The Forum for the Welfare of Senior Citizens at GK-2 conducts a program titled `Talk over a Cup of Tea` – TKT in short – which is a unique initiative that provides a platform to the Forum members to brainstorm on various topics that could be relevant to fulfill their intellectual needs as senior citizens. I had initially started this program after spending six decades healing and dealing with people in Delhi and abroad. Gradually I began to focus ‘on the Mind’. This meant sharing and exploring the inner stories of people and how these played a vital role for them.
The seniors in our Forum are a happy active group of men and women dealing with their lives by singing, dancing, picnicking and a lot more. It was a shift for me from living with the inner workings of others` minds to my own at that time. Along with the physical pleasures it became meaningful for me to know about them closely too.
This was then when this ‘talking group’ started with some like-minded seniors and Manoj Kumar joined me to support me as a fresh senior in this venture. Together we worked to take the program to its next level. This discussion based program has now evolved to provide a holistic opportunity for the members to interact on issues that could be social or personality driven that may influence their physical and mental well-being. The program methodology runs through three stages with all the stages complementing one another. In the initial stage, the members self-introspect on key moments of their life journey that have shaped up their persona and identify and hone their latent strengths to effectively face the life ahead. Having done so, the members study their immediate community/society in the next phase so as to appreciate the issues relevant to them as also the approaches to deal with these issues by learning from the experiences of the other members.
The final phase deals with providing members a proper understanding of the external environment which stretches beyond our immediate surroundings. This phase also widens the learning horizon of the members. All the three phases run cyclically in a recurrent manner to achieve the spiral of intellectual growth for the members. We hope the program continues to scale newer heights through enhancement of the learning and development needs of the forum members.
