Designing our new Library
We’re in the process of designing our library for the new building . . . I’m 100% confident our kids already love books (they may just not know it) but taking care of them, putting them back where they belong, treating them like polished jewels when they borrow and take them hom is another level […]
Fire Hoses and Paved Roads
This is what the building looked like the last time Madhu, our architect, came for a visit. A muddy ground, a busy work crew and a buzz of progress in the air. Madhu’s inspections are minute – he looks at the quality of the work, the faithfulness to design and whether there is strict adherence […]
Ashish Rangari, Project Manager Extraordinaire
This Guy. We first met Ashish Rangari, Senior Project Manager at our building site the day we broke ground in March, 2023. Though employed and assigned to our site by Cushman & Wakefield, he became an integral part of our team and oh! how we loved working with him. Today, so sadly for us, was […]
Art for Latika
During Covid, I had gone to the US to be with my daughter for her first delivery and the day I arrived, all the airports shut down. I stayed for 15 months – until the second vaccine – and among the many things that happened during that time was that I felt extremely rich. As […]
What Spaces Can Do
I took another Latika team down to the building site a few months ago to show them how things were progressing. Look how they responded to the first classroom they walked into. This photograph never fails to make me smile. I had just said: “Look at this – it’s going to be a classroom,” and […]
Why Contract Labour Doesn’t Work
Twenty years ago, my children and I had passes to a swimming pool at a well-known boarding school in Dehradun. During the long summer, we made friends with the security guards. At the end of the season, I said goodbye to our favorite, saying we’d meet again the following year. “Not likely,” he said ruefully. […]
We Began. Look What Happened.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can – Begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. At Latika we thought and dreamed a long time. Boldness took courage. Today, as our dream for a truly accessible campus where EVERYONE is welcome comes true, we see the genius, power and […]
Accessibility Doesn’t Stop at the Bathroom Door
“How accessible are Tier 1 cities like Pune?” asks Sudhir Shenoy, who writes on leadership, inclusion and philanthropy in a LinkedIn post recently. The answer, unfortunately, was: not very. As Sudhir and the RunInSync team planned accommodation for wheelchair athletes attending their event, they ran into a problem that disabled people in India know all […]
Behind the Blueprint
So proud that Latika is part of the Cushman & Wakefield family. We work with many donors, but none have stolen our heart the way C&W has. Starting with Anshul Jain, whose vision and conviction set the construction of India’s first truly accessible building in motion, it has been a complete joy to be connected […]
Experiential Learning at Latika: Seeing, Tasting, Moving, Talking
Our current premises are a little more constrained than we’d like, for sure, so it’s a good thing that learning at Latika doesn’t end with the four walls of a classroom. That’s because our curriculum includes something many children rarely get enough of: experiential learning. Experiential learning is exactly what it sounds like — learning […]