Our Story
It all started when we (Hema & Prakash Gudnavar and Namrata & Vishal Bhatt) chose Aarohi for our daughters when Aarohi started in 2009. Aarohi triggered our journey towards understanding education fundamentally.
Few years later, Hema and Prakash dived into farming (weekends) while Namrata & Vishal joined (full time) Aarohi and amable Geniekids respectively. We all had interesting experiences, some as group, some as individuals. Each of us derived our own unique learning from these experiences. In many cases, we all witnessed the same events but, each had a different perspective and a different learning – same environment, different choices and different learning.
While we two families continued to interact regularly, we seemed to have different paths. Sometime later though, fate decided to intersect lives of the two families. Around Sept’2014, Aarohi shared it’s plans to close the city center. Our desire to have an Aarohi like center in city led us towards starting BeMe.
Hence BeMe is primarily inspired by Aarohi. Also, as individuals, we have been picking some more stones on the way. Sudbury Valley School is another strong source of inspiration for us. At the same time, our personalities have been shaped by some other individuals and groups – Summerhill, Landmark Education, Osho, J.Krishnamurty, Mahatma Gandhi and John Holt are few to name. Three of us have also spent ~10+ years of our lives in corporates where targets and predictability are important and where, people are frequently trained by other people about how to work with people.
One of the questions we often face is: “What philosophy is BeMe based on?” Given our background shared above (in brief), we definitely bring the influence of many of these sources, especially Aarohi and sudbury but, what lies at the centre of BeMe’s working is child. BeMe is and will be whatever is the need of the child at BeMe.