Hridya Ramakrishna is twelve. She was born in England and went to school here until she was seven. Since then she has boarded at a school in the forests of South India, where she studies, practises martial arts and helps plant trees. She is coming home.
More about me
8
My age when I wrote to the Prime Minister of India about saving soil.
Hindustani vocal · Bharatanatyam
[TBC: link to an unlisted video of her singing]
England ⇄ South India
Two homes, twice a year.
Kalaripayattu is a martial art from Kerala, one of the oldest in the world. I have trained in it at school for [TBC] years. The part nobody tells you is that most of it is not fighting. It is standing still when you want to move, and going back to the beginning when you get it wrong. I am not the strongest in my group but I am stubborn, and in Kalari stubborn counts for a lot.
I sing Hindustani classical music and I dance Bharatanatyam, which is a South Indian classical dance. I have performed at Pongal, Ganesh Chaturthi, Janmashtami, Holi, Guru Purnima and Mahashivaratri, and I once sang a patriotic song in several languages at once for Independence Day. Singing in front of a few hundred people used to terrify me. It does not any more, which is probably the most useful thing school has given me.
Save Soil is a campaign to stop the world's farmland dying. Soil needs organic content to stay alive, and across the world it is running out. If it keeps going we cannot grow enough food. When I was eight I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of India asking him to bring in laws to protect it. I sang The Soil Song on stage with Machel Montano. I have planted trees with Project Green Hands and written a poem about what soil means to me. It is the first thing I ever cared about that was bigger than me.
Sanskrit is my best subject. It is a very old language and almost nothing in it is wasted. The first thing I ever performed at school was the Guru Paduka Stotram, when I was eight. I like it because it is difficult in a tidy way: if you learn the rules properly the language does what you expect, which is more than you can say for English spelling.
Isha Home School is a residential school in South India, on a thirty acre campus surrounded by forest. It teaches the ICSE syllabus, which is the Indian national curriculum examined by CISCE and taught entirely in English. Pupils sit their ICSE examinations at the end of Class 10, at about sixteen, so it lines up closely with GCSE.
What makes it different is not the syllabus. It is a deliberately gadget-free school: no personal phones, no tablets, shared computers for work only. Most of the teachers are volunteers who left other careers to teach, so the classes are taught by people who chose to be in the room. The school describes its aim as the natural blossoming of children rather than the gathering of information, and in practice that means a lot of music, art, sport and time outdoors alongside the academic work.
Pupils meet people from every walk of life, from farmers and craftspeople to people running national organisations. It is a boarding school, so the children cook, clean, resolve their own arguments and look after younger ones.
| ICSE (her school) | England | |
|---|---|---|
| Exam board | CISCE | AQA, Edexcel, OCR and others |
| Language of teaching | English throughout | English |
| Main exam | ICSE at end of Class 10 | GCSE at end of Year 11 |
| Age at that exam | About 16 | About 16 |
| Subjects carried | Usually more, with English and a second language compulsory | Usually fewer, chosen at option time |
| Known for | Breadth, and unusually strong English | Depth in the chosen subjects |
I have never been taught in any language but English, and I have never dropped a subject, so I am used to carrying a lot at once.
If you are from a school and would like to know more, my parents are the best people to write to. They read everything before I do.
Ramakrishna Dharmarajan