– To going back to how you felt and what you see! –
One and a half months before, Rovin and I undertook our journey across Central and South India studying some of the best alternate education school models in the country. This is one of the excerpts from our journey.
Our first destination is a school in Pune called Gyan Prabodhini. A school set up in the year 1969, it is a ‘world renowned’ school in Maharashtra. Haha, yes this joke is still doing the rounds! Anyway, Rovin would definitely have heard of this school before. He must have come across its existence in one of his myriad conversations with his friend-folks sometime. The thing with Rovin is that he knows too much, loves to eat even more and is extremely hilarious. He is hungry for three things: knowledge, food, and bad jokes. Once while we were standing in a queue to wash our utensils in the office, he mentioned to one of our colleagues that he is right now standing in “Katar” (meaning “queue” in Hindi). After a brief pause, with his eyes gleaming as he opened his mouth, he said that he is not in “Qatar” (a place in middle-east) but in “Katar”. His jokes are mostly as legendary and epic as this one. Now, everyone can guess what it means to be around him. It means an endless ‘Qatar’ of jokes. He is the Uday Chopra of bad jokes, basically!
Unlike Rovin, I had not known about the existence of Gyan Prabodhini until my mentor at Vision India Foundation, Nomesh Ji, told me about it on the day when Rovin and I met him to discuss this journey which we were about to undertake. He had just thrown to us the challenge to travel and visit the best alternate schools, learn from them and come back. “All of this has to be done in one single trip”, he said. “How is this even possible?” I had found myself thinking. Before I could add a flame to the fire to my mind’s thoughts, I saw Rovin and Nomesh Ji already starting to plan which schools we should visit, the number of days we should spend at each school, and other details. I like to live in spontaneity and this is the most spontaneous unseen adventure in a long time that was being unfolded in front of my eyes. I was also a part of the discussion now but was mostly watching my senior folks spreading the magic with their work. Truly inspiring!
After almost an hour of brainstorming, we had finally selected six schools: Gyan Prabdhini in Pune, Shishuvan in Mumbai, Vande Mataram Foundation schools in Hydeabad, Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, Isha Home School in Combatore, and Aurobindo Ashram Schools in Pondicherry. We would be covering these schools in a period of almost a month with our travel starting from the first week of September.
I have lived in Meerut for the most part of my quarter-life. It is a place which is 60 Kilometers from New Delhi. As a kid, the only time when I went outside Meerut was when I had to visit my grandparents’ home in Roorkee or visit my aunts and uncles in different cities. Belonging to a lower middle class family, travel was a luxury and hence we had it in limited doses. This limited travel instilled in me the fear of travelling so much so that I would ask a thousand questions to my sister and mother whenever I had to go to any place outside Meerut; asking the bus conductor where to get down also was a big task at times. This fear continued until I went to Bangalore alone for the first time. Wipro Technologies was kind enough to have given me an offer to come and work for their company and I had readily accepted it. Within a year though, I had already left my job and had gone into the wild. One year later, I had already traveled the length and breadth of this country; from Ahmadabad to Bihar; and from New Delhi to Hyderabad. Travel became a part of my existence and a fearful boy had suddenly become fearless. But I had never done a travel journey like the one that we just ended up planning. One month of continuous travel, meeting people, visiting schools, learning about education and re-educating our own understandings about the existing systems of education is something that was challenging and exciting at the same time.
Two and a half months later, when I reached New Delhi railway station to travel to Pune on the morning of 9th September, like a thousand times before, my train had got delayed. Searching for the place to spend the next two hours, I found an empty bench at the far end corner of platform number 4 and sat on it to open and write in my diary. There is a thing about diaries. It not only tells you who you are right now in the moment but also who you were a while back and what you aspire to become in the future. As I started to write, my mind again transported back to the day of our meeting with Nomesh Ji and Rovin. After all the planning was done, the inner voice within me asked a very important question. It was probably the most important question that anyone should ask. Or was it?
As I paused for a while, with Nomesh Ji and Rovin’s eyes, ears turned towards me, I asked, “How would we wash our clothes while travelling continuously?” It did not take me much time to comprehend the absurdness of this question. I was waiting for my senior fellows to make me remind the same.
“Don’t worry! It will not be a problem. You will figure it out.” said Nomesh Ji.
Rovin, on judging the situation perfectly came to my rescue and told me that this is the last thing that I should worry about. Of course, I knew it. The question was absurd but the answers were beautiful. The boundary of being always trying to be correct and being yourself was broken, in my mind and heart. I was certain now that when you are just yourself, and you have people who knows and respects who you are, you have reached the right destination in your life.
