September is an important month for home gardeners. As the monsoon ends and mother nature prepares herself for autumn, home gardeners gear up to change the layer of summer and monsoon gardening and prepare their gardens for winter and spring season. Nirvana Homes pose a camera perfect landscape for a green heart. To maintain such gardens worth participating in any garden competition of national level, Nirvanites strive hard to learn urban gardening. Many home gardeners from Nirvana learn it in a curricular way from the only organisation of our country dealing in this field since 1965, ‘All India Kitchen Garden Association (AIKGA)’. AIKGA is an historical organisation started as a movement by late Lalita Shastry ( wife of our beloved PM late Lal Bahadur Shastry) to combat the notorious famine in our country in 1965-66, then carried forward by Late Sarala Bhargava as a registered NGO to teach citizens of our country to grow food in home gardens.
The Gurgaon Chapter of AIKGA, called ‘Unit 39’ conducts its monthly sessions of such learnings and knowledge sharing from the Chinmay Mission Gurudham campus behind Nirvana Country.
Unit 39 conducted its annual ‘Udyan Mela’ on September 21st this year in the ‘Gurudham’ campus in a great fervour. The unit members put up the whole show in AIKGA’s signature style which is a confluence of celebrating Mother Nature, traditions and hard work! There were sale stalls, demonstrations of gardening techniques, lectures and yummy, homemade food for all.
Stalls were offering many things that a gardener needs in this season, Seasonal flowers and vegetable saplings, season flower bulbs, organic manures and inputs, gardening tools, seeds, gardening literature and magazines. Few stalls also offered their own farm produce of ghee, honey, and handmade soaps. There were a couple of young girl entrepreneurs offering hand crafted gift items and home- made yummy food for the mela visitors. The atmosphere was reverberating with the zeal and feel of the gardening community celebrating its annual event, charged with laughter, knowledge sharing, positivity and love for Mother Nature. ‘Pull up your socks and get into your gardening boots’ was the common shout to cheer each other up for hard work in the coming season to have beautiful home gardens in winter and spring seasons!
company and behind setting up the Lorraine Music Academy. Today, we have taught more than 10,000 students. We are on our journey to teach the next Million, and beyond.
So, what brought you to Nirvana?
We were originally in DLF Phase-4. But being in Nirvana gave us a lot of visibility, and proximity to people who realized the value of the Piano and getting into music being available to them at their doorstep. We opened in Courtyard, we were in Birch Court, and we had two centers in DLF Phase IV. But the Nirvana community was very forward thinking from the start, and realized the importance of musical education for their children. Our first set of students from Nirvana in 2010 such as Dhruv Malhotra, Ishika, Yash, Niharika, Shambhavi, Shatakshi set the tone for us from the start – with Dhruv Malhotra going on to be the first student at the Lorraine Music Academy to complete Grade-8 at the age of 12/13. We had a lot of students who not only did very well in music, but also academically. But now we have no physical centers, we are absolutely online. We will get into a hybrid model in the near future.
How does this online teaching work for Music?
Lorraine: In the present, we have employed people who come online and they teach all the instruments. We do instruments, like the Piano, Guitar, Violin, Drums, Ukelele, and Singing – everything is possible online. We have a few offline interactions also, but we have students from all over the world – USA, Canada, Netherlands, London, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia. And these are students not just doing Grade 1 or 2 in music, but also those in colleges in London who come for specialized courses to us.
Aubrey: Unfortunately, today’s generation spends a lot of time staring at a screen. So, if you want to take them away from the screen, it’s very important to involve them in an activity which involves the brain and the hands. The Lorraine Music Academy addresses that while building the interest of the child, even with online teaching. We offer a lot of audio-based learning, and video-based learning, which is similar to reading a book on kindle. This mode works because good teachers’ access is limited, and going digital helps us scale up across India and the World. So, we “digitized” Lorraine, and we got into AI and Machine Learning, and are now getting to be a future ready Music Education Technology enterprise. We are still a future-ready work-in-progress enterprise with evolving technology.
Is the focus of Lorraine Music Academy only Western music?
Aubrey: Music is a language. Within that comes what genre, what format. So, we teach music in that manner as a language. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Carnatic or Hindustani or Western or Eastern. We have taught Bollywood music, we have taught Carnatic songs, we have taught Hindustani songs, we have taught bhajans, we have taught hymns, we have taught Christmas carols, we have taught Enka – that is Japanese music, we have had Japanese singers here along with musicians from across the Globe. The way we teach music is to ensure that any child who learns music with us can play any instrument in the future because the foundations are built in a particular way, and then can play any format of music, whether Western, Eastern, Indian, Hindustani or Carnatic. We choose to teach in a particular script like a language which is Western notation because that’s the easiest and that builds the foundations of music best.
What is your dream going forward?
My dream is that every home in Nirvana learns music. Many parents feel that their children have less time when they’re in the 10th or 12th grade. But I disagree, they learn to manage – they memorize better, they concentrate better, they regulate their emotions better and it’s a stress buster. Mental health is very important, and they’re so stressed out – and music can just charge you up in such a way and give you a lot of balance.
So, what do you want to start now, next for the Nirvana community?
We are going to open up singing for everybody. They can come and sing, I’m just going to announce it. We’re going to start community choirs in Nirvana. This will be a combination of online and offline. We would like to introduce music to those who are probably hesitating or not coming forward, like I said every house in Nirvana should learn music – whether Western or Indian or anything. We do Indian music and Western music. And we have so much talent in Nirvana. Not just our students, but even adults and senior citizens. But they need to know that music requires commitment. We can only teach those who are committed. It’s not like you come for one month and you stop and then come for one month. We only have long term programs. Our programs are very affordable. Because it may be long term but overall, it’s a fraction of what you eventually gain.
