I have grown up in the ever changing, ever alive city of Mumbai. I come from a land that is steeped in sages and spirituality, in yoga and meditation, in diversity and divinity. All of these have been an integral part of my growing up years as the youngest member of a 25-member joint family. Loud, opinionated, loving family – who would suddenly turn silent as I would ask them questions like, what is love, who is god, who makes everything work? An unconventional student of sorts, I would prefer bunking school, sitting on my terrace that faced the sea and think about Life.
This, I believe, lay the foundation of Miraaya Holistic Growth Centre – the first centre across the world dedicated completely to working on the BEING of a child or adult, with little focus on the DOING. I believe we need an education system that needs to get children LIFE READY and not just EXAM READY. We don’t teach children chemistry, but we do teach them about the chemistry of relationships. We don’t teach children history, but we do teach them about how to become history makers. We don’t teach children language from the text books – but instead make them fall in love with communication itself. We operate as an after-school development set-up and also tie up with schools to bring in the miraaya magic within curriculum.
We started with one centre at Chembur and today have franchisees at Tardeo, Lokhandwala, Pune, Ghatkopar and three more coming up at New Jersey, Singapore and Dubai.
I also happen to be a word-a-holic. I have written a few books – and each has given my soul deep fulfillment. The first, at 23, was Thank You Cancer published by Hay House. This won a lot of media acclaim and was written about in Times of India, The Hindu, DNA, Dainik Bhaskar, Mumbai Mirror, Life Positive, Reader’s Digest and many more. It also got translated into two languages.
The next was a series for Grade 1-Grade 8 called the WoW Text books. I have attempted to make English come alive with key life skills and this series has been adopted by a few schools in India.
Finally, the last book is called I Inspire – the story of Neerja Malik as told to Megha Bajaj. This has been published by one of the oldest publishers in India called Jaico. Thousands of copies have been sold and the publishers see this as a potential best seller.
Children, words, love and laughter– keeps me waking up each morning believing Life is Beautiful.