To The Motherland: My Trip to Shanti Bhavan: Music Videos, Goldman Sachs, and More

Last weekend was one of the best experiences I’ve had so far at SB. On Saturday, I went to Hosur with the choir to help them film their music video, and had a blast. The kids got up early in the morning and dressed up – the girls looked great, and I tied the ties of almost every boy because they didn’t know what they were doing.

Choir group pic before leaving for Hosur!

A pic for the boys

Men in Black

Once we got to Hosur, they must have performed the song (If You Lead by Carole King) at least 40 times over the course of the day, shooting at various locations throughout the city. When I say ‘various locations,’ I don’t mean secluded parts of Hosur that were made for a large group to gather together and sing; instead, we inserted ourselves right into the middle of the city and made some bold moves to get the unbelievable shots that Yazmany, the filmmaker, wanted.

We started at the Hindu temple overlooking Hosur, then moved on to another temple whose entrance was the mouth of a lion.

Couldn't ask for a better view

In front of the lion's mouth

How many bunny ears can fit on one head?

Me and Anjali!

We took a break for lunch, when the girls decided that I deserved to be tied to a tree with their dupattas. I went along until I realized they were actually tying the knots tightly – it took me about five minutes to work my way out of there.

#bollywood

The dupatta around the neck was pretty intense

Apprehensive

Later on, we moved into the actual streets of the city, grabbed a cow which was passing by, and put it into the video. We also filmed on a statue of Gandhi and blocked traffic in the city square for what seemed like a half mile.

A day in the life

Staredown

Turns out filming in the middle of an intersection will cause a slight traffic issue...

Right as we finished singing in rickshaws and then a random corner shop, my camera finally died, so I unfortunately don’t have a picture of what might have been the best moment of the day: on the way home, we stopped at a village to sing, and one of the old village women, who must have been at least 75, came up and started dancing with the volunteers to the song. Hilarious? Yes. Awesome? Most definitely.

Singing in rickshaws!

Swerve.

The soloists taking over a corner store

Sunday was another great but exhausting experience, as the OSA (on-site administrator) Mohit and I went to Bangalore to do interview prep with SB grads who are currently in college. I’m taking them (along with the current 11^th and 12^th grade business students) to the Goldman Sachs office in Bangalore this upcoming Saturday for a series of workshops and a golden opportunity to walk into the laps of HR and hopefully get some internships. Since this is such an unbelievable chance for them, we spent a solid seven hours drilling and practicing interview skills with the grads, and have been doing similar things on campus for the last couple of weeks. One of the grads from SB’s first graduating class, Stella, just started working at Goldman Sachs, so she brought a really valuable perspective that helped us figure out what message to send the kids.

On another note, she and another first batch graduate, Shiba, who currently works at Mercedes-Benz, were two of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. Coming from where they did and turning themselves into the incredible people they are, opening the world up for themselves in the process, is truly inspiring. They were pretty quiet throughout the day and took a backseat to Mohit and I because we were running the session, which felt a little weird – in reality, they and the other SB grads who are going on or will go on to do big things in the world are real-life heroes to me.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the Goldman trip on Saturday, because not only are we taking them to GS, but afterwards we’re surprising the 11^th and 12^th graders with KFC and Krispy Kreme donuts, which will be a huge hit; I can’t wait to see their faces when they realize what is going on.

To shift gears a little bit, teaching has been going well, but my 11^th grade kids still don’t have books for econ and commerce so that makes it a little more challenging, especially when it comes to giving them homework. For now, they need to focus on Goldman as well as school, so it’s not that bad, but hopefully the book order comes in soon otherwise it’s going to be really hard for them to study for their upcoming monthly tests.

That’s about all I have for now, but I’ll definitely be writing later this week with news about Goldman and more updates about general SB life. Lastly, as if this post wasn't picture-heavy enough already, here are some more miscellaneous shots from the past week!