Mirambika

25 years ago this laboratory was born Partho Indian Express: Monday, July 17, 2006 The writer

It was 1983, my last year in college. I was a good student, a topper. All set to go to the UK for higher studies in literature. And even then, in that heady romanticism of early youth, I recall that the first experience of reading words that were to echo a hundred times in the caverns of my being: man is a transitional being. It was nearly four years later that I returned to Sri Aurobindo and that stupendous theme of his life-work that envisioned man’s ascent to a “divine supermanhood”.

Divine supermanhood? Something had happened when I’d read those words, something that took me more than ten years to figure out. I knew I had found the theme of my life. All that remained then was to set out on the journey and follow the theme to its source. That’s when I came to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi, having “renounced” the everyday life of the world in a fit of existential madness, searching for that Holy Grail of divine supermanhood. But everyone around me was busy living the same mundane existence.

I entered mirambika. Really a playfield that passed itself off as a school. A few rooms that did not look like rooms. Grown-ups that did not look or behave like grown-ups. And children who did look and behave as children. I was told mirambika was a free progress school. Free progress? Oh, that’s Mother’s idea of how education should be, I was told — from the inside out: first awaken the soul in the child, and then work outward, allowing everything else, mind, emotions, body, to be remoulded in the light of the soul. How? Simple, one finds the soul in oneself. And that was the beginning of a lifelong journey. One just finds the soul. And then one plays with children. And things happen.

It is still very simple. Except that grown-ups now look and behave like grown-ups. And children are just beginning to behave a bit like grown-ups. Maybe it’s the times. Maybe it’s Delhi. Maybe it’s the soul itself, following some secret law of its own, working out things of which we have no idea. Because mirambika is not just an education system, it is a laboratory of the future, a laboratory tentatively walking towards divine supermanhood. The writer is a former principal of mirambika, which completed 25 years last weekeditor@expressindia.com