Take a hike

It's not often that one finds a retired army brigadier,a state level football player,an amateur magician,a corporate executive and other professionals come together to create educational programmes...

Written by Pallavi Jassi

April 19, 2009 02:55 AM IST

3 min read

An initiative started last year to give children an unconventional lesson gains popularity

It’s not often that one finds a retired army brigadier,a state level football player,an amateur magician,a corporate executive and other professionals come together to create educational programmes for children to enhance their learning skills outside academics. But when they do,you can safely expect a learning experience unlike most others. InMe is doing just that. An initiative that provides outdoor and adventure based learning programmes for those between nine and 17,InMe was started last September by Gaurav Saklani,Tarun Chandana,Brig. Trigunesh Mukherjee and Satindra Sen.

Most of the teaching in schools is through telling. So while it works well in imparting academic knowledge,it doesnt attend to a lot of the softer skills,such as self awareness and personal development, says Saklani,an XLRI alumnus,who gave up his corporate job to facilitate programmes on teamwork,leadership and communication 12 years ago,when he founded iDiscoveri with fellow batchmate Chandana.

But once they parted ways from iDiscoveri in 2006,both Saklani and Chandana took off to Kumaon and Kerala respectively to introspect and further their initiative of the learning programmes. While they returned with their company EXPER in 2007,they only catered to the corporates. The inception of InMe last year changed that.

Our aim is to teach children that they dont always have to be dependent on being taught and instead can learn by themselves, says Chandana,a state-level football player.

The learning process,which is an insight into ones own latent abilities and self awareness,is done through outdoor activities and includes adventure sports like rock climbing,backpacking,wilderness craft (a programme that builds on childrens endurance level by putting them in a situation where what they would do if they got lost or how they can improvise the shelter),mountain biking and rafting among aeromodelling. While it may sound like any other camp that regular tour operators or adventure outfits undertake,64-year-old Brigadier Mukherjee,who even took premature retirement from the army to join Saklani and Chandana in 1999 and facilitate programmes for children,feels otherwise. Unlike the tour operators/adventure companies,we take groups of these young children through these outdoor activities with an aim to teach them things about themselves that they werent already aware of, says Mukherjee,a faculty member from the College of Defence Management and Army War College and the Commandant of the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School. The point of adventure sports is to let them test their own physical abilities as well as their decision making power and the leisure interests are more about discovering the creative talent that the child may have never realised, explains Sen,also an XLRI alumnus,who left his job at American Express to bring on board his organisational skills.

While it is a common love for travelling,outdoor sports and instilling personal development in children that brought all these professionals from such varied backgrounds,they all agree that the diversity only adds value to the programmes. While the summer camps last a month and they undertake 10-15 camps during that time,InMe also works with schools across India.

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