Parent Musings
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." - Maria Montessori
Team
CORE TEAM
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Gayathri is very passionate about the education system in India. Her core interests lie in finding appropriate environments and methods to engage children in learning, based on research in psychology, neuroscience and education. She started her career in the Telecommunication software industry where she spent 10 years building and managing products and teams both in India and US. The birth of her daughter in 2003 inspired her to make a career shift to the field of education. She has worked with many educational organizations both in India and US, teaching children and helping them with their organizational/program development needs. She holds a Master of Science degree from Stanford University, USA and a Master of Education degree from Harvard University, USA. Apart from working on Parent Musings, she regularly volunteers for non-profits in Bangalore. |
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Smitha has worked as a web designer for 6+ years and has also briefly worked as a trainer in the field of Multimedia. She has been artistically inclined always. Her interests are Fine arts like sketching, singing, embroidery and so on, Photography, Science (has been her favourite of all her subjects as a student), Technology, Psychology, Spirituality and Philosophy. She feels the field of Multimedia gives her very good scope to express all her talents. And helps her implement her life's mission - "Lead a complete life." balancing all her roles and responsibilities well and doing work that matters to people around. She says helping children learn is the most rewarding of all work because it carries a high level of responsibility and requires a lot of caring thoughts and deeds. |
CONSULTANTS
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Deepa Prakash holds a Ph.D in Food Behaviour from the University of Mysore and a PGD in Quality Assurance and Food Analysis, DFRL, University of Mysore. She is also a consultant for nutrition education and application food science at Nutreplanet Consultancy, Bangalore. |
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Sushma is an Odissi dancer, currently learning under Guru Surupa Sen of Nrityagram. She teaches at the Valley School. She has also trained in Bharatnatyam for 10 years. Her passion has been classical dance since childhood. Dance is one thing that has made her feel centered and to be in the present moment. Dancing not only leaves her refreshed but also makes her a sensitive and a sensible person. The complex movements and the need to keep her multiple body parts synchronized keeps her alive and alert. She attributes much of her academic success also to dancing. This realization dawned much later in life, when she had actually moved away from dancing into training and working as a CA. After 10+ years of corporate life, she decided to pause it and take up dancing full time. She is a mother of two girls. Dancing has helped her bond with her elder daughter. She takes great joy jumping and moving with her, completely unaware of her status as mother-daughter or as teacher-pupil (as she’s homeschooled). Her second daughter too enjoys moving and is very expressive with her movements. She also enjoys free-style dance, which she does once in a while as a family (and that includes her husband ☺). |
ADVISORS
GAUTAM BALIJEPALLIGautam is a Partner at Ojas Ventures, an early stage VC fund in Bangalore backed by NS Raghavan of Infosys. He has more than 15 years of experience in venture investing, business development and software development. Prior to Ojas, he was with the venture capital team at Nomura (NYSE: NMR), Japan’s largest investment bank, based in London. During his time at Nomura, he has syndicated investments of around $60m. He led and managed investments in Compellent (NYSE: CML), Revivio (Symantec) and NetForensics, as part of a team. Prior to Nomura, he gained experience in Business Development at Sun Microsystems and had significant senior management exposure while working on marketing initiatives for Sun’s software products. He has also held roles in consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers (IBM) and software development at Infosys. Gautam has a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an MBA from London Business School. |
