We believe that there is no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfect child. Our personal and social experiences shape how we evaluate ourselves and others around us. Different societies have divergent ideas about childhood and what an effective parent should be doing. As a consequence of our experience across cultures, we believe that there are many right ways to bring up children and children understand their worlds in very different ways. As concerned adults, we must be able to recognize and respect these differences. Consequently, there are multiple solutions to particular situations, depending on time, task, context and person.
Every society attempts to deal with issues of teaching, learning, security, comfort and nourishment of the forthcoming generations in the ‘best way’ possible under given circumstances. In fact, most families make sincere attempts to provide for children. Despite our best efforts, children will remain vulnerable to our interventions or lack thereof. This makes the task of caring for children highly prone to being judged. ‘Parenting’ is now a thriving industry and both public and private spaces are flush with advice on how to get the job done. Commercial ventures use these sentiments to bump up sales and we are constantly inundated with advice about “how to” bring up our children. In this cacophony, how does one make sense of information?
Our objective is to assemble ideas through harvesting our own lived experiences, without hesitation, to invent and improvise while remaining grounded to a coherent range of beliefs and purposes. Sometimes, on account of taking things for granted, we are unable to really “see”; a bit like “fish in water” as Michael Cole once remarked. We believe that our task is to notice things and bring them to the notice of our audience, to show how collisions of choice and chance configure our lives and create meaningful patterns. In a small way, we would like to unearth these patterns because we all need to be able to see ourselves and others. “Only beings who can think about the ways they are determined can free themselves” Maxine Greene
MASALA CHAI 