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Writer's pictureAvinash Joseph Almeida

Irony of being nice part 2

Payal, Palak and Khushi have been out of the picture for this month. It has given me time to focus on the older kids. With Gaurav I am focusing on investing and with Chandrama I am teaching him computers these are the 2 subjects I am teaching in a formal sense. However there are a lot of informal learning sessions and conversations that happen on day to day basis. For e.g. with Kishan we talk about creative ways to post his artwork on instagram and create his portfolio among other things.


‘The environment that we are building does come with a price.’ I remember using this statement in my last article. While we are striving to build an environment where they can express themselves and be vulnerable, however, the society they come from, they are conditioned to take advantage of such an environment. It is very common though, even when Satyam founded the place 5 years back, he had to take strict action by restricting few children from the space for a week or two to create some space for introspection. I also had to do something very similar to Payal, Palak and Khushi. The situation that day reached the level where, they were just taking advantage of our gentle behaviour. In this space children take responsibility of their learning and can take a holiday whenever they feel like, but they kept extending the holidays under false reasons, so then I had to be firm and said, now take a week long holiday and think about the choices you are making.


Why did I have to be firm about something so simple? It is an interesting question. The general world knows consumerism (I pay, you deliver) and authoritative policing mostly. Scarcity, fear of abuse and prejudiced judgments, is very common therefore when they do come to a space where they can express and be themselves; initially, they tend to take advantage. We could have talked about the situation (as mentioned in previous articles) and come to a common understanding. But the culture of this place is such, that at the end of the resolution, they got what they wanted, which is coming to the space. This has been a continuous pattern for the last few weeks that they were here, they use to just listen and continue to behave in the same manner which was manageable and it was fine considering they are only children (As a child I also did that). But when they kept pushing for a holiday under false reasons I had to intervene and be even more firm.


Ironically they have stopped coming for now. It is a cycle of false pride, the adults have it and the children have adopted it.


Now the question is will they come back? What really motivated the other kids to come back? What is that magic stay tuned for the next article.

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