an elastic membrane. Inside of the container we kept a small speaker. Over the elastic membrane we spread a bit of sand. Then the magic began, we sent few frequencies of sound and then the sand began to dance on the membrane and made few distinguished patterns. We will send a few pictures which will explain the whole deal. 

We also had brought many instruments, tabla, mouth organ, guitar, harmonium and keyboard. The idea was to explore how different instruments make sounds and some discussions around how to create music. But nothing of that sort happened. One of the facilitators from KKS got his tabla and he was not allowed to play peacefully. Few of them were banging on the tabla and punching the harmonium. It was a big mess and an explosion of noise. It was a display of how ruckus can easily be created and how it can go completely out of control.

Emergency Meeting

After the fiasco at the KKS session, some of us were very disturbed. Facilitators including the KKS team reflected that freedom doesn’t mean that one can create disruption or harm others. The issue is not as much that they were creating a mess but that of unfairness. Those who created a ruckus could exercise their freedom to do it while the ones who were interested in learning could not learn. So we called for an emergency meeting the next day and reflected on what had happened. We all agreed that this is not a mad house but a learning centre where kids are pursuing their interests and is learner centric. This environment needs to support and protect those who want to learn. So we collectively arrived at a decision to eliminate all those who disrupted. This means that they will not be allowed in the next coming session of KKS.

Hopefully this will be better for all of us as a community. Will share the learnings from this soon.

That’s all for now…stay safe during the festivities.