SAIIER 2020:Kuilai Creative Centre
Kuilai Creative Centre
Entity::Kuilai Creative Centre (formerly Kuilappalayam Cultural Centre), provides various kinds of activities to the villagers, Aurovilians, Newcomers, Visitors, Guests and for everyone to maintain and strengthen the better relationship between them and us.
Our vision:
- To connect the beneficial influence of Aurovilian philosophy and activities with the Tamil culture – and for our centre to be a place where the two cultures will integrate.
- We would like to build a bridge between Auroville and our villages, connecting people with many different activities.
- We believe that this would fulfil the Mother’s wish to attend to the development and welfare of local village people.
Activities of the year:
We provided valuable and useful extracurricular activities to the villagers, Aurovilians, Newcomers, and everyone, including Silambam (martial art), Bharatha Naattiyam (classical dance), Music, Fine art, Evening Tuition, Hip-hop dance and more. All these activities were to help and support the participants to de-stress from their study tensions, home stresses, and work strains or from any other sort of pressures, to have a better concentration on their tasks than before.
Our Library functioned as a daytime activity for the public and this was open from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm and 1:30pm to 5pm. Some people, mostly students from our surroundings, came to borrow books for reading at home and returned them back to our library. Parents, students and others also wished to utilize this facility to improve their learning, knowledge and skills. This year, our exercise was also to record the data and to notice how best the library could be activated well for the users in the future. This will be an ongoing experimentation for us.
Silambam led by Ajeethkumar took place on Sundays from 10:15 to 11:30 am. Hip-hop by Vijay was held regularly twice a week. Bharatha Nattiyam was on Saturdays from 4pm to 5pm, by Ramya and Vanitha (Aurovilians). And Evening Tuition was continued and taken care by Divya and Subithra.
Children’s Day was celebrated with plenty of activities on the 14th of November, 2019, having more than 100 participants from Aikiyam, Yatra, Kuilappalayam Govt. school, Roy’s boarding and Kuilappalayam Trust school. The children took part in many different games and competitions during the whole day, and some performances in the evening with some snacks and food.
We celebrated Pongal, Diwali, Saraswati pooja, and Ganesh pooja.
Outcomes:
Around 30 students per day from the village and Auroville attended Tuition to get help with their homework. The weekend activities, Silambam, Hip-hop and Bharatha Naattiyam, had 5 to 10 participants per activity including village kids and Auroville kids. These groups were created according to the participants' own favourite activities, expressions of skills and demonstrations of talents. Silambam was especially concentrated, where it took many layers of trials on teaching it innovatively using various tools and methods. The participants felt thankful that they were benefitted from the nearby distance of the Centre and could have the opportunity to join these activities.
When our participants heard about the celebration time of Auroville and the Divine Mother, they shared their wishes to also take part. So from next year onwards our participants will be taken to Auroville Birthday week celebrations and to some of our Auroville events.
Reflections:
Most meaningful this year was seeing the increased number of participants from the village and Auroville for every activity. It was a big surprise and the most meaningful success that we had felt.
Most of the challenges we faced were: time coincidence with not enough space (overlapping activities); transportation problems specially in the evenings when children come from home and return back, because of dogs on the streets, darkness around everywhere, etc.; and insufficient financial support.
Conclusion:
Continuation of the current activities and adding up some more extracurricular activities are the major goals for us in the upcoming year.
Due to increasing amount of activities, we may be in need of couple of classrooms or another big hall on the top of our present building in the future.