We save posts, forward reels, store screenshots, hoping the next insight is the one that finally fixes the mealtime or the meltdown.

Here is the strange thing that keeps happening to me.

Almost every time I find something that sounds genuinely smart, I realise, my wife, Pankhuri is already doing it.

I was reading How Children Learn, a classic by John Holt from 1967.

Holt’s point, made across the whole book, children learn by living real life, alongside adults, not by being given a pretend, kid-sized imitation of it.

They learn by watching adults do real things and being allowed to join in.

He even notes that children who aren’t shut away in school all day get to see their parents actually work, and to take part in it.

This is exactly how Pankhuri has been designing the days for Tara-Tashi.

They work independently as we adults do.

Stress is something we humans take on; it isn’t something that simply exists.

For a long time, I wondered how Pankhuri is able to be the ideal parent- which in my personal opinion is what a child needs.

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Perfect versus ideal

First, a word I want to be careful with.

I am not calling Pankhuri a perfect parent. There is no such thing.

We all lose our patience. We have days we are not proud of. Every parent carries their own follies, and anyone selling you “perfect” is really selling you guilt.

But I have started to believe there is such a thing as an ideal parent. The difference matters.

A perfect parent gets everything right. That is impossible.

An ideal parent works from the right place. That is very much possible.

The right place

The right place is the foundation. First principles.

Think about why any parenting advice works, when it works. It is never because of the trick itself. It is because underneath the trick sits a basic truth about children. Once you understand that truth, children will listen to you.

The hack is the packaging. The truth is the product.

Most of us, me included, collect packaging.

Pankhuri starts at the truth.

When something isn’t working with Tara and Tashi, she doesn’t search for what other parents did. She asks why. Why is this happening? What does a three-year-old actually need right now? What is the honest deal here?

Once you actually hold that truth, half the internet’s advice becomes obvious.

You don’t need the script for getting your toddler to eat, because you already know the deal has to be honest and the promise has to come true.

Eat now, and you will have the energy to play. And the play always, always happens.

That is one truth doing the work of a hundred saved posts.

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Why the girls listen

This is the part people notice when they meet us.

Tara and Tashi listen to their mother.

Not because they are scared of her. Not because a reward is waiting.

Every insight I stumble on and excitedly bring home turns out to be some corner of that same foundation, dressed up with a new name.

She got there without the name. She just kept asking why and kept the promises.

Those two words were running our home before either of us had read them anywhere.

What this frees you from

Here is what I find genuinely freeing about this, and why I am writing it down.

You can stop collecting.

You don’t need a hundred more screenshots.

You need a small number of foundations you actually believe, and the patience to act from them every single day.

The advice industry cannot sell you that, because there is nothing to sell. It is thinking, and it is yours.

So, when people ask us the secret to being an ideal parent, this is the honest answer.

Stop hunting for answers.

Start asking why the answers work.

The moment you can explain the why, you don’t need the hack anymore.

You need what you already have: your own judgment, and your child in front of you.

There is no perfect parent. There never was.

But the ideal one might just be you, thinking for yourself.

If you sit with this and find your own foundation, come tell us what it is.

We are learning too :)

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We are building an ecosystem where the learning happens beyond walls. The best way to understand that is by experiencing it yourself.

Curious? Call or write to us.

📞 Call/message us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

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What to read next:

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is forcing it on them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP (Sanjay Gandhi National Park)? Or curious about how we approach learning at home?

Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Call/message us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

The mother said it the way you announce good news.

She was glowing. And it is good news, I told her. The numbers feel like proof that the child is learning.

The conversation drifted, the way these do, towards the bigger question.

What are we actually watching for at this age.

What does doing well even look like in a small child.

I told her the thing we keep coming back to. Independence.

She looked surprised when I said Tara and Tashi get themselves ready, start to finish, on their own.

There is a fixed order to it.

They fetch their towels.

They pick their clothes and lay them on the bed.

They bathe themselves.

They come out, do their own oil and lotion, and get dressed.

The only thing they still need us for is their hair.

And even that, only if we want it neat.

With the short haircut Pankhuri gave them, they can push in a hairband and call it done.

People hear this and assume it is a personality thing.

Some kids are just independent. We don’t think that is it.

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You stop doing things fast for them. You stop finishing the task because you are in a hurry.

You let them take their time and figure it out, even when your own hands are itching to just do it for them.

Our kids are growing up in a world where a machine will answer any question before they finish asking it and do the hard part of almost any task if they let it.

Last Saturday, on our weekly trips to Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the girls took their cycles.

There is a short patch from the entry down to our usual break spot.

Fifty metres, maybe. We could have covered it in ten minutes. It took us an hour.

Because they wanted to ride it themselves.

At one point a cycle got stuck on the side of the road, and they spent a good ten minutes working out how to get it back onto the road.

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We stood there and let them.

An hour to cross fifty metres looks like wasted time. It is not.

That hour is the lesson. They build so many neurons during that experience.

The next time a wheel gets stuck, they already know what to do, because they did it once with nobody rescuing them.

They will cry about it sometimes. You stay close, you cheer them on, and you let them try anyway.

Counting to a hundred is lovely. But I will take a child who can think and work independently over a small academic milestone, any day.

Two parents, twin daughters, no manual.

Come Join In

We are building an ecosystem where the learning happens beyond walls. The best way to understand that is by experiencing it yourself.

Curious? Call or write to us.

📞 Call us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

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What to read next:

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is forcing it on them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Call us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

Actually, it is one of the most common questions we get.

So let me answer it with what happened in our house last Sunday.

Tara and Tashi woke up on their own, early as always.

By then, we had already spent a long stretch of the morning outside.

Cycling. Moving. Breathing open air.

Doing the kind of thing that makes everyone a little hungry and a little tired in a good way.

Then we came home.

And without any instruction, both of them went to their desks, picked up their tracing books, and began to work.

I know this may sound like a small thing.

It is a small thing.

That is why it matters.

We usually think discipline has to be pushed into children from the outside.

Sit here. Do this. Finish that. Pay attention. Don’t talk. Don’t move.

And then, when a child resists, we treat the resistance as proof that children do not naturally want to learn.

But what if we inverted the script a little?

What if the job is not always to make them study?

What if the job is to build a home where the wanting has enough room to appear?

That, more than anything, is what these years have taught us.

The other day, while tracing, they had a long and very serious conversation about an owl.

Why it sleeps during the day.

Why it cannot see properly when the sun is up.

How, at night, when the rest of us are sleeping, it goes out hunting for food.

And how angry it must get when it cannot find any.

We did not explain this to them.

They built it between themselves.

One idea.
Then another.
Then a correction.
Then a theory.

The tracing continued through all of it.

This is the part I think many of us miss.

The talking is not always a distraction from the learning.

Sometimes the talking is the learning.

Language. Logic. Imagination. Memory. Negotiation. Attention. All of it is happening there, while the pencil moves slowly across a dotted line.

You may think we got lucky. Maybe Tara and Tashi are just like this.

And yes, every child has their own nature. Of course.

But what a short clip does not show is the months behind it.

The early mornings.

The repetition.

The patience.

The hundred small moments when we stopped ourselves from correcting too quickly.

The hundred small moments when we did not take over.

The hundred small moments when doing less was actually the harder thing.

I am not pretending we get this right every day.

We don’t.

There are days when I interrupt too much.

Days when I want the line to be neater.

Days when I forget that their pace is not mine.

But this Sunday was one of those days that quietly tells you: something is working.

Not because they did something extraordinary.

They did something very ordinary.

They sat.
They traced.
They talked.
They stayed.

And they were happy doing it.

That was enough.

They need room. To just be and choose.

I guess that is what these years have taught us.

Discipline is not only the ability to obey a schedule.

Sometimes discipline is a child returning to something because it has become hers.

That feels like a childhood worth building.

There are days you feel proud to be a parent, and this was one of them.

We were not proud because our daughters had done something extraordinary.

They had done something completely ordinary, entirely on their own, and they were happy doing it.

If that is not a childhood worth building for them, then what is.

If you want to understand how a calm, child-led home actually comes together, come and talk to us.

We are always happy to share what we have figured out, and what we are still figuring out.

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What to read next:

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is forcing it on them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Call us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

If you wake up at seven, she said, we will not be able to go to the National Park. So, you have to get up at five on Saturday, not your normal time.

She is not even four.

That small exchange, overheard by accident, is the clearest proof we have that something is working.

We go to #SGNP every Saturday morning.

It is a two-hour drive there and back, and we have learned to guard our ritual fiercely.

Just the four of us, some music playing, and a forest waiting at the end of the road.

This week, they brought their cycles along.

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Watching them get ready has become its own quiet lesson.

They climb into their rear seats on their own. They pull the belts across and click them shut without a glance in our direction.

The long drive used to turn their stomachs, and even that they have learned to manage by themselves now. We used to do every bit of this for them.

These days we mostly just drive.

Yesterday, while driving back, one of their pants got wet due to spilt water, and they changed it on their own. This was all while I was driving and Pankhuri was in the co-driver seat. They unclasped their seat belts, changed their dress, and clasped their seat belts with lot of effort, ‘uhhumm’, ‘nahi ho raha (it’s not possible)’, ‘aap kar do (pls do it for me)’, ‘aarrgghh!’ and finally, ‘yay, mumma, maine khud se kiya’ (I did it on my own!).

And after that, they slept like this :)

It’s amazing what children are capable of, when you give them the freedom to explore and expand.

Then there is the park itself. It calms you from somewhere deep, somewhere underneath your thoughts.

The pace of everything slows down. All week the city races, and then on Saturday, under the trees, it finally exhales.

We walk and we run. We stop to watch the monkeys fling themselves from one branch to the next.

The girls ask their endless questions, and instead of handing them a quick answer, we let them sit with it and reach for their own.

Some of what they come up with is better than anything we would have said.

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None of this arrived quickly.

The independence we see now, the seatbelts, the settled stomachs, the easy way they handle their cycles, was built ‘ONE Saturday- AT A TIME’ across more than one year now.

The same drive. The same forest. The same small responsibilities handed back to them, week after week, until they owned each one completely.

We never really pushed them. We just kept showing up and kept trusting that they could do more than their age suggested.

They proved us right and then went further. Now they are the first ones awake. Some Saturdays it is two small voices, at an unreasonable hour, telling us it is time to go. :)

So, we get up.

We would not miss these mornings for anything.

And it turns out, neither would they.

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The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is forcing it on them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Call us: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

For thirty days this summer, our family split up and went on two separate paths.

Pankhuri went one way. The girls and I went the other.

It’s never easy to say goodbye for a prolonged absence, but we knew the reason and that gave us strength.

I will be honest. I did not know how a month apart would feel. But, confident from previous such experiences, I was optimistic that it would get managed.

Pankhuri was going deep in Kathak.

A month-long immersion in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Guess where :)

Thirty days of riyaaz, rhythm, discipline, exhaustion, discovery, and dance. Thirty days to go as deep as she could into the one art that is fully hers.

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Meanwhile, Tara, Tashi, and I went for the road.

Mumbai to Delhi, Ghaziabad, Roorkee, Dehradun, Panchkula, Chandigarh and then back to Mumbai. Meeting and spending time with our closest family.

While Pankhuri went deep into her dance, we went deep into our roots.

Now, here is what nobody tells you about family.

We are taught that proximity means togetherness.

So, you would think a month apart would cost us something.

It did the opposite.

Because Pankhuri was away, the three of us could not glide through the life like we used to with her being around.

There was no other parent to share the responsibility, when tired.

No one else to absorb the sudden hunger, the window-seat negotiations, the bathroom stops, the repeated questions, the tears that came without warning, the jokes that made sense only to the three of us.

There was just us.

And in that gap, Tara and Tashi and I became our own small unit.

We had our own jokes.
Our own rhythm.
Our own thousand kilometres of conversation.

Some of it was serious.
Some of it was nonsense.
Some of it was the same question asked in seven different ways.

Meanwhile, far away, Pankhuri was becoming more herself too.

A dancer, finding and creating herself with each passing day.

There is something powerful about children seeing their mother go away to learn. To start something again. To be vulnerable yet confident. To belong to something that is hers, outside the daily machinery of family life.

Maybe Tara and Tashi will not remember all the details.

Maybe they will only remember that Mumma went to dance.

That may be enough.

And maybe they will remember that while Mumma was dancing, Papa drove them across half the country and listened to their stories.

So maybe closeness is not always about staying in the same place.

Sometimes a family grows by letting each person go all the way into the thing that is theirs and trusting the love to hold across the distance.

When we all got back together, something had shifted.

Pankhuri carried new dance in her.

I carried thirty days of the best conversations I have had with my daughters.

We were the same four people.

We were not quite the same family.

We were a closer one.

Sometimes a family grows because each person is allowed to go fully into the thing that is calling them.

Sometimes love becomes stronger because it is trusted across distance.

You leave full.

You come back fuller, satisfied, happier.

The pieces fit differently afterward.

Somehow, better.

As a dad, this was the most fulfilling month I can remember.

We had to drive a thousand kilometres apart to find it.

P.S. Go deep into your own thing. Trust the people you love to do the same. Then come home. :)

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The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is scheduling it for them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

For more than 3.5 years, as a father, I’ve done almost everything that a dad can and should do.

But tying my twin toddler’s hair is something that I’ve always found ways to outsource.

I have found easier hairstyles and have given them nicknames to make them sound cool and escape from TT’s demands for doing their hair the way Mumma does it.

I have always marvelled at the intricate hairstyles that Pankhuri would make for TT, but it was something where you would know the beginning and the end, but the process just gets lost.

I even tried learning the process a few times - I would observe Pankhuri spending 10 minutes in zen mode with each of them, but I would always get lost and found an excuse not to try it that day.

Finally, the day came where I could not escape from the battle anymore. Pankhuri was to travel, and TT needed their neat, intricate hairstyles which they are used to.

So, the training began…

After a few days of practice, I figured out the way of making a good, neat hairstyle with ‘two chotis’ which meet TT’s standard.

Now, my hands know where to go. I am able to part their hair down the middle in one clean line. Sectioned. Plaited. Tied. Repeat the process again.

The way they would feel their two chotis after the process and then smile; this feeling has no parallel. It’s one where I feel genuine connection with them.

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The part I want to write down before I forget it

Here is what nobody tells you about the boring tasks of parenting. When you actually start doing one yourself, the task changes. It stops being a chore. It becomes a small window where it is just you and your kid, and you start noticing things.

I noticed that Tara hums when she sits still. A little tune she makes up while I work on her hair.

I noticed that Tashi tilts her head back without me asking, almost like she has been waiting her turn.

I noticed which of them has thicker hair and which one has longer hair.

These are tiny things. None of them matter on their own. But I had missed three years of them. Three years of small, specific knowledge about my own daughters, because the task had a name on it and that name wasn’t mine.

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What we hand off when we hand off the work

We outsource a lot of parenting. Some of it we have to. Working parents don’t have the luxury of doing every single thing themselves, and there is no medal for trying. But some tasks we hand off on autopilot. Because somebody else does it slightly better. Because we’ve decided we are not the type of person who is good at that thing. Hair. Feeding. Bedtime stories. Bath time.

We hand the task off. And we don’t notice what we are also handing off with it.

The ten minutes of humming. The tilt of the head. The slow accumulation of knowing your child a little better at the end of the day than at the start.

The real joy hides inside the work

The two chotis taught me that the real joy of parenting often lives inside the work, not around it. Slowing down to do something with my kids, even something as small as a braid, gave me ten minutes with each of them that I would have otherwise missed.

Ten minutes of quiet. Ten minutes of humming. Ten minutes a day adds up.

I am not an artist. I will not get better at this beyond a certain point. The chotis will always be a little uneven. The parts will sometimes wander. The girls will eventually do their own hair and roll their eyes at the photos.

But for now, every morning, I make two small pieces of art. Something I can call my own :)

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The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe children learn best when nobody is scheduling it for them. When their curiosity has room to wander. When they are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. Now we are sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path, but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

Think about it for a second. Really think.

If someone handed you a blank sheet right now and said, “draw a feeling,” what would you reach for?

What colours, shapes, textures would your mind pull from?

Whatever it is, it would come from something you’ve lived. Something you’ve seen, touched, felt, tasted, heard. Your brain doesn’t create from nothing. It creates from everything it’s been exposed to.

Now think about a child.

A child who has spent their early years inside four walls. A screen in front of them. A classroom around them. Printed worksheets. Colouring books with thick black outlines that scream “stay inside the lines.”

That’s the raw material their brain has to work with. That’s the ceiling of their imagination.

Now think about a different child.

A child who has watched deer graze at sunrise.

Who has felt mud between their fingers.

Who has heard birds they can’t name but still recognise by sound.

Who has sat in silence in a forest and realised, that the forest isn’t silent at all.

Hand that child a blank sheet and some colours, and something entirely different shows up.

Not a colouring book filled neatly inside the lines. Something that’s completely theirs. Born from what they’ve lived, not what they’ve been taught.

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A Saturday morning at SGNP

This Saturday, we were at Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Our usual. 6 AM. Trails, trees, the early morning air that makes you feel like Mumbai is a different city entirely.

We’d carried some colours and paper. Nothing fancy. No easels, no art setup. Just a few sheets and a basic paint set.

Tara sat down near the lake. Deer were grazing just a few feet away. Sunlight was filtering through the tree canopy. Birds were doing their thing overhead.

Tara started painting. Strokes of green. Patches of brown. Dots and shapes that didn’t look like anything recognisable to an adult eye scanning for perfection.

And then she explained it. In her own words. At 3 years old.

She wasn’t trying to draw a perfect scenery. She was capturing what it felt like to sit near one. The colours of the forest. The feeling of being surrounded by something alive and breathing.

The experience taught her that.

The question nobody asks

We spend a lot of time, energy, and money giving children what we call “the best education.”

But what do we actually mean by that?

Usually we mean a school with a good name. A building with the right facilities. A curriculum that looks impressive on paper.

Maybe some extracurriculars thrown in. Art class on Wednesdays. Music on Fridays. A structured, controlled, timetabled version of learning.

And it works. For a very specific, narrow definition of “works.”

Children learn to follow instructions. They learn to perform on demand. They learn what the right answer is and when to give it.

But do they learn to observe?

Do they learn to feel?

Do they learn to sit with something they don’t understand and stay curious instead of anxious?

Do they learn to look at a deer and want to paint, not because someone told them to, but because something inside them moved?

That’s a different kind of education entirely.

Education is exposure

Here’s what we’ve come to believe after three years of raising Tara and Tashi.

The richness of what a child sees, touches, hears, and feels in their early years becomes the raw material for everything they’ll ever create, think, and become.

Every conversation they overhear.

Every texture they touch.

Every animal they see up close.

Every sunrise they witness.

Every rainstorm they stand in instead of running from.

Every kitchen they’re allowed into.

Every market they walk through.

Every forest trail they stumble along.

All of it goes in. All of it becomes building blocks.

And later, when they need to express themselves, to create, to solve, to imagine, to think differently, they’ll reach into that reservoir. If it’s full, they’ll have plenty to draw from. If it’s empty, they’ll reach in and find nothing but what a screen showed them.

The early years aren’t about teaching children things. They’re about showing children the world.

That’s the real investment. Not tuition fees. Not branded school bags. Not the “right” preschool with a two-year waitlist.

Time. And exposure.

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What this looks like in practice

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. You don’t need to book a flight to Iceland (though we did that too, at 22 months, and it was worth every sleepless hour of travel).

It can be this:

Take them to the park. Not the one with the plastic slides. The one with actual trees, mud, bugs, and birds.

Take them to the vegetable market. Let them touch the tomatoes. Let them smell the coriander. Let them watch the vendor weigh things on an old-fashioned scale.

Take them to the kitchen. Let them crack an egg. Let them knead dough. Let them see where food actually comes from before it lands on their plate.

Take them to the beach at 6 AM instead of 6 PM. Different light. Different sounds. Different creatures in the sand. Same beach, completely new experience.

Let them get bored. Boredom is where creativity lives. When there’s nothing to consume, a child starts to create.

And most importantly, let them ask questions you don’t have answers to. That’s not a failure of your parenting.

That’s proof that their mind is working exactly as it should.

Back to the blank sheet

Tara didn’t need an art class to paint something meaningful. She needed something to feel.

The deer gave her that. The forest gave her that. The quiet, unhurried Saturday morning at SGNP gave her that.

And when she explained her painting in her own words, she wasn’t performing. She wasn’t reciting.

She was sharing what lived inside her because of what she’d experienced outside.

That’s the kind of expression you can’t teach. You can only create the conditions for it.

So the next time someone asks you what school your child goes to, or which classes they’re enrolled in, or what “structured learning” looks like in your home, maybe the answer is simpler than you think.

We take them to the forest. We take them to the river. We take them to the market. We take them to the kitchen.

We let them watch. We let them touch. We let them feel.

And then we hand them a blank sheet and let her mind run free.

Everything after that is theirs.

SGNP. Every Saturday. 6 AM. This is where our children learn.

Why we keep coming back

We’ve written about SGNP before. About the ritual of it. About the slowness. About how a 100-minute drive can reset your entire week.

We started coming here because something in us knew that our children needed mornings like this. We needed mornings like these. Mornings where the world is quiet and big and full of things to discover. Mornings where the only agenda is to show up and see what happens.

And every Saturday, without fail, something happens. Something small and unremarkable and completely unforgettable.

Today it was two girls painting a lake they couldn’t possibly capture on paper. And that’s okay. Because the lake wasn’t asking to be captured. It was asking to be seen.

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The invitation (same as always)

If you’re in Mumbai and you’ve been thinking about starting a weekend ritual with your kids, here’s our suggestion: don’t overthink it.

Pick a place. Go early. Bring some fruit. Leave the phone in your pocket for as long as you can.

You don’t need SGNP. You need a morning where nothing is planned and everything is possible.

But if you do want to join us at SGNP, you know where to find us. Every Saturday. Same trails. Same lake. Same two little girls with paint on their fingers and stories in their heads.

Come experience it. Because we just spent 800 words trying to describe it, and we still didn’t get close.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

Want to join us for a Saturday morning at SGNP? Or curious about how we approach learning at home? Reach out. We’d love to walk with you.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

We’re working parents. We also try to share our parenting journey every week. Write posts. Tell stories. Put what we’re learning into words.

But this Saturday morning at Sanjay Gandhi National Park? We don’t have the words.

Not because nothing happened. Because what happened lives in a place that language can’t quite reach.

The thing about 6 AM at SGNP

Picture this.

The sun is rising. Not the dramatic, Instagram-filter kind of sunrise. The quiet kind. The one that creeps through a canopy of trees over the lake, slow and golden, turning the water into something that doesn’t look real.

The Tyndall effect is doing its thing. Those soft beams of light cutting through the leaves, landing on the water, the trail, the faces of two little girls who are too busy running to notice how beautiful it all is.

A cool breeze moves through. Birds are doing what birds do best. Not performing. Just existing. Chirping because that’s what mornings are for.

And you’re standing there, breathing it in, and you realize: no photo will ever capture this. No caption will do it justice. No reel, no blog post, nothing.

Some things cannot be shared. They can only be experienced.

But we’ll try anyway.

Because something else happened this morning that’s worth talking about.

We jogged. Well, some of us jogged. Others ran in zigzag patterns while laughing at absolutely nothing.

There’s science behind this. Jogging releases endorphins. Your mood lifts. Your body wakes up. But the science doesn’t tell you what it feels like to be running alongside your three-year-olds on a forest trail, their little legs pumping, their faces wide open with joy, and suddenly you’re not exercising. You’re building a memory.

Not the kind you’ll remember in detail. The kind that sits in your bones. The kind that shows up years later as a feeling. A warmth. A “remember when we used to...”

That’s what jogging with your kids does. It’s not about the kilometers. It’s about the togetherness of moving through the world at the same pace.

The lake, the fruit, and the tiny artists

After the run, we found our spot by the lake.

We sat down. Cut up some fruit. And then we pulled out the art supplies.

Tara and Tashi started painting.

Not in a classroom. Not at a table. Not because someone told them to. They painted because the lake was right there, the trees were right there, the light was doing magical things, and they had paper and colors in their hands. What else would you do?

We sat there watching. Eating a watermelon. Watching two little humans try to put nature on paper. And we thought: this is it. This is the whole point.

No structured activity. No learning objective. No “developmental milestone” being ticked off. Just two children, completely absorbed, painting what they see, in a place that most adults drive past every day without stopping.

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Sticks, twigs, and the world’s best toys

The painting didn’t last forever. Because something better showed up.

Water.

Tara found a stick. Tashi found a tree branch. And suddenly the lake edge became a construction site, a spaceship launchpad, an excavation site, and a dragon’s lair. All within fifteen minutes.

They collected leaves. Sorted them by size (their idea, not ours). Dropped sticks into the water and watched them float away, narrating entire stories about where the sticks were going. “This one is going to the ocean.” “This one is going to find a fish friend.”

No toy on the market can compete with this. Nothing you buy online, nothing that lights up and makes sounds, nothing with an app attached to it.

A stick. Some water. A child’s imagination. That’s it. That’s the product.

And the energy? The sheer, boundless, can’t-sit-still energy of two kids playing with nature? You can’t manufacture that. It comes from freedom. From the permission to be loud, messy, and curious without anyone watching the clock.

Why we keep coming back

We’ve written about SGNP before. About the ritual of it. About the slowness. About how a 100-minute drive can reset your entire week.

But today felt different. Today reminded us why we started this ritual in the first place.

Not for content. Not for community building. Not for any reason we could explain on a slide.

We started coming here because something in us knew that our children needed mornings like this. We needed mornings like these. Mornings where the world is quiet and big and full of things to discover. Mornings where the only agenda is to show up and see what happens.

And every Saturday, without fail, something happens. Something small and unremarkable and completely unforgettable.

Today it was two girls painting a lake they couldn’t possibly capture on paper. And that’s okay. Because the lake wasn’t asking to be captured. It was asking to be seen.

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The invitation (same as always)

If you’re in Mumbai and you’ve been thinking about starting a weekend ritual with your kids, here’s our suggestion: don’t overthink it.

Pick a place. Go early. Bring some fruit. Leave the phone in your pocket for as long as you can.

You don’t need SGNP. You need a morning where nothing is planned and everything is possible.

But if you do want to join us at SGNP, you know where to find us. Every Saturday. Same trails. Same lake. Same two little girls with paint on their fingers and stories in their heads.

Come experience it. Because we just spent 800 words trying to describe it, and we still didn’t get close.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk. Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure. No pitch. Just a conversation between parents.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

If you’ve been following us for a while, you already know this. It’s our ritual. Our reset button. The one thing we protect no matter how busy the week gets.

But here’s the thing about SGNP. It never gives you the same Saturday twice.

The trails are the same. The entry gate is the same. The early morning mist, the familiar faces of fellow walkers, the smell of wet earth and green... all familiar. And yet, every single week, something shifts. A new perspective sneaks in. A moment catches you off guard. Something small happens that stays with you for days.

Today was one of those days.

Part 1: The Van Rani Toy Train

We’d been wanting to take Tara and Tashi on the Van Rani for a while now. For those who don’t know, Van Rani (literally “Queen of the Forest”) is SGNP’s iconic toy train. It’s been around since the 1970s and has been a part of countless Mumbai childhoods.

The train was shut down for over four years after Cyclone Tauktae damaged the tracks back in 2021. But it’s back now. And it’s better than before.

The new Van Rani runs on battery power instead of diesel, so it’s quieter and more eco-friendly. And the best part? It’s completely open-air. No glass walls. No enclosed coaches. Just you, the forest breeze on your face, and the sounds of the jungle all around you. The entire 2.3 km track has been rebuilt from scratch, including all 15 bridges along the route.

For the kids? It was pure magic.

Tara and Tashi were soaking it all in. The wind in their hair, deer walking alongside the tracks, trees rushing past on both sides.

Neither of them cared about the engineering marvel of it. They just cared that they were on a train. In a forest. With animals walking around freely.

That’s enough. That’s always enough.

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Quick practical details if you want to try it:

SGNP is open Tuesday to Sunday (closed Mondays), from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM. The toy train starts at 9:00 AM. The ticket counter is right near the toy train station, close to the boating area, so you can’t miss it. There’s a minimum number of passengers needed for the ride to start, so weekends are your best bet.

Tickets are Rs. 98 for adults and Rs. 37 for children. The train departs from Krishnagiri Station and returns to the same place, passing through the Deer Park, some bridges, and tunnels along the way. The whole ride is about 15 to 20 minutes.

Our tip: go early. Reach by 9 AM if the toy train is your goal. The first few rides of the day tend to be less crowded and the morning light through the forest canopy is gorgeous from the open coaches.

Part 2: When Deers Become Your Art Teacher

After the train ride, we did something we hadn’t planned but felt completely right in the moment.

We set up an outdoor painting session.

No easels. No reference sheets. No “draw this” instructions. Just some paper, colours, and one simple ask: feel what you see. Draw whatever you feel.

And what they could see was this. Trees everywhere. Sunlight coming through the canopy. And deer. Actual, real deer, just a few feet away, grazing like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Now think about this for a second.

Most painting classes for children happen in closed rooms. Four walls. Artificial lighting. A printed reference image taped to the board. The teacher says, “Today we draw a butterfly.” And every child draws the same butterfly.

Why?

Why do you need to paint in a closed room? Why can’t the world be your canvas?

When children paint outdoors, surrounded by the thing they’re observing, something different happens. They don’t just draw what they see. They draw what they feel. The colours change. The shapes get looser. The energy is different.

We didn’t give them direction. We didn’t correct their strokes. We didn’t tell them what to draw or how to draw it. We just sat there, watched them work, and let the forest do the teaching.

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The SGNP Perspective

Here’s what I keep coming back to after every Saturday morning at SGNP.

We live in a city that moves at a speed that makes it hard to think. Mumbai doesn’t slow down for anyone. And in that speed, we forget what a full life actually feels like.

A full life isn’t about doing more. It’s about being present for what you’re already doing.

When you sit by a pond and eat watermelon under the trees while your children paint next to deer, you’re not being unproductive. You’re not “wasting a Saturday.” You’re living the kind of life that most people scroll Instagram wishing they had.

The difference is, you just have to show up. That’s it. Drive to the park. Walk in. Let the forest do the rest.

Every Saturday at SGNP gives us something different. Some weeks it’s a conversation with a stranger who becomes a friend. Some weeks it’s watching Tara and Tashi discover a new insect. Some weeks it’s just the silence that hits you when you step past the gate and realize the city has disappeared behind you.

This week, it was a train ride and a painting session with deers. And the reminder that children don’t need walls to create. They need the world.

Something New Starting Today

Starting this week, we’re going to share our Saturday SGNP experience with you every Sunday.

Think of it as a weekly dispatch from the forest. Not a travel blog. Not a review. Just an honest account of what we experienced, what the kids did, what perspective shifted for us, and what you can take away from it for your own family.

Every Saturday at SGNP brings a new lens to look at life through. And we want to share that with you. Week after week.

So if you’re a parent in Mumbai (or anywhere, really) looking for a slower, more intentional way to spend your weekends with your kids, stay with us.

Subscribe if you haven’t already. And maybe, just maybe, join us one of these Saturdays.

The forest is always open. And it always has something to say.

See you next Sunday.

If you’re curious about our Saturday SGNP mornings or want to join us for one, reach out. We’d love to have you.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk. Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure. No pitch. Just a conversation between parents.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

Old cardboard boxes became the backbone of an art installation.

Waste plastic turned into structures the kids could paint on and destroy with colour.

A floater, some ropes, and a bit of stubbornness gave us a swing that had the girls (and honestly, the adults too) grinning from ear to ear.

Nothing was ordered online. Nothing came in shiny packaging. And that was the whole point.

The Essence of Any Celebration is Creation

Somewhere along the way, we started confusing celebrations with shopping lists. Buy the decorations. Order the outfits. Get the matching tableware. Done.

But here’s the thing. The celebrations you actually remember, they weren’t the ones where everything was perfectly bought and arranged. They were the ones where someone put thought into making something. Where the house felt alive because people built it together, not because someone clicked “Add to Cart.”

That’s what we wanted our Holi to feel like.

So, we got our hands dirty. We set up the table ourselves. Filled up balloons.

Rigged the house with installations. Because creating something with your own hands changes how you experience it.

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Process, Not Outcome

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know this is at the core of everything we do at Life of PI Square. We don’t obsess over how it looks. We care about how it felt getting there.

The art installation wasn’t Pinterest-perfect. The swing wobbled a bit. The colour table had more mess than method. And that’s exactly what made it special.

Tara and Tashi didn’t care that the boxes were recycled. They cared that they could splash paint on something massive. They cared that there was a swing they hadn’t seen before. They cared that the house felt different, exciting, like something was happening.

That’s what kids remember. Not the decor. The energy.

It’s About Being Together

We invited families over. We played with colours. We ate together. The kids went wild. The parents actually got to sit, talk and also be a child again.

No agenda. No structured activity timeline. Just people being together, celebrating in a space that was set up with intention.

And the funny part? The preparation was half the fun.

Gearing up the house, figuring out how to turn a pile of waste material into something the kids would love. That’s not the boring part before the party. That IS the party.

Joy Multiplies When You Share It with the Right People

Here’s something we’ve realized over time. You can do all of this alone as a family and it’ll still be beautiful. But when you share it with people who get it? It hits different.

The families who came over didn’t walk in and ask “why didn’t you just order decorations from Amazon?” They walked in and said “wait, you made all of this?”

And then they wanted to know how. And then their kids jumped right in alongside Tara and Tashi like it was the most natural thing in the world.

That’s what happens when you surround yourself with people who share your values. There’s no explaining. No defending your choices. No sideways looks when your kid is elbow-deep in paint on a cardboard box instead of playing with a store-bought toy.

Just people who look at your recycled-box art installation and think “this is brilliant” instead of “this is weird.”

We’ve been building this community slowly. Through our weekend SGNP walks, through home visits, through conversations that start with “we also don’t do it the conventional way.”

And every time we come together, the joy compounds. The kids feed off each other’s energy. The parents exhale a little because they’re not the odd ones out for once.

Holi could have been just playing with colours.

Instead, it became a house full of families who believe that childhood should be messy, creative, and free. And that made it ten times more memorable.

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What Holi Taught Us (Again)

Every celebration is a chance to show your kids what matters to you.

If you outsource everything, they learn that celebrations are things you buy. If you create together, they learn that celebrations are things you build.

That you can take what’s lying around, put some thought and effort into it, and turn an ordinary Tuesday into something the family talks about for weeks.

That’s what we want Tara and Tashi to grow up with. Not the memory of a perfectly decorated house. The memory of a home that came alive because everyone pitched in.

Parenting is easy when you stop trying to make everything perfect and start making it real.

Happy Holi from our family to yours.

If this resonated with you, we’d love to have you in our community. We share stories, systems, and honest conversations about raising kids with trust and intention.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk. Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure. No pitch. Just a conversation between parents.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

Not to train for a marathon. Not to tick off a checklist.

We go to do nothing. To just be. It slows down. Everything.

That’s it. That’s the whole point.

There’s something about pulling into SGNP early on a Saturday that resets everything. The city is still asleep. The air smells different. The noise in your head starts to quiet down before you’ve even stepped out of the car.

And honestly? That 40-minute drive with the family is already worth it. Windows down. No rush. No screens. Just the road and the slow build-up to something good.

What actually happens there

Nothing dramatic. And that’s what makes it special.

We walk. We jog. Sometimes we just sit.

Tara and Tashi run ahead on the trails, then stop to inspect something on the ground. A leaf. A bug. A stick that looks like a sword. They don’t need activities. The forest IS the activity.

We see turtles gliding through the lake. Monkeys swinging between branches like it’s their personal playground. Birds we can’t always name but always stop for. Deer grazing in the open spaces like they own the place (because they do).

We meet runners. Fellow families. Some have become regulars now, familiar faces we look forward to seeing. Others are new every week, curious about what we’re doing out here with two little ones so early. Some of them end up coming back the next Saturday.

That’s how a community forms. Through showing up.

The corn/watermelon spot

There’s this lake. Surrounded by trees. The kind of canopy where the Tyndall effect is in full bloom. Rays of sunlight streaming through the trees, hitting the water, the ground, the kids’ faces. It looks like something out of a painting.

We sit there and Tara-Tashi meet their ‘Corn Didi’ who gives them corn, watermelon, kurmura with love. We eat. And just... be.

No agenda. No timeline. No “okay we need to leave by 8.”

The girls eat. They watch the water. They point at things. Sometimes they just sit quietly, which if you know toddlers, you know is rare and beautiful.

This is the part people don’t see on social media. The stillness. The doing-nothing part that actually fills you up more than any planned outing ever could.

Why slowness matters

We live in a world that celebrates speed. Fast results. Quick hacks. Instant everything.

Parenting has fallen into the same trap.

Every minute needs to be “productive.” Every outing needs to be “educational.” Every experience needs to be documented, shared, validated.

But kids don’t need that. They need presence. They need parents who aren’t rushing to the next thing. They need mornings where time stretches and nobody is checking a watch.

That’s what SGNP gives us every Saturday.

It’s not about the destination. It’s not even about the walk or the jog or the animals (though those are all wonderful).

It’s about carving out a space in the week where we’re not performing parenthood. We’re just living it.

Slowly. Quietly. Together.

The ripple effect

Here’s what we didn’t expect when we started this ritual: it changed the rest of our week too.

When you have one morning that is genuinely peaceful, genuinely unplugged, genuinely slow, it becomes an anchor.

The chaos of Monday through Friday feels more manageable because you know Saturday morning is coming.

The girls feel it too. They know what Saturday means. They wake up ready. They don’t need convincing. It’s not a chore for them. It’s their thing.

And that 40-minute drive back? Usually quiet. The good kind of quiet. The kind that comes from being full, not from being tired.

An open invitation

Every Saturday, we’re at SGNP. Same time. Same trails. Same watermelon spot (most weeks).

If you’re in Mumbai and you’ve been thinking about disconnecting from the noise, even for one morning, come find us. No plan needed. No preparation required. Just show up.

Bring your kids. Bring your curiosity. Leave the rush behind.

You might be surprised what doing nothing can do.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk. Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure. No pitch. Just a conversation between parents.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

“So... why don’t you send Tara and Tashi to school?”

And honestly? My first instinct isn’t to defend our choice. It’s to ask them a question right back.

Why do you send YOUR children to school?

Pause on that for a second. Really think about it.

Because when I’ve asked this question to dozens of parents, the answers are always the same. And they always surprise me. Not because they’re wrong. But because every single thing they’re looking for? Our kids already have it. Without school.

Let me walk you through it.

“School teaches discipline.”

This is the number one answer. And I get it. There’s comfort in structure. In someone else creating a framework for your child’s day.

But here’s what I see every single morning in our home.

Tara and Tashi wake up. They follow their own routine. Not because we’ve drilled it into them or because a bell rings at 6:30 AM. But because they’ve built it themselves over time. Brushing teeth, getting dressed, sitting down for breakfast. It happens naturally. No shouting. No rushing. No “come on, we’re going to be late!”

The mornings in our house are joyous. I don’t use that word lightly. There is actual joy. Because nobody is in a frenzy. Nobody is being forced into anything. The girls move through their day with a rhythm that belongs to them.

That’s not the absence of discipline. That’s the deepest form of it. Self-discipline. The kind that doesn’t need a teacher watching over you to work.

“School gives them structure.”

Structure is important. I’ll never argue against that.

But who says structure has to come from a school? Who decided that the only way to give a child a framework for their day is to put them in a building with 30 other kids and one adult for 6 hours?

We have structure. Plenty of it. But it’s designed around our family, our values, and our children’s natural rhythms. Not around a curriculum that was written for the average child. (And by the way, no child is “average.”)

Our girls know what their day looks like. They have rhythms for play, for reading, for meals, for outdoor time. They know when it’s time to clean up after themselves. They know when it’s winding down time.

The difference? They don’t resist it. Because they’re not being forced into someone else’s structure. They’re living inside their own.

TT make their own rotis for lunch every day since 2.5 years of age

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“School is where they learn.”

This one always makes me smile.

Because if you spend even one morning with Tara and Tashi, you’ll see that learning isn’t something that starts at 8 AM and stops at 2 PM. It’s happening all the time. Every single minute.

Why read about Tyndall effect when you can eat with it in the background

When they’re cutting vegetables in the kitchen, that’s motor skills and focus. When they’re playing with blocks, that’s spatial reasoning. When they ask “but WHY?” for the 47th time in a day, that’s scientific thinking.

Children are born curious. You don’t need to create curiosity. You NEED to not kill it.

And here’s what I’ve noticed about the school system. Not all schools, but many. The structure that’s meant to foster learning often ends up doing the opposite. Kids learn to sit still. Kids learn to wait for permission. Kids learn to ask “will this be on the test?” instead of “but what happens next?”

Because boredom is where creativity lives. Boredom is where a stick becomes a sword becomes a fishing rod becomes a magic wand. When you fill every minute of a child’s day with structured activity, you rob them of the chance to create something from nothing.

“They need to learn social skills.”

TT make friends outside their age group and also make breakfast for them

Sure. But social skills aren’t exclusive to a classroom.

Tara and Tashi interact with people of all ages. Not just kids who happen to be born in the same year. They talk to shopkeepers, auto drivers, other families at parks, our friends, their grandparents. They reason. They negotiate. They express what they want using words, not tantrums.

At 3 years old, they use reason to converse. That’s not a school-taught skill. That’s a trust-taught skill.

When you treat children like they’re capable of understanding, they rise to meet you.

“But what about when they’re older?”

This is the fear question. And I respect it deeply.

Every parent worries about the future. Will they be able to handle the “real world”? Will they be behind? Will they miss out?

Here’s how I think about it. The real world doesn’t test you on memorized facts. The real-world tests you on your ability to think, to adapt, to communicate, to stay calm under pressure, to be curious enough to figure things out.

We took our twins to Europe at 10 months. Three countries. Three weeks. Twenty-two cities. We took them to Iceland at 22 months. Twenty-seven hours of travel, missed connections, lost luggage, sub-zero temperatures, snow storms.

They handled it. Not because they read about resilience in a textbook. But because they’ve been living it.

The “real world” is already their classroom.

What I’m really saying

I want to be clear about something. This is not an anti-school post. I have nothing against schools. Some are doing incredible work. Some teachers are absolute heroes.

What I am saying is this: don’t send your children to school on autopilot. Don’t do it because “that’s what everyone does.” Don’t do it because you haven’t considered that there might be another way.

If you’ve thought about it deeply and school is the right choice for your family, wonderful. Go for it wholeheartedly.

But if you’re doing it because you believe school is the only place where children can learn discipline, structure, social skills, and knowledge? I’d gently push back on that.

Because we’re living proof that those things can happen at home. In fact, they can happen better at home.

Because at home, the learning never stops. There’s no bell that rings. No curriculum that dictates what’s interesting today. No one-size-fits-all approach.

The PI Square Way

At Life of PI Square, we believe that the best environment for a child isn’t one where learning is scheduled. It’s one where learning is natural. Where curiosity is celebrated, not managed. Where children are trusted to explore, to question, to fail, and to try again.

We built this for our daughters. And now we’re sharing it with families who feel like something is off about the default path but don’t quite know what the alternative looks like.

If that’s you, we’d love to talk. Book a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure. No pitch. Just a conversation between parents.

Because parenting is easy. When you trust your children.

📞 Book a call: +91-96540-55169 🌐 Visit: www.lifeofpisquare.com 📷 Instagram: @lifeofpisquare 📧 Email: parent@lifeofpisquare.com

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

We’re Pankhuri and Ishan, parents to twin toddlers. At Life of PI Square, we believe parenting is easy when you trust your children and start at the right time.

Want to learn more?

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

So, we get to celebrate twice a year.

Not the full-blown cake-and-candles type. But a pause. A checkpoint.

A moment to look back and ask, “How’s the year going? Where did I want to be? Where am I actually?”

I think half birthdays are underrated. A full year is too long to wait before you reflect.

Today was one of those days where everything just fell into place.

I played tennis. I spoke to the people who matter.

I spent the evening with the ones closest to me. And they surprised me..by asking me questions about my own surprise 🤪.

But the best part? Tara and Tashi made me a card.

They painted it themselves and presented it to me like it was the most important thing in the world. Because to them, it was.

Then they read me stories. In their own way. From their own books. Three-year-olds reading stories to their dad on his birthday.

And my return gift to them? Extra stories at bedtime.

They asked for more, I said yes to all of them. Because what better way to celebrate your birthday than giving back to the two people who made it the best one yet?

Actually, there were three. Without Pankhuri, nothing that I call Life today, exists.

Not in a filmy, dramatic way. In the most real, everyday, unglamorous way possible. She makes the simplest of experiences memorable because it’s not about the experience but the heart that you put into it. And she puts her whole heart into everything she does.

She's the heart of the Life of PI Square. Tara and Tashi are who they are because of her patience, her belief, her refusal to take shortcuts. And I am who I am because she never lets me settle for less than what we could become together. This birthday, this life, this family. It all starts with her.

Oh, and the cake cutting?

Well…why don’t you see it for yourself

Sometimes the unscripted moments are the ones you remember forever.

Tara and Tashi also spoke about me. And with Pankhuri’s commentary, it became hilarious.

We had cake. We celebrated. And it hit me.

This is what birthdays are actually for. Not the restaurant bookings or the Instagram posts (ironic, I know).

Birthdays exist so you can pause and feel. Feel happy. Feel grateful. Feel the weight of another year lift off your shoulders, not pile on.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Every birthday is also a deadline you set for yourself without realizing it. You either look back and say “that was a good year” or you look back and wonder where it went.

And if it’s the second one, that’s okay. But only if you do something about it.

Break the pattern. Whatever isn’t working, tear it down.

Not tomorrow. Not next Monday. Now.

The foundations you built last year that are cracking under pressure, don’t keep plastering over them. Rip them out. Pour new ones. Build something that can actually hold the life you want.

Because the best gift you can give yourself on your birthday isn’t a watch or a dinner. It’s the decision that next year, when this day comes around again, you’ll be standing somewhere different. Somewhere better. Somewhere you chose.

Today I played. I loved. I reflected. I celebrated with tiny humans who think painting a card for papa is the greatest achievement of the week.

And honestly? They’re not wrong.

Happy birthday to me. Here’s to building better foundations.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

We’re Pankhuri and Ishan, parents to twin toddlers. At Life of PI Square, we believe parenting is easy when you trust your children and start at the right time.

Want to learn more?

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

You need money to raise your kids.

So, you work.

But to work, you need someone to watch your kids.

So, you hire help.

But to afford that help... you need to work more.

See the loop?

You’re essentially earning money to pay someone else to do the one job that matters most.

And the harder you work to “provide” for your children, the less of YOU they actually get.

This is the outsourcing trap. And it doesn’t just not solve the problem. It creates bigger ones.

Because here’s what nobody tells you. The nanny changes every few months. The daycare has 15 kids per caretaker. And your child? Your child is learning to attach to people who keep leaving.

We are not saying don’t work. We are not saying one parent must quit everything. That’s not realistic for most families and it wasn’t realistic for us either.

What we ARE saying is this. There is no substitute for at least one parent being genuinely present in a child’s life. Not physically there while scrolling a phone. Not in the next room on a call all day. Actually present.

That presence is the single greatest gift you can give your child.

Not the toys. Not the fancy school. Not the “enrichment classes” at age 2.

Just you. Showing up. Being there. Consistently.

We raised our twins without full-time help. Not because we’re heroes. Because we realized early on that the outsourcing model was broken.

Every time we plugged one gap with external help, two new problems showed up.

The help wouldn’t show up. The help would feed them wrong. The help would handle tantrums differently than we wanted.

So, we stopped trying to outsource the most important job of our lives.

Was it hard? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Every single day.

Not because we drilled them. Because when you’re present, you build systems. When you build systems, your children become capable. And when your children become capable, parenting gets easier.

That’s the real cycle worth investing in.

Stop chasing the money to afford the help to replace your presence. Start building a life where your presence IS the system.

Parenting is not about outsourcing. It’s about showing up.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

We’re Pankhuri and Ishan, parents to twin toddlers. At Life of PI Square, we believe parenting is easy when you trust your children and start at the right time.

Want to learn more?

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

Just a campus. Two curious girls. And a whole lot of time to explore.

Last weekend I drove my twin toddlers (alone) to participate in a badminton tournament, 60 km outside Mumbai. While most people focused on the fact that I was solo-parenting twins and playing competitive badminton at the same time, what really mattered was something else entirely.

What the girls learned in those two days. Without anyone teaching them a thing.

They saw what competitive sport looks like.

They watched me play. Up close. They saw the intensity. They heard the sounds. The shuffle of feet on court. The smack of the shuttle. The crowd reactions. The scoring.

They cheered. They clapped. They got invested.

Nobody sat them down and said, “Now children, this is called badminton, and here are the rules.” They just watched. They absorbed. They felt the energy of people pushing themselves in a high-pressure environment.

At 3 years old, they experienced firsthand what it means to compete. What it looks like when someone trains for something and then performs. What it feels like when your dad wins and gets Player of the Match.

That’s not a lesson you can replicate in a classroom.

They explored an entire campus.

After the matches, we didn’t rush home. We explored.

We rode in a taxi around the campus. We found fountains and stood there watching the water, trying to figure out where it comes from and where it goes. We walked through greenery. We stood near sprinklers and felt the mist on our faces. We climbed the amphitheatre stairs, counting steps without anyone asking them to count.

We found insects. Spiders. The kind of tiny creatures most adults don’t even notice. But Tara and Tashi stopped. They looked. They asked questions. “What is this?” “Why does it have so many legs?” “Where does it live?”

This is science class. But nobody called it that.

They figured out a railing puzzle on their own.

This one is my favorite moment.

We found a set of railings. The girls started climbing them. Not unusual. But then they encountered a challenge: how do you get from one side of the railing to the other?

They couldn’t just step over. They couldn’t go around. So, they had to figure it out. Using just their bodies. Bending, twisting, adjusting their weight, testing their balance.

No one told them how to do it. No one demonstrated. They worked it out themselves. Trial. Error. Adjustment. Success.

That’s problem-solving. That’s spatial awareness. That’s physics. That’s confidence. All in one moment on a random railing that no lesson plan would ever include.

They jumped on an inflatable. And learned about pressure.

There was an inflatable jumping setup on the campus. The kind that bounces differently depending on where you stand, how hard you push, and how your body moves.

For most parents, this is just “fun.” And it is fun. But watch closely. When a 3-year-old jumps on an inflatable, they’re learning about force and response. Newton’s 3rd law seen and understood. They’re calibrating their bodies. They’re understanding that the same surface can behave differently based on how you interact with it.

Nobody taught them that. The inflatable taught them that. Their bodies taught them that.

They went to a cricket ground.

We walked to the cricket ground on campus. Open space. Grass. Boundary markings. A pitch in the middle.

Did they understand cricket? No. But they experienced what a large, open, purpose-built space feels like. They ran. They felt the difference between grass and the pitch surface. They looked at the stumps. They asked what they were for.

Seeds get planted this way. Not by forcing a child to sit and learn something, but by exposing them to it and letting their curiosity do the work.

This is what unschooling actually looks like.

People hear “unschooling” and think it means doing nothing. It doesn’t.

It means doing everything. But without a curriculum. Without a schedule that says “10 AM: Science. 11 AM: Physical Education. 12 PM: Art.”

In one weekend, Tara and Tashi experienced competitive sport, physical problem-solving, nature observation, water dynamics, spatial reasoning, balance and body control, and the experience of being in new environments with new people across age groups.

All of it happened naturally. All of it happened because we showed up, let them explore, and got out of their way.

The world is the classroom. You just have to take them there.

A weekend worth more than a semester.

I sometimes think about what a “school week” would look like for a 3-year-old. Sit in a room. Follow instructions. Learn letters. Do a craft activity. Go home.

In one weekend, my daughters experienced more real learning than most kids get in months of structured activity. Not because they’re special. Because they were given the space to be curious.

That’s all it takes. Exposure. Freedom. Trust.

The rest? They figure it out.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

We’re Pankhuri and Ishan, parents to twin toddlers. At Life of PI Square, we believe parenting is easy when you trust your children and start at the right time.

Want to learn more?

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

The honest answer? Before they could even hold the racket properly.

But here’s the thing. I wasn’t teaching them tennis. I wasn’t running drills. I wasn’t standing behind them going, “No, hold it like THIS.” I was just... letting them be around the sport. Letting them feel it. Smell the court. Hear the sound of the ball. Watch me get excited about something.

That’s the whole secret. And it works for any sport, any activity, any passion you want to share with your kids.

It Started with a Racket and Zero Instructions

They were tiny when I first handed them a racket. No expectations. No coaching. Just, “Here, hold this.” They dragged it around the house. Used it as a pretend guitar. Swung it at nothing in particular. Dropped it. Picked it up again.

I didn’t correct their grip. I didn’t show them “the right way.” I just let them be curious.

Then came the ball. Can you balance it on the racket? Can you bounce it? Can you tap it in the air once? Twice?

Some days they were into it. Some days they threw the ball under the sofa and went to play with something else. Both were perfectly fine.

The point was never “learn tennis.” The point was “this thing is part of our world now.”

They Watched Me Play Before They Ever Played

This part doesn’t get talked about enough.

Before my girls ever picked up a racket on a court, they came to watch me compete. They sat courtside at badminton tournaments. They saw Papa sweating, running, celebrating, losing, trying again. They saw other players. They heard the cheers. They felt the energy of competition.

Kids absorb everything. You think they’re just running around, eating snacks, being distracted. But they’re watching. They’re building a mental map of what sport looks like, what effort looks like, what joy looks like when you’re doing something you love.

When I eventually took them to the tennis court for a technique session, it wasn’t a foreign planet. It was familiar. They’d already seen something like it. The lines on the ground, the net in the middle, the sound of the ball. They walked onto that court like they belonged there.

Because in their heads, they already did.

The Court Was a Playground First

The first few times we went to the court together, there was almost no tennis happening.

They ran. Baseline to baseline. Side to side. Around the net posts. Along the white lines like they were balance beams.

And that was perfect.

Because what was actually happening? They were building comfort with the space. They were learning to move their bodies on a hard surface. They were burning energy and having fun in a place that would later become their training ground.

I didn’t rush it. I didn’t say, “Okay now let’s practice.” I let the court be a playground until they were ready for it to be something more.

At Three, Things Changed

When they turned three, I bought them proper rackets. Height appropriate. Light enough for their hands.

And suddenly, something clicked.

They were ready. Not because I decided they were ready, but because all the months of holding, swinging, watching, and running had built a foundation.

I started introducing simple drills. Not the kind you’d find in a coaching manual. Fun ones. The kind where they don’t even realize they’re learning:

Side running along the baseline. Just shuffling their feet, giggling, racing each other.

Running backwards. This one they love because it feels silly and rebellious. But it builds coordination and spatial awareness like nothing else.

Picking up balls from one baseline and carrying them to the other side. Sounds simple, right? It builds endurance, focus, and teaches them the dimensions of the court without a single lecture.

Throwing the ball. Over the net, against the wall, to each other. Every throw builds arm strength and hand-eye coordination.

Understanding what the lines mean, what the net is for, where you stand, where you aim. Not through explanation, but through play.

Basic strength stuff. Squats, jumping, running drills. Disguised as games because that’s the only way it sticks at this age.

The key with all of this? They were excited. They wanted to do it. I didn’t have to convince them or bribe them or set up a rewards system. They ran to the court. They asked for their rackets. They urged for “one more round.”

The Real Philosophy Behind It

Here’s what I want parents to understand.

I play tennis because it brings me genuine joy. It’s not a chore. It’s not “exercise I have to do.” It’s the highlight of my day, sometimes my week. And my kids can feel that. Kids are incredibly perceptive about what brings their parents alive.

If I had approached tennis as a skill to be drilled into them, with targets and benchmarks and structured coaching from day one, they would have felt the pressure. They would have associated the sport with obligation. And they would have resisted it.

Instead, I approached it as sharing something I love. Come watch Papa play. Come hold this racket. Come run on this court. Feel the sun. Hear the ball. See how happy this makes me.

That’s what made them want to come back. Not instruction. Not classes. Not a coaching program with a monthly fee.

Joy.

They fell in love with the feeling of being on a court, of moving freely, of swinging a racket and hearing the pop when ball meets strings.

They fell in love with idea of being like their papa.. even if for a few moments, even if it is only on the Tennis Court!

And now that the love is there, the skills will follow. At their pace. In their time.

What I’d Tell a Parent Who Wants to Start

Don’t start with a class. Start with exposure.

Let your child see you play the sport. Or just be around it. Let them pick up the equipment and do whatever they want with it. No rules, no corrections, no “that’s not how you hold it.”

Buy them the right sized gear when the time feels right. Not too early, not too late. You’ll know.

Make the first few sessions on the court about running and playing, not drilling and learning.

Introduce structure slowly. And only when they’re pulling you towards it, not when you’re pushing them into it.

And the most important thing? Make sure YOU enjoy it. If you’re stressed about their progress, if you’re comparing them to other kids, if you’re treating it like another item on the parenting checklist, they will sense that. And the magic will die.

This isn’t about raising the next Djokovic. It’s about giving your child the gift of falling in love with movement, with effort, with a sport that could stay with them for life.

That’s all it takes. Start small. Stay patient. Let joy lead.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

We’re Pankhuri and Ishan, parents to twin toddlers. At Life of PI Square, we believe parenting is easy when you trust your children and start at the right time.

Want to learn more?

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

The first question everyone asks us is - ‘Which school do they go to?’

And when we say - None; they are even more curious on how TT do what they do.

Well, it’s simple. Not easy, but simple - it takes just two parents, a bunch of principles, and a whole lot of trust.

And here’s what that looks like right now.

1. They get ready on their own. Fully.

We don’t stand over them giving instructions. They walk into the bathroom, bathe themselves while managing the hot water tap, dry off, apply oil and lotion, pick their clothes, get dressed, and show up ready. At three and a half.

They even help each other with things such as buttons on the back. The only thing that they need us to do is their hair, that too, if we are not okay with their self-made hairstyles.

Most mornings, they’re ready before we are.

2. They make rotis. Every single day.

This isn’t a cute one-time “let’s play kitchen” moment. This is daily. They knead the dough (on somedays), roll the rotis, and help place them on the tawa.

Are the rotis perfectly round? No. Are they made with focus, effort, and pride? Absolutely. And they eat their own rotis and are happy to share it with us as well.

People see this and their first reaction is always, “How is this safe?” It’s safe because we taught them how. Step by step. With patience. Not by keeping them away from the kitchen.

3. They sit. And do nothing. And that’s the point.

This one shocks people the most.

In a world where adults can’t go two minutes without reaching for their phone, our girls can sit with boredom and not panic. They don’t need constant stimulation. They don’t need a screen shoved in front of them every time there’s a quiet moment.

They sit. They think. Sometimes they stare out the window. Sometimes they hum to themselves. Sometimes they just... be.

This is deep work. At three years old. And it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we never filled every silence with noise.

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4. They communicate with reason, not tantrums.

Tara and Tashi don’t just express emotions. They explain them.

“I’m upset because Tashi took my book and I was still reading it.”

“I don’t want to eat this right now. Can I eat it after some time?”

They negotiate. They articulate. They reason. When something goes wrong, they can sit down and talk about what happened and why. Not perfectly every time. But the foundation is there.

This is emotional intelligence. And it matters more than knowing the alphabet.

5. They are physically active. Really active.

Every Saturday, we’re at Sanjay Gandhi National Park by 6 AM. Walking. Jogging. Climbing. Exploring trails in the early morning mist while Mumbai sleeps.

They don’t sit still all day and they’re not supposed to. Their bodies are meant to move, jump, run, fall, get back up. We don’t restrict that. We encourage it.

The result? Two kids who can walk for hours, who have stamina that tires out most adults on these trails, and who sleep deeply because their bodies are genuinely spent by the end of the day.

6. They clean up after themselves.

Toys go back where they came from. Plates go to the sink. Spills get wiped up.

Not because we threaten or bribe. Because this is just how things work in our house. You take something out, you put it back. You eat, you clean your plate. It’s not a chore. It’s a habit. And habits formed at three stick around a lot longer than rules imposed at thirteen.

7. They run on a rhythm that would impress most adults.

Up around 6:30 to 7 AM. Excited. Not groggy, not cranky. Genuinely excited to start the day. No battles. No negotiations. No “five more minutes” on repeat.

Asleep by 7:30 PM.

This didn’t happen because we got lucky with “easy” kids. It happened because we built a routine and stuck to it, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard. Consistency is the most underrated parenting tool that exists.

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8. They are self-sufficient in a way that surprises everyone.

Eating independently. Using the washroom. Wearing their own footwear. Cutting some fruits and veggies. Making their bed.

People visit our home and watch them for ten minutes and say, “They’re like tiny adults.”

They’re not tiny adults. They’re children who were trusted to learn. There’s a difference. We didn’t wait for them to “be ready.” We gave them opportunities and stood back.

9. SGNP Saturdays are their idea of a great weekend.

Every Saturday. Rain or shine. Sanjay Gandhi National Park at dawn.

They look forward to it all week. They talk about the monkeys, the deer, the trails, the other people they meet. They’re building a relationship with nature that no classroom could replicate.

This is their classroom. Open sky. Real animals. Mud under their feet. Conversations with strangers who smile at two little girls jogging at 6 AM.

No curriculum. Just curiosity and the outdoors.

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10. They do all of this without school.

Read that again.

No school. No structured program. No teacher deciding what they should learn and when.

They learn by living. By doing. By watching, asking, failing, and trying again.

And the outcomes? Look at the list above. Independence. Emotional intelligence. Physical fitness. Deep focus. Self-sufficiency. Routine. Responsibility.

These aren’t things you learn from a textbook. These are things you learn from an environment that was designed to let you grow.

11. They don’t want screens. Even though screens exist in our house.

We didn’t hide the TVs. We didn’t lock away the phones. There’s no dramatic “screen-free household” policy taped to our wall.

The screens are right there. Available. Visible.

And the girls just... don’t care.

You know what they do instead? They pick up the AC remotes and make imaginary phone calls. Full conversations. With characters and plot twists. One of them will hold the remote to her ear and have a five-minute call with someone who doesn’t exist, and it’s more creative and engaging than anything a screen could serve up.

That’s what happens when you never make screens the default. When boredom isn’t a problem to solve but a space to create from. Kids don’t crave screens. They crave stimulation. And if the environment gives them enough of the real kind, the digital kind just stops being interesting.

We didn’t ban anything. We just made real life more compelling.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this.

I’m not writing this to brag. I’m writing this because three years ago, none of this seemed possible. We were new parents with twin newborns and inconsistent help. We had the same doubts and problems that you probably have right now.

Can kids really be this independent this young? Yes.

Does it require some magical parenting superpower? No. It requires trust, consistency, and the willingness to let go of how you think things should look.

The environment matters more than any method. And the results speak for themselves.

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Special Invite - Come see for yourself.

I know reading about this is one thing. Experiencing it is another.

Over the past few months, we’ve had so many parents reach out asking for a closer look at how our home actually runs. How the systems work. What the environment feels like. What their kids would do in a space like this.

So, we decided to honour that.

We’re opening our home to a small group of kids. Your child spends time in the same environment that Tara and Tashi live in every day. The same routines. The same systems. The same trust-based setup that led to everything you just read above.

No lecture. No slides. No theory session for parents while kids sit in a corner.

Your child actually becomes part of the system. They do what our girls do. They eat together, clean up together, play together, follow the rhythm of the day together. And you get to watch what happens when children are placed in an environment built on trust and independence.

This isn’t a workshop. It’s not a class. It’s a real day in a real home with real systems running in the background.

Imagine dropping your child into a space where they’re not just being “watched” but genuinely thriving. Learning independence. Building habits. While you get a few hours to focus on your work from home without the guilt. Without the constant interruptions. Without wondering if screen time is doing the babysitting.

This is what our system enables. Kids who don’t need constant supervision because the environment is designed to make them capable. Not dependent.

Most parents tell us they “get it” only after they see it in action. Reading about it is interesting. Watching your own child respond to it? That changes something.

We’re keeping the group small on purpose. Because this works when the environment stays intimate and personal.

If this sounds like something your child (and you) would benefit from, reach out. Let’s set it up.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

At Life of Pi Square, we believe that parenting is logical, and the smartest parents aren’t the ones using the latest apps.

They’re the ones who know when to pause and listen.

If this message resonates with you, 📬 Subscribe for more reflections on mindful, connected parenting in the digital age.

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

Sunrise on one of the first summits we climbed together.

Fourteen years ago, two people, who met in college, decided to build a life together.

Not a perfect life but as it turns out, an interesting one.

Here’s what nobody tells you about long relationships. The goal is never to “arrive.” It is to keep walking. Together. Sometimes stumbling. Sometimes carrying each other. But always moving.

I’ve been thinking about this phrase lately - Happily dissatisfied.

It sounds like a contradiction. It’s not.

Being happily dissatisfied means waking up grateful for what you have while refusing to believe this is all there is.

It means loving your life and still asking: what else is possible?

We have built something real over these fourteen years. A partnership. A home. A safe space to fail. To be accepted.

Twin daughters who challenge everything we thought we knew. A repository of our knowledge born out of our experiences in life and experiments in parenting.

And yet.

We’re not done.

We don’t want to be done.

The trap of “enough”

Society has this weird obsession with contentment as an endpoint. Find your person. Check. Have kids. Check. Build a career. Check. Now sit back and be grateful.

But gratitude without growth is just stagnation wearing a smile.

Ideal couples aren’t the ones who have “figured it out.”

They’re the ones still figuring it out. Still having hard conversations at midnight. Still surprising each other. Still choosing each other, actively, not out of habit but out of genuine desire.

That’s what happily dissatisfied looks like in a marriage.

You can hold your partner’s hand and still reach for something more. Not more than them. More with them.

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What parenting taught us about this

When our twin daughters - Tara and Tashi - arrived, everything we thought we knew got thrown out the window.

Twin newborns. Two working parents. No consistent help. The logical response would have been to just survive. To lower every expectation until we could breathe again.

Instead, we got curious.

What if we didn’t have to choose between our ambitions and our children? What if the struggle itself was the teacher?

We potty trained them by 2 years 2 months. Not because we’re special. But because we worked logically and happily accepted whatever came to us.

We took them to Europe at 10 months. 3 countries, 22 cities. Three weeks. Not because we wanted to prove something. Because we asked: why not?

That’s “happily dissatisfied” parenting.

You love your kids exactly as they are. And you believe in who they’re becoming. Both things. At once.

The danger of pure satisfaction

There are parents who are completely satisfied. They’ve optimized everything. Routines locked in. Expectations managed. Surprises eliminated.

They’re not happy. They’re just comfortable.

Comfort is the enemy of growth. For you. For your marriage. For your children.

When you stop questioning, you stop evolving. When you stop being a little dissatisfied, you stop trying. And when you stop trying, you start ‘not living’. Slowly. Invisibly. But surely.

It’s a choice, you either choose comfort or growth!

The danger of pure dissatisfaction

On the other extreme, there are people who are never happy. Nothing is ever good enough. Every achievement is trivialised and every failure is accentuated. Every milestone is just evidence of how far they still have to go.

That’s exhausting. For them. For everyone around them.

Dissatisfaction without happiness is just suffering with ambition.

The magic is in the “happily” part. The gratitude. The presence.

The ability to sit in this moment, with this person, in this life, and think, rather believe - this is good. This is really good.

And then, in the very next breath: what’s next?

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Fourteen years of PI

PI started as a joke. Pankhuri and Ishan. Our initials. Our shorthand.

Then it became something. Something meaningful. Something no one had seen, but what P & I believed, could exist. It became a dream fulfilled for two 20-year somethings and they didn’t even know that this was their dream.

A partnership. A philosophy. A way of approaching life that says: we’re going to figure this out together, and we’re never going to stop figuring it out.

And when we were gifted with the square in PI (our twins), is when we could connect the dots backwards. But believe us, back in the day they did look like random, frustrating blips.

Life of PI Square exists because we refused to accept the parenting scripts handed to us. Because we asked questions that made people uncomfortable, but it provoked them to think. We could see wonder in their eyes.

With that, we kept at it. Just being present, showing up everyday for PI Square - dissatisfied with the status quo, while still being deeply, genuinely happy with the family we were building.

Fourteen years in, we believe that the couples who make it aren’t the ones who find something and become content. They’re the ones who want more together.

The parents who raise extraordinary kids aren’t the ones who have it all figured out. They’re the ones who stay curious, who keep experimenting, who model for their children what it looks like to be grateful and hungry at the same time.

An invitation

If you’re reading this and something resonates, I want you to ask yourself:

Are you happy? Are you satisfied?

We need to be happy because that someday will never come.

We also need to be dissatisfied because then only we can create the best, which is yet to come!

That’s what we wish for you. That’s what we’re still learning ourselves. Fourteen years in and counting.

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💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

At Life of Pi Square, we believe that parenting is logical, and the smartest parents aren’t the ones using the latest apps.

They’re the ones who know when to pause and listen.

If this message resonates with you, 📬 Subscribe for more reflections on mindful, connected parenting in the digital age.

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com

Why.

My twins ask it about everything. And I mean everything.

They don’t take anything at face value. Not a single thing. They want to understand the reasoning. They want to go deep. They want real insights into how the world works.

The other day, they asked me why my belly button isn’t as clearly visible as theirs.

I told them it’s because I have fat deposited around my belly.

“Why is there fat?”

Because I don’t eat healthy.

“Why don’t you eat healthy?”

And there it was. A question from a 3-year-old that stopped me cold.

Why don’t I eat healthy? I know better. I have all the information. I understand nutrition. So why don’t I do it?

This simple conversation with my kids became an exercise in self-reflection. The kind we never do in our normal lives. We move too fast. We don’t have time to think. We’re not even conscious about the simplest things we do every single day.

But kids? They question everything.

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And here’s what I’ve learned: that’s not a bug. That’s a feature.

We call it “the why phase” like it’s something to survive. Something to get through. We sigh when the questions pile up. We say “because I said so” when we run out of answers.

But what if the “why phase” is actually peak human intelligence?

Think about it. Children are natural scientists. Natural philosophers. They refuse to accept “that’s just how it is” as an answer. They dig. They probe. They want first principles.

Meanwhile, we adults have stopped asking. We’ve accepted the surface level. We’ve traded curiosity for efficiency.

My belly button conversation could have been annoying. Instead, it became a mirror.

Why don’t I eat healthy? Maybe because I’ve stopped questioning my own choices. Maybe because I’m moving so fast that I can’t even see what I’m doing anymore.

My kids see it though. They see everything. And they’re not afraid to ask.

So, the next time your toddler hits you with the fifteenth “why” in a row, pause for a second.

They’re not trying to annoy you.

They’re trying to understand the world. And maybe, just maybe, they’re teaching you to understand it too.

What’s the most surprising “why” question your child has asked you? Sometimes the simplest questions reveal the deepest truths.

P.S. - One day they were putting their handprints on the glass doors -

And when I asked them why you are doing this. Their answer was - “Aise hi :D”

But..on some occasions, they amaze us how their ‘why?’ has led to so much understanding about how life works.

T explaining why we need to close the balcony door to prevent the room door from shutting on its own, with a thud!

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

At Life of Pi Square, we believe that parenting is logical, and the smartest parents aren’t the ones using the latest apps.

They’re the ones who know when to pause and listen.

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People think I’m slightly mad.

“You take BOTH twins? Alone? At 5:30 AM? To a national park?”

Yes. Every Saturday. And I actually look forward to it.

Tara and Tashi are three now. Every Saturday morning, while Mumbai sleeps, we’re on our way to Sanjay Gandhi National Park. We walk. We jog. We explore. Monkeys swing overhead. Deer graze in the mist. We meet runners, walkers, elders, families, vendors who greet us and cheer us with their smiles and eyes full of awe and admiration, but mostly with love and respect.

The part that surprises everyone: taking them out in the forest, wild or even a park is actually easier than staying home. Because that’s what children are naturally designed to do. To observe, get curious, get excited. To marvel at monkeys jumping across trees or spot a spider on a bark. To meet the same swan boats in the lake and eat watermelon and corn from the same Didi at her stall.

How Saturday Mornings Actually Look

This didn’t happen overnight. We started when the girls were around two. Took a few trial runs to find the rhythm.

5:00 AM - I wake up. Quick freshen up. Boil some eggs. Pack water bottles, fruits, eggs, one change of clothes (because, still toddlers 😛).

5:15 AM - Wake up Tara and Tashi. This is where trust kicks in. I tell them it’s ‘National Park’ day. They know what that means. Instead of crying about it, they spring up from their sleeping horizontal position to a peppy standing stance. They get dressed on their own and get ready faster than most adults I know.

5:30 AM - We’re out.

6:00 to 6:15 AM - We reach SGNP. Takes about 45 minutes from home. The gates open early for walkers and joggers. That first breath of cool morning air. The girls’ eyes go wide every single time.

6:15 to 8:00 AM - We walk the trails. Sometimes jog. These days the girls run to beat the morning cold. They point at everything. A monkey in the trees. A spotted deer in the distance. Butterflies they want to chase. The fallen bougainvillea flowers. Other kids they want to say hello to.

8:00 AM - Heading back. Tired in the best way. The girls often fall asleep in the car.

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Why 5:30 AM Actually Makes Sense

People ask why not go later when it’s more “convenient.”

5:30 AM IS convenient. No traffic. Park is quiet. There are joggers and active trainers moving their bodies that our kids observe and internalise without distraction. Weather is actually pleasant in Mumbai at that hour. Animals are more active. Air is cleaner.

And toddlers have massive energy reserves. If you don’t channelise that energy early, it ends up channelising you. A morning in nature burns through it in the healthiest way possible. By 9 AM, we’ve already had a full adventure. Rest of the day flows.

One Parent. Two Kids. How?

This is the question I get most.

Two three-year-olds can be chaotic. But they’re also more capable than we give them credit for.

Tara and Tashi walk on their own. Have been doing that since before they turned two. They stopped using strollers at around 13 months and hence we got used to ‘No strollers on trails’. We walk at their pace, which is surprisingly steady when they’re actually interested in where they’re going.

Nature does the parenting. When you’re in a forest with 270 bird species and monkeys swinging overhead and the occasional deer sighting, you don’t need to entertain your kids. They’re already absorbed. Already learning. Already asking questions.

“Mumma, which bird is that?”

Today they showed me a mynah and when I asked why is it not a crow, they said because it has white in the feathers and a yellow beak.

“Why does that monkey have a baby on its back?”

“Can we see the caves?”

The park is the curriculum. I’m just walking alongside.

Consistency helps too. The girls know what to expect on Saturday mornings. They know the routine. The trails. This predictability reduces chaos. They’re not fighting me because this isn’t new or scary. It’s their weekly adventure. And mine too.

It’s a delight to see their wide eyes and excitement. Today, we stood for a good 15 minutes at a spot just because Tara Tashi wanted to see monkeys jumping on the trees. Other people initially wondered why we were standing like that, but when they saw, they heartily smiled and gave us thumbs up or a silent “way to go” with their gestures.

And I stopped over-preparing. Used to pack like we were going for a week. Now it’s water, fruit, eggs, one change of clothes. Less stuff, less to manage. If something unexpected happens, we deal with it. Kids are resilient. Parents are too.

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What They Get from This

Could talk about the physical benefits. Fresh air. Exercise. Vitamin D. But the deeper stuff matters more.

Independence. They walk themselves. Observe. Process. They’re not sitting in strollers watching screens. They’re participants.

Curiosity. A forest is the ultimate curiosity trigger. Everything is worth examining. A leaf. A stone. A bird call. This is how children are supposed to learn.

Connection. We meet the same groups of walkers regularly. The elderly uncles doing their rounds. Runners who wave. Other families with kids. The girls are learning that community exists beyond our home.

Confidence. They know they can walk long distances. Handle the outdoors. This quiet confidence shows up in other areas of their lives.

What I Get from This

Being selfish for a moment.

These Saturday mornings are my therapy. Mumbai is intense. Life is busy. But for those two hours in SGNP, surrounded by forest in the middle of one of the world’s most crowded cities, I breathe.

I watch my daughters discover the world, and I remember why we chose this approach.

When we started traveling with the girls (Europe at 10 months, Iceland at 22 months) people thought we were brave. Or reckless. But those trips taught us something: children rise to the expectations you set.

Expect them to be helpless, they will be.

Trust them to handle new experiences, they will.

These Saturday mornings are an extension of that. Small, consistent adventures building big capabilities over time.

Start Your Own

You don’t need SGNP. You need a place that feels like an adventure to your child. Local park. Beach. Hiking trail. Whatever nature you have.

Start small. Wake 30 minutes earlier one day. Take your kids outside before the world gets loud. Watch what happens.

The anticipation of “National Park Day” creates structure in the week. The girls know Saturday is coming. They talk about it. Look forward to it. That anticipation itself is valuable.

No special gear needed. No fitness required. Just a decision to do it, and then keep doing it.

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The Actual Secret

People want hacks. Tips. The “one thing.”

There isn’t one.

What makes this work is the decision to keep showing up. Even tired. Even when it rained the night before. Even when I’d rather sleep in.

Consistency isn’t glamorous. But it’s what separates “want to” from “do.”

Mumbai has a national park right in its heart. Leopards walk those trails at night. Birds chirp in morning mist. Ancient caves carved by Buddhist monks sit quietly in the forest. Every Saturday, my daughters and I get to be part of that world.

That’s not hard. That’s a privilege.

💬 Let’s Redefine “Smart Parenting”

At Life of PI Square, we believe that parenting is logical, and the smartest parents aren’t the ones using the latest apps.

They’re the ones who know when to pause and listen.

If this resonates with you, 📬 subscribe for more reflections on mindful, connected parenting in the digital age.

Follow our journey on Instagram @lifeofpisquare and explore our approach to raising confident, independent kids at lifeofpisquare.com