With great power comes great responsibility
I love music.
I love my school campus.
Fortunately for me, both came together. Learning to play the ukulele and guitar on campus
with Nikhil Sir was an experience like no other, especially because he always guided us to
learn our own way, pick our own songs, and enhanced our learning through jamming with
each other instead of teaching us through mundanely structured lessons.
We recently discovered that Nikhil Sir will be on a sabbatical leave for two years. That could
mean no more after-school music classes, no more jamming out with my friends, and no
more getting the strumming pattern wrong and being corrected by Advait and Vivaan for
the hundredth time. It was also clear that we could not get this unparalleled experience
anywhere else. We had to do something. We couldn’t just let our musical journey end like
this.
What if we could continue? Self-learn our way, inspired by Nikhil Sir’s methods.
On Friday, the 26th of January, Vivaan, Arnav, and I went to talk to our school co-founder,
Pavan Sir, about continuing our classes as an experience of self-learning. Pavan sir was
extremely proud of us and encouraged us to go ahead with the idea. He reminded us that
“with great power comes great responsibility” and guided us to discuss accountability, to
plan the days of the week to meet, the timings, and the dos and don’ts. We then decided to
do a trial week.
And that’s where we are now! Doing the trial week, and it’s going great! All of us are making
significant progress while being able to adhere to our own rules. And now we already have
new people joining us!
We’ve set up a few goals to keep us on track, such as:
● learning one song a month (we choose a song and one of us gets the cords tabs written)
● teaching Tiyaan (our youngest member) till he’s on track with us
And that’s it for now! (surely, more goals would come to mind later on, though…)
My group and I are incredibly grateful that the founders have trusted us and given us this
opportunity to self-learn through continuing our jamming and learning sessions on the DLRC
campus. We hope this club will very soon grow to empower many more DRLCians like us to
enjoy and co-learn music with each other.
By: Aalaya Thyagarajan (G6 DLRC student)
Edited by: Avishi Dalmia (DLRC Alumni and Media Lab Curator)