Cultural Event Invite

Turtle Walk in Chennai

When news that the olive ridley turtles had started to nest in the beaches of Chennai reached us, at the beginning of last week, we quickly put together a plan for our visit. Tickets were booked and calls were made to our friends at The School for a place to rest, Tholkappia Poonga for a visit and to our friends at SSTCN (Chennai Students’ Sea Turtle Conservation Network) for the overnight walk to watch the nesting. We set off on a Friday morning reaching Chennai by noon. After a quick lunch, we visited the Tholkappia Poonga.
Tholkappia Poonga is an ecological park in the Adyar estuary area. It is an amazing example of restoration of freshwater eco-systems in the heart of a city! We were introduced to the history, the restoration process and the flora and fauna found in the park by Mrs.Gomati. Her energy, passion for ecological restoration, and determination to carry forward the good work shone through in her interactions with us. We recommend it as a must see place for people visiti…

Colouring Book

About the illustrator:
Sidharth loves to draw. He usually likes to be on his own when he is drawing and enjoys the alone time with the paper. He captures the feelings of the creatures with his strong and confident lines.

He has put together this colouring book for his younger peers at Shibumi.

When enquiring into his love for this expression through drawing the illustrator shared ...

'Sometime ago I started to draw faces and animals. One day, I was drawing a dragon. Suddenly!! When I had finished drawing, it popped off the paper and started to attack. Quickly I drew a sword and started to attack it. Luckily I managed to defeat the dragon and went back to drawing.
Fortunately nothing else popped out of paper.
I REALLY LIKE DRAWING!'

Ta-ki-ta Ta-ka-dhi-mi

The first week of July started off on a musical note with Ranjani Sivakumar, a Carnatic vocalist, spending four days at Shibumi conducting a music workshop.

The children huddled around Ranjini and enjoyed the sessions with her. She would bring our attention to listening by patiently tuning the tanpura at the start of the session. Asking the children to listen and participate by telling her if the notes of the string sounded lower or higher. This naturally lead to conversations and questions about the instrument, the tension in the string and sounds that are soothing.

For most part of the session we were learning the Sarali varisai, the fundamental sequences. This allowed us to get a feel for the melody and the rhythm. The sequences follow a logical order - ascending and descending, up to the 7th varisai. We learnt with her the first three patterns and sang them at different speeds.

She had a playful way with the younger children (Lalit and Todi groups), when understanding the ' ta…

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