When, in 2018, I first set foot in a school in India I didn’t know that that was the place I was going to spend most of my time during the whole semester (as part of my Masters, I studied at Savitribai Phule Pune University for six months). My mother is a teacher and I have always been extremely passionate about education. In India, it was not just about education, it was rather about the right to it – Right to Education, one of India’s most notorious elephants’ in the room.

During the semester, we were given the opportunity to carry out a research and a non-research related project. In both cases, I decided to focus on education, which I grasped from an academic perspective in my research paper titled “Democratizing discourses on RTE Act: Towards Right To Education?” and from a more intimate angle in my short documentary project. 

In October 2018, “School-स्कूल”  was born. “School-स्कूल” is a journey across two public public schools of Pune – two of the few where the most underrepresented kids can have access to a free education. The documentary gathers the stories of a group of students and teachers I was so privileged to interview, and explores experiences of school as a site of learning, sharing and living.