Can You Draw Something You've Never Seen? #SGNP Saturday 12/∞
Why the richest education we can give our children isn't a curriculum. It's the world itself.
Can you draw something you’ve never seen?
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.
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.
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.
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