I love beautiful things – paintings, photographs, flowers, mountains, melodies and writing. I try and share some of this appreciation along with the curiosity about how each of these is created. I have also realized (thanks to working with Ioana), that beauty is in the details, it is a way of life, an acquired perspective (for some) – kind of like a new lens you put onto your camera or a deeper understanding of a fundamental physics concept.
By the way this photograph is taken by Romesh Bhattacharji (click here for more amazing pictures from north-east India).
I want to bring these perspectives to children and show them that learning can be so amazingly rich. I had a very colorless formal education, but explored crazy worlds of books after school. We had a very deep, dark mysterious black wood cupboard that had book collections from two grandfathers, two uncles and my mother. I learned about cheiromancy, talking to plants, how to fly planes, buddhism, photography, sailing, art, dogs and mountain climbing. I wish I could share the same free-wheeling curiosity and love of learning with children. Schools today (especially here in the US) are way more interesting than my prison-like, churning-out-suitable-wives-for-indian-men school (Sophia, Meerut), but I still get the sense of so much regimen, boredom and lack of beauty.
I hope we can change that through our sessions that dont have a “correct” end result, or a pre-determined path to success and through our materials that share a fascination with the beauty around us.