Pathway has its doors wide open to good people from anywhere and new ideas at all times, boys and girls here are always looking forward to extend a warm welcome to persons who show human concern, cordial regard, genuine love and good humour. Playing or working with children gives a lot of blessings to people who arrive here. Looking at the children, their abilities, their capacities and limitations, their joy, laughter and mirth, gives great inspiration to all who want to work with them, it is an experience of mutual benefit, the people who really work with them develop enduring patience, affection and empathy. It is these qualities, which attract persons from far and near to try out their own creative ideas and concepts in the service of the receptive and responsive children here. Two young women from Netherlands were such dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers, who came over at the instance of AIESEC.

AIESEC is an international student body, which is dedicated to the interests of students to help them in various ways. This organization arranges lectures and group discussions, besides exchange visits to various non-governmental organizations. Penny and Elma showed great interest to visit India and wanted to be useful to Indian children. They found Pathway through that student body.

Despite the language barrier, Penny and Elma wanted to work closely with our children, helping them in their education. After considerable pondering over various possibilities they hit upon the idea of organizing a puppet show! A show with a difference.

Small stories, such as the Easter egg story, thirsty crow, etc were first put down on paper and then they started drawing the whole story as pictures, with pencil drawings of each scene. These pictures were used with all groups of children so they could get familiarized with the content and progress of the main story line. After using the drawings as a matrix for absorbing story telling for a number of days, the final puppet show got devised. Dolls representing the various characters of a considerable range of sizes were made. Penny and Elma selected appropriate background music from different sources that could be used as a continuous music score for the entire length of the show.

On the appointed date and time all the children sat and eagerly huddled in full numbers in front of the specially erected dais with flowing satin curtains. They too had taken part in the creative process and were naturally excited and eager to find out how the whole piece would turn out. They were looking forward to impress the adult audience and were casting meaningful glances at them as if telling them, wait and see, you are going to enjoy it immensely.

The dais was gaily decorated with various flowers and lights which created a happy atmosphere of joyful celebration. Rani, the untiring teacher of the tiny tots at Pathway, was given the responsibility to welcome all the children and others who were assembled to witness the great programme. There was the introductory music which was so soothing and sweet, followed by the appearance of a beautiful doll on the stage which seemed to talk, sing and dance. The doll told everybody that she planned to narrate the story of the Thirsty Crow.

After this, there was a great hustling and rushing of movement of the satin curtain which opened on to a glorious scene, a scene where a number of dolls of wonderful colours and sizes were in view, talking, dancing and singing, conveying the story.

Of course I don't have to narrate to you the crow story itself here because surely you know how the crow dropped pebbles to raise the water level in order to facilitate its beak to dip into it for a satisfying drink, but the whole point is in the telling of the story, by the dolls, who looked so alive and real, the make-believe was so perfect, and you have to come and watch the show next time we put it up. As a student volunteer from a city college, who had been of some help to Pathway in promoting this show, I congratulated the organisers profusely, and also made a special request: Could the children, with the help of Penny and Elma, come and organise a show like this in our own college on Midsummer Night's Dream, a Shakespeare Play that is causing quite an agonizing confusion and we were surely going to flunk in the examination because we could never remember how the two pairs of lovers involved get mixed up again and again and how the rightful partners are rematched and reunited into the right relationships again and again by a fairy who was squeezing some ayurvedic herbal juice into each one's eyes so that each one falls in love afresh with the partner, hopefully the right candidate out of the remaining three, who is brought into view while waking up from the herbal trance, which is all really confusing, and I shuffle up the four lovers again while writing the exam, and there is no hope unless Pathway dolls are going to depict it and show it clearly how.

That isn't so bad after all like The Comedy of Horrors in which Shakespeare has two brothers, quipped my classmate Prema: "The two brothers in that play look so much alike that not even a wife can tell them apart, and the hilarious comedy of love affairs is built on this dramatic device of mistaken identities, but how would you make two dolls representing them look different enough for us viewers to recognize the difference but not sufficient to make their wives identify them safely?

Human learning takes place in the human brain, declared Prema, suddenly interrupting the subject, as if she had just made that profound discovery. We looked at her awaiting further comment to follow that very original statement. She was reading from the Hindu.

The brain functions like a computer. Information received through sense organs is processed at the molecular and cellular levels in clusters of brain neurons. Our brain has enormous potential to be involved in cognitive, affective and psychomotor learnings. Cognitive mapping has been done on the right and the left cerebral hemispheres. Unfortunately our educational system uses this God-given advanced computer only for storing information and retrieving the same verbatim at the time of examination. Teaching and learning have become memory-oriented and focused only on examinations. A new, wholistic perspective of human resource development should start from early childhood care and education itself.......as Pathway is attempting in their Agro farm school. With that Prema put down the newspaper and smiled. After a minute's pause I asked her, And so? what do we do now?

Go ahead and put Shakespeare on the puppet show, she announced. Let us begin by making some drawings just as Penny and Elma did and then we start discussing with Pathway children and get launched before the exams come round the corner, she suggested.

-------Krishna