Alok Badal There are times in our lives when each one of us experiences some life-changing moments. The day I met Prof. Chittaranjan Das (1923-2011), whom many young adults of my age affectionately called Chitta Bhai, I knew that I was on the road to change. I came across Chitta Bhai in 1988 when I attended a twenty days teacher’s training camp at Koraput, organized by New Life Education Trust, Odisha. I had decided to take up Integral education as my mission as I was inspired by the Integral vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. At the camp all of us were eagerly expecting Chitta Bhai’s arrival. He arrived in the camp towards the end and was with us only for five days. He taught us many subjects from philosophy, psychology, sociology, art, music (Rabindra sangeet in particular) to integral yoga and integral education. Chitta Bhai was a freedom fighter who was jailed twice for his participation in the Quit India movement. Later he studied philosophy at Shantinekatan. Afterwards he went to Denmark and Finland for higher studies. He had degrees in philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural anthropology apart from mastery over more than 13 Indian and foreign languages. On his return to India, he opened a basic education school – Jivana Vidyalaya – at Champatimunda, on the outskirts of a forest in rural Odisha. The most inspiring thing about him was that he was able to perceive the strength and potential of an individual and guide him/her accordingly. He would spontaneously forge a bond with the individual and stimulate him/her to grow in a natural way. He would openly criticize social systems, preconceived notions, pretences and contradictions vehemently, yet he was very tolerant and encouraged people to strive beyond their limitations. Whilst at the camp, Chitta Bhai learnt that a teacher had been sacked and humiliated by the school authorities for questioning their stand on a petty incident. Chitta Bhai criticized the narrow-mindedness of the authorities and saw to it that the teacher was absorbed in another school. This incident revealed his compassionate nature. In another incident, some students from the Integral school used to come to him to learn Maths and English. One day I got a chance to observe his interaction with students. While correcting some of the class work, he pointed out a mistake to a child. The child immediately struck off his answer with a cross mark. Seeing this, Chitta Bhai asked him “Why did you do that? Isn’t

Maya Kamalakar sits across me, a warm smile on her face and enthusiasm illuminating her eyes. She recalls the magical moments she had during her travels. Maya is an avid traveller and a teacher by profession. She worked as a teacher in Vidyaranya School till last year and now is part of the administration of the school. Her other interests include movies and hiking. Excerpts from an interview: When did you start travelling? From my childhood, I loved to travel. But I hardly took any trips with my parents. One day, my aunt asked me to accompany her to Shirdi. I decided to go because I wanted to experience a train journey. That journey revealed to me the joy of travelling. In fact, that was a journey into a different world. It opened a new world to a nine year old girl – a world of unknown people and experiences. How was it different for you when you started to take travelling more seriously? You said that this childhood journey showed you the wonders of travelling. Yes… that first journey gave a chance to realize my passion for travel. I started to brush up the list of places I wanted to visit after reading about them. My dreams came true after I started to earn. Each journey inspired me to travel more. The misty morning and chirping birds made the Himalayan trek one of the best journeys. Each drop of water I drank from the valleys seems to be elixir, pure and sacred. We trekked miles a day but we were never tired because the destination made us move forward. I started trekking in my late 40s. The interesting thing about most of my journeys is that I travelled on a shoe-string budget. So you are saying you learnt a lot from each of the hurdles you faced during the journeys? Was there any moment in your trips when you really wanted to give up along the way? I had many hurdles during my trips. I don’t consider them hurdles now. Those were the lessons to know the other side of life which made me stronger. I thought of leaving the travel camps during my initial days as I was unable to get used to living so close to nature. I found it challenging to sleep in public places where vendors and street dwellers sleep. I started to accept those challenges realizing that they added value to our journey. I never quit any of my

Meenakshi Kumar When the daily routine of life and work becomes a chore rather than pleasure, it surely is time to take a break. And, if the retreat rejuvenates and refreshes in body, mind and spirit, then that is just the antidote one needs. When I chose teaching as a profession, I was inundated with euphemisms such as, ‘What a noble profession!’ You will be instrumental in changing/moulding the future! ‘This will be a very fulfilling job!’ etc, etc. Full of such noble ideals, I embarked on my journey with enthusiasm. The initial euphoria wore off quickly, and as I found myself flooded with rigorous work challenges and shortage of time I found every excuse in the book to park my guilt on. I read every self-help book I could lay my hands on but concluded they were not written for ‘teachers’ but for other professionals. What I could not put a finger on was where was the bliss associated with this profession? It was exhausting, challenging and emotionally draining, not refreshing, stimulating or spiritually exhilarating at all. Time for a break. That was when I heard of a workshop on NLP-K which said that it would help one understand the ‘Power of the Mind’ and identify limitations to success. I thought this was exactly what I needed. It was a weekend workshop that asked for commitment of time. This workshop taught me about the ‘Unconscious’ mind. It determines our behaviour and responses and reactions to experiences in life. The workshop empowered me with a tool to communicate with my ‘Unconscious’ mind. NLP is an acronym for neuro linguistic programming, literally the language of the programs in our mind that run our life! And K stands for kinesiology, a method for communicating with this software. When it comes to our computers, we ensure that we have a good anti-virus software installed, frequently clean up the system and regularly upgrade it to remove old programs that are no longer efficient. But with our minds, even though it accumulates a lot of negativity and ineffective programs over the years, we do nothing to clean it up or upgrade it. Hence, we continue to act out of old unconscious habits and beliefs and continue to face the frustrations and fruitlessness that we always faced. If we were aware of these limiting beliefs and knew a way to reprogram our minds, then we would be able to do what Gandhiji asked us to do when he said ‘Be the

Damayanti Mukherjee Indus International School is at present a network of three IB (International Baccalaureate) accredited schools located in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune along with multiple Indus Early Learning Centres (I ELC) in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, a Community School in Bengaluru and its own teacher training wing, ITARI, in Bengaluru. The IB ethos of being a “lifelong learner” is deeply imbued by the leadership team at Indus and this is reiterated through the Leadership Retreats that are often organized for faculty members during an academic session. I was part of the fifth Indus Leadership Retreat at the verdant Indus campus in Bengaluru in June this year where teachers from across the three Indus Schools met to take part in an enriching learning and reflection session. One of the perks of being a teacher is the abundant amount of “paid holidays” in terms of long vacations and the thought of voluntarily giving up that precious time was in itself a challenge. But I had been told so much about these retreats by my colleagues that my curiosity was highly piqued as I landed at Bengaluru International Airport and settled down for the two-hour journey to the school campus. We were put up in the boys’ and girls’ hostel and it was hilarious seeing grown up adults smoothly shifting to the “boarder” mode leaving untidy beds, borrowing accessories, talking across the shower stalls and rummaging each others’ bags for midnight snacks. The greater goals scaffolding the theme of leadership were team building and generating self- awareness. Both were amply evident in not only the formal meetings throughout the days but also the early morning badminton matches where the “house” spirit of each branch created instant best friends and lifelong enemies! The pool-side time-out session clearly separated the leaders from the lambs as people whom I had only considered as earnest mathematicians, serious scientists and articulate language teachers devised ways to turn those of us with two left feet into scintillating rumba and salsa dancers. I have never been told off so sternly in my adult life as “step 1..ring the bell, step 2 ….shake the duster, step 3 ….draw a circle, step 4 ….shake your ‘backside’….what is this Damayanti, where is your concentration?…now repeat…1,2,3,4….” “Concentration? …My muscles are shivering!” The agenda for the retreat was framed by the Leadership director and leadership coordinators of each school under the guidance of CEO Lt Gen Arjun Ray, PVSM, VSM (Retd) along with the principals of the three schools.

Durga Sitaraman When the idea of an annual school-wide retreat for the teachers was first floated, I wasn’t very sure what to make of it. Retreats reminded me of my school days when nuns from all over the district would assemble in my school. I vaguely recall the unstated hushed environment in the school, the occasional waft of hymns emanating from the chapel and the sombre look so many of us put on unwittingly. When I was old enough, I remember asking one of my teachers and she said, “Nuns come here to re-establish their relationship with God.” That was too much for me at the time and I remember telling myself that I would never ever want to establish any relationship with anyone, let alone God. That being stated, I was intrigued by the idea of an annual retreat for teachers; I wanted to understand the whats, whys and hows of it. What I had inadvertently experienced from the periphery, I can now define and participate in the present, real-time context. When we sat down together to discuss the framework for the retreat and as each one of us started sharing our expectations, things slowly started to take shape. For the first time in many years, I started asking myself some of the difficult questions I had been postponing for a long time: What am I, as an educator, bringing to the table? When I enter a class, who is it that the children experience – the person I am? Or is it my role as “a deliverer of content”? Who do I see myself as? What do I primarily associate myself with – is it my knowledge, my theatrics, my content, my skills? Does it also include my experiences and beliefs? How about my feelings, emotions and psyche? Is education, for me all about content, methods and delivery? Or is it about creating learning environments for human beings? As an educator, what is my role? Is it about enabling students to score marks, or is it about helping them to create and nurture wholesome relationships? Do I have a moral right to impose my values and beliefs on an unsuspecting audience or do I allow them to develop and nurture their own values, creativity and critical thinking? The more I listened, the more I became convinced that learning is a lifelong process and that the teachers have as much to learn as students. In fact, we have more on our plates as we

Amit Deshwal “… I know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong – To measure yourself at least once – To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions…” – Into the Wild In January this year we decided to take the children on an unconventional trip, a cycle trip to a small village near Hyderabad. The idea was not only to appreciate and enjoy nature but to understand nature in its raw form and to deepen our relationship with it. Here is a small recount of all that happened. The week it all started We had to plan a trip for the older bunch (13-16 year olds). A lot of proposals were being thrown on the floor, during the ‘Children meeting session’. “Can we cycle to my village, Mulugu? It is about 50 km from here”, someone asked. It was indeed an exciting and unmatched proposal and we all decided to go for it. Cycling 50 km to Mulugu and back, it was to be. Now the rules of the game had to be defined… the trip had to be made interesting and challenging. After much deliberations we decided on the following: We would start cycling from Hyderabad, and go towards a village 50 km from the city, stay there overnight and come back the next day. We would not use any money during the journey and would work out ways to arrange for food, place to stay and other necessities. One of us would carry some money which was to be used only in the case of an emergency. We would not carry cell phones. One phone would be taken, again to be used only in case of an emergency. We would not carry more than a total of 2 loaves of bread to be used when starting the journey. The idea was for the children to realize how difficult/easy it is to fend for oneself and arrange for basic necessities. The next few days, children tried to convince their parents to allow them to undertake this arduous journey. Finally out of seven children, four decided to come for the trip. Bags packed, cycles out Six of us (4 children and 2 teachers) began our journey at 5 a.m. when it was still dark. We had barely hit the highway when the first tyre gave up. There was no cycle shop visible anywhere. We did not know what to do, when

Leila Mathew Field trips or school excursions are something I have never really looked forward to, especially with a group of teenagers with growing pangs and pimples, but if you are part of a school it is something that you cannot avoid. I left school teaching a while ago but remember vividly the two trips I made with a group of tenth standard boys and girls of an elite school I was teaching in at some time in the past. Looking back I don’t regret making the trips because I learnt something about students I would never have learnt in a classroom. The first trip was to Kodaikanal where we were forty students, two teachers and a parent. I noticed one thing – you can depend on the boys to be helpful and responsible, something you don’t see in the classroom and they are also very aware of the surroundings and protective of the girls. For the girls it is a sense of freedom and giggles and secret whisperings on the train journey, totally oblivious of ogling men mainly out of sheer ignorance and having been extremely protected at home. Too late for a teacher to lecture them on these matters at that moment but it was a point to be taken up later and also to be remembered on the next trip. Most of the students had not travelled by ordinary sleeper class or some not even by train (the school catered to the rich and famous, hence the term elite I had referred to in the beginning). Well, it was a sleepless night for us on the train and we reached Kodai by afternoon the next day. We had booked rooms in the Youth Hostel run by the tourism department. Again the boys adjusted quickly but there were moans of dismay from the girls at the dormitory and the bathrooms and to make matters worse there was no water in the bathrooms. The young men rose to the occasion and carried water from the pipe outside for everyone and I was really impressed by their willingness to help, when all I usually saw in class was their total engrossment with themselves or their particular groups. The highlight of activity in Kodai was the boat trip which both myself and my colleague Saroja dreaded but which we knew could not be avoided, so against our better judgment and with a sense of foreboding, we agreed to let them go with, of course, experienced attendants

Veena Kamlapally has been in Vidyaranya, Hyderabad since 1996. Having joined the school initially as a teacher, she soon managed to find her own space, inculcating a spirit of adventure in the children, taking them out on school excursions and learning with them all about compassion and responsibility. She is also a volunteer at SpicMacay and is one of the core members. Here she talks about how she built on her experiences from one trip to the next : Many people just dream of exploring the world, experiencing different cultures and meeting different people. I make them all happen. My journeys are all about exploration and the sense of wonder that I feel at the immense diversity of our surroundings. My urge to travel is very strong as I always felt that if there is a will, there is a way to travel. Going back to nature to see and experience the miracles of mountains and hills is something that interests me. I started trekking when I was in the seventh standard in school. At Kendriya Vidyalaya, in Bengaluru, where I studied, I joined the Scouts and Guides movement, and this association gave me my first opportunity. Later on I started trekking alone and gradually my friends asked me to take their children along with me. Apart from the school academics, travelling become a passion, a priority. Each journey taught me to understand nature, to connect with the earth, and showed me how truly ‘incredible’ the world is. I like the Himalayas more than the beaches and I feel I am a Himalayan after each of my trips there during the month of May every year. Walking amid the heights, overcoming all the difficulties on the way, are unique lessons which cannot be gained from any books. Drinking the fresh water that falls through the valleys, watching the full moon are a few unforgettable experiences I had. I tell people who accompany me on the trips to ”come along with me, I can take you to the hills, villages and forests but only you are responsible for yourself”. Self-confidence and will power are the two things that I carry along in my travel kit. People and experiences Meeting different people and sharing their experiences was something I learnt during the trips. I learnt that each person is unique. During these trips, there are people who complain saying it is difficult for them to sleep in tents and to cope with the limited facilities in trekking