The Spirit of Art

There’s an silence in the room akin to one when strangers meet for the first time.

A group of twenty five young students look at me expectantly. They are here for a drawing and Illustration workshop and I am here to instill a love for this creative art in them!

The setting is beautiful. Lush green lawns, towering trees, spotless cleanliness and blue-hued mountains at a distance. Acres and acres of it.

The Himalayan Institute in Jolly Grant, Dehradun is a remarkable organisation. Its the vision of Swami Rama that has taken shape here in a physical form.

I was honored to be invited here to see their Rural Development Institute and spend an entire morning with some of the students talking art and exploring creativity through illustrations.

After the extremely satisfying session, I was taken for a leisurely tour of the grounds book stores and meditation hall. This was followed by a delicious meal at the dining hall.

To experiemce the iconic Himalayan Institute and see the amount of work being done in various fields by teams of dedicated individuals was truly heartening.

I had read the sublime book, Living with the Himalayan Masters, by Swami Rama, many years back.

Little did I know that years later I would be walking down the paths that he must have traversed at some point!

Such a singular honour.

#art #creativity #connectingpeople ##himalayaninstitute #rdi