We are still in the phase of transition and hope to settle down in this year of the Pandemic. We were suppose to travel and paint in the summer but as whole world has come to a stand still, we are also stuck. While stuck at home, we thought to write about various experience we have missed writing about. One of them was our work in Chennai in an experimental school in the summer of 2018.
The invitation to paint in the school came through a friend who have seen us working in Gunehr art project. She saw the way we work and then invited us to come to Chennai and paint in an unorthodox and interesting school. We were excited to paint as it was our first travel after we had our son. He was nine months then.
The arrangements of our stay has been made with a family and coincidentally the name of the lady was also Meenakshi and they had lived in US for 15 years before going back to India and settling down there. We had a funny conversation over phone as they told us this: I hope you guys don’t mind sleeping on the floor. off course there will be a mattress but we do not have cots/beds. Also we are vegetarians.
We laughed out loudly and said: We do not have beds in our house. We sleep on mattress and prefer it that way. About food- we eat what hosts eat.No preferences.
When we reached the school named Cascade family learning school, we realized how different it was from the conventional school. It ran on the idea of a Montessori school where learning is not only fun but also unforced leading the child to grow naturally. The families had to engage in the growth of the their children and may be that’s why the name Family learning in the school.
The principal Vidya Shankar told us about the school and we started our work with the little ones making a toy train on the walls. The parent of various came to the school all day long and helped us in painting the train with their children. There was no inhibition in any parent about anything. Normally people hesitate in something like painting but in that school not a single kid was hesitant. Even the small ones were confident and when they were tired or didn’t wanted to paint, they clearly said that its his/her time to play and they don’t want to paint.
Slowly the walls came alive with the trains and then in next few days we painted animals with the other senior kids. The last day was reserved for the parents and fine tuning of the whole work. Many parents came to paint and Meenakshi gave them the work to fine tune the toy trains and fill the big areas of the animals kids have painted.
Someone wanted to paint monkeys and since it was a school we thought of the idea of Gandhi’s monkeys in a new ways. Four monkeys instead of three but then what was the third monkey will do?
People made suggestions and finally the fourth monkey sat down thinking because when we think we make a change. True isn’t it? That was the learning curve of the Chennai experiment in our travel.
