“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this, may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us–or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”

James Baldwin “Notes on the House of Bondage” 1980.

The second edition of Chai, Kappi & Jugaad is an invitation to collectively re-draw maps to worlds where children can thrive in unconditional love and pursue their wildest aspirations. A world where there is no violence, no practices of shaming, guilting and punishment. A world that witnesses children in their vitality and fullness of life rather than reducing them into thin singular narrow false identity conclusions by report cards, assessment forms, bad behaviours, psychiatric diagnosis, score cards, by their position on the caste pyramid, or reductive gender norms.

A world where children know in their body that everything they imagine is possible to achieve and a world where we do everything in our capacities to make these possibilities real.

The question we will hold close to our hearts at the conference will be this :

What ideas, practices, routes and unlearnings will leads us in directions where children can live freely who they are, author stories of their own choosing, and grow into the possibilities they hold close to their hearts?