Interconnecting insights

Aditi Mathur and Ratnesh Mathur

I am free, when I can see
how tree is me and I the tree

We often tell children not to care so much about being independent, but to care about accepting interdependence. They say, “But I want be like my papa, who does everything.” We ask, “Does he milk the cow? Does he shell the corn? Does he live life alone or does he coexist with us all?” At this point usually there is some silence.

We then ask, “Do you see a cloud in your notebook?” And they say “no”. So we tell them one day a cloud cried and it rained on earth. A little seed got some water to grow into something real tall. Then a woodcutter cut it down, a factory pulped it and transformed it into paper, which a binder stitched and a shopkeeper sold. And the children say, “Yes now we see a cloud in our notebooks!” So, we ask them how can we live independent lives then? And in chorus they reply “no live no live, we live only interdependently”.

You see, you can’t beat me
coz I ain’t running no race

We often ask the children, what the moral of the story The hare and the tortoise is and when they are through with their myriad views, we add our own. To us the story says it is futile to run any race, futile to prove who is faster as in one way or another, we all reach the finish line. But the children say, “It’s fun to race, to win.” We agree it’s fun and it’s alright to have fun. But all these races, selections, and winners seem to imply that life is about scarcity – that only a few can have it. What will happen if we start looking at everything in life as a race? The children reply, “Then we will be running all the time.” And we conclude, we will be tired, all the time.

We remind the children how animals hunt together, live together, and safeguard each other and we see the children nodding their heads as if their primal instinct suddenly surfaced to question this culture of scarcity that we have gifted them.

Money can buy me everything
Except for what I really need

We sometimes give the children 10 rupee notes. Most of them instantly start planning what they want to buy. Some even start wishing they had got more. We ask them how they are different now that they have money as compared to earlier when they were penniless. This question seems to baffle them; some say they now have purchasing power. We ask what will happen to this sense of strength once they spend the money. This question baffles not only them, but us as well. We wonder how this concept of independence is so strongly enforced by the concept of ‘my money’.

We often ask parents to consider what concepts pocket money reinforces and what it will be like if instead of pocket money, we exercised the concept of common money, where everybody knows how much we have and everybody decides where and what to spend on.

I count my blessings
I count you twice

We tell the children, “Let us all together count the gifts that we have received.” Initially, the children start with things like game station, cycle, etc. Soon somebody will add things like love, laughter, jokes, mummy, sister, friends, wind, fragrance, mountains, butterflies, and in no time the gift-list spirals into infinity. We all sigh. We are all blessed and gifted – in abundance. We all, only because we all co-own.

Those we meet can change us, sometimes
so profoundly, we are not the same afterwards

In the book/movie Life of Pi (from where we have taken this quote), Pi says that it is the presence of the tiger in his boat that made him live through the ordeal. So the ferocious tiger and the attendant fear was a blessing! When a child complains that another child is teasing, we ask what can we learn from the child that teases you? And the child has lots to share, lots to learn. And so what we learn from those who do something fantastic, from those who do something terrible, and from those who show an irritable disposition, and …. we ask the children, who are you? – as in – what has gone into making who you are? And as they think and express their thoughts, they talk about how each person they have met, each book that somebody wrote and they read, each movie that somebody made and they saw … how each one of them has made the ‘who’ that they are. And then we sleep into the wee hours of the night counting the little millions of people who have made each one of us. Dreaming, I is not I, but a huge we.

I am free, I soar like a kite
but I need you, for my flight

We lock children in a room sometimes and ask them what freedom is. They say, it is to be out of this room, whenever I want, to do what I want, and however I want. And then we ask, if we let one of them out of this room will that child be free? They think for some time and say, no that child will be free when all are free. As we sit together in the night under the moonlit sky, we ask, is night captured by the sun or is sun darkened by the moon and the ones who like science say, neither – they coexist, as the cycle of life.

and then I ask and ask more
and they say why you ask so much
I say, oh to live we need to be aware:
we learn from what each would share.

When we think about the fact that the packet of milk that comes to us daily comes after changing about 30 hands, we realize that independence is a myth and that www is actually World WE Web and that the only reality is interdependence. ‘I’ exists only in the mind; the whole world is about relationships and togetherness. We realize that we tell children – in many different ways – that life is a trade-off between self and others, a balancing act. That there is only one winner – you or others. Class rank tells us that, position in a race tells us that, selection in a play tells us that. According to us, however, this paradigm of life is only full of strife, struggle, and stress.

The invitation here is to involve children to explore a different but imperative paradigm. To burst some myths (like that of scarcity), to break some beliefs (that being dependent is bad), to play differently (cooperative sports and games), to explore options (instead of committees make communities) and so on. The invitation is also to look at inspiration not just from movie stars and sports winners, but also from simple rural folk who seem to have for generations – simply coexisted.

The authors run an open unschool called Aarohi and invite all readers to visit and see how open learning can be an amazing way to work with children. They also conduct training retreats and online training for teachers and parents. Visit www.aarohilife.org.