“Namaskar!” Says thirty little voices in unison, greeting me to their classroom. The meaning of Namaskar is ‘I greet the god in you.’ “Namaskar!” I shout back.

We are conducting our third Hearts of the World workshop at Kasba Girls Home in Kolkata. We work in one room and with so many kids it’s a challenge to separate them, which I’ve taken to doing recently when possible because I’ve found that kids, like adults, are mostly copy cats and when you put them to paint right next to each other it is much more difficult to get an honest heart felt painting, you often get a cheap duplicate of their neighbors work. We separated all the kids but some of them bunched together just as everyone had started to paint. So quickly the contagion spreads, five sitting close together had all begun to paint the inside of their hearts identically, red. Another two had snuck together and lo and behold, they each painted a person in the lower right hand side of their hearts. Another two were painting rainbow stripes! What a coincidence!

imitation is the greatest form of flattery

Thirty kids is a lot to wrangle, especially in another language and so I called on the teachers to help us spread all of the kids out evenly throughout the room.

Then we started to get some nice results. One kid transformed his heart into a cricket field with the crowd circling the outside. Another painted himself, with an easel, paint brush in hand.

Cricket stadium heart

“My heart feels happiest when I am painting.” Deepack, age 10

Next we’re moving on to the Sundarbans, a unique and beautiful region known for it’s mangrove forests, river deltas and numerous Bengal tigers…