September at KYC: Stories Beyond the Exhibit
BY SOHINI SRINIVAS
One of the nicest things about my job is seeing what people bring into our KYC centres
This September, we had two very different groups visit our centres, and both ended up bringing their own experiences into the conversation.
At QLO – Aahara, the Food Experience Centre, 14 members of the Media Production Team from Good Food Movement, one of our contributors to Aahara, came by to experience the centre.
They explored the exhibits, exchanged food habits and home ingredients, and spent time around our models of Bengaluru’s iconic markets.
The conversation soon moved to sounds.
Some members of the team had previously recorded sounds at Russell Market, KR Market, Madiwala Market and HAL Market, and shared stories from those recordings. After seeing how sound is being used at Aahara to recreate a sense of the markets, they started thinking about what else could be captured: the different sounds, rhythms and layers of a market that you might not notice unless you stop and listen.
And then came the games! Build Your Plate got everyone playing, but it was the card games that brought out the loudest cheers — from serious bidding battles with Over Confident Food to competitive rounds of Rivers of Bengaluru Game and Everyday Materials.
Over at the Channapatna Art & Craft Centre, we welcomed 67 first-year architecture students and 4 faculty members from Dayananda Sagar College of Architecture, followed by 6 History Honours students and a faculty member from Surana College.
Their curiosity went beyond the colourful toys. They wanted to understand where the craft came from, including its history around the time of Tipu Sultan, how a piece of wood makes its way through the process of becoming a toy, and what the craft looks like for artisans today.
The visit continued with Benga Quest (games designed in-house), where students explored sustainability through games, alternative possibilities and lively conversations.
These visits were a good reminder that an Experience Centre doesn’t have to be a one-way experience. People walk in with things they already know, places they have been, questions they have been thinking about and experiences from their own lives, making the experience richer for everyone.
That’s what we hope our KYC Centres can continue to create: spaces where people don’t just see stories, but interact with them, question them, play with them and add their own.
Starting Young: Building a Culture of Sustainability
Sustainability is a shared commitment at Tapas School, and our recent session brought together students, faculty and school staff to explore how small, everyday actions can contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable environment. With around 50 students from Grades 3 to 8, 5 faculty members and 10 school staff, including cooks and kitchen staff, the session created an opportunity for everyone to learn, participate and take practical ideas back into their daily routines.
Through engaging conversations, activities and games, the children explored a simple but important question: Where does our waste come from, and where does it go once it leaves our hands? They learnt about waste segregation, different types of waste, the importance of using the right dustbin, and the basics of composting. The games made the learning hands-on and helped them understand that managing waste is not just about throwing something away, but about making the right choice at every step.
What made the session particularly special was that the learning extended beyond the classroom. We also conducted a separate session with the school’s kitchen staff, focusing on the management of kitchen waste and how it can be composted and transformed into rich compost that can eventually be reused for the plants and gardens within the school premises.
The session was thoughtfully facilitated by Anuradha Govind, an educator with over a decade of experience in waste management and sustainability. She has conducted 100+ sessions across schools, colleges, corporates and communities, using interactive approaches to make sustainability practical and accessible.
Our enthusiastic colleague Divyashree, who is also involved in lane composting initiatives in Shantinagar and other neighbourhoods, joined the session and brought her practical experience into the conversation.
When children learn about sustainability early, they don’t just learn about waste—they begin to understand their role in caring for the spaces and communities around them. These everyday habits and conversations can shape how they think and act as they grow, making them an important part of building a more sustainable future.
It was encouraging to see students and staff engage with sustainability in such a practical way—from understanding which bin to use to exploring how kitchen waste can return to the soil as compost.
Small actions, when understood and practised early, can become lasting habits.
Kodathi Kathas
One Morning, One Community: Plogging for the Future
BY VIVEK S.
On Saturday, August 29th, as part of World Lake Day, we took another collective step in our journey to reimagine what it means to be neighbours in Kodathi. If our initiative “Wipro in the Neighbourhood” is about moving from passive consumption to active stewardship, then this community plogging drive organised by Assetz 63° East RWA, Socratus, and the Kodathi Gram Panchayat was exactly the kind of “active citizenship” we hope to foster.
The Idea: Cleaning, Connecting, and Caring
We gathered in the fresh morning to walk, clean, and care for the 1km stretch of Gopalakrishna Adiga Road & surroundings of Gattahalli Lake. The initiative brought together 50 people- Assetz residents, Prakiya school (vice principals & team), employees from Wipro and Kodathi Saahas team, and a couple of active local residents/ volunteers.
We didn’t just want to clean a road or a lake; we wanted to build a repeatable active community model. By collecting litter along Gopalakrishna Adiga Road and the lake peripheries, we weren’t just removing waste, we were measuring our impact, understanding our consumption patterns, and, most importantly, creating a space for neighbours to bump into one another (KYC community groups).
Beyond the Plog
The morning didn’t end with the cleanup. We moved to one area for refreshments and Banga Quest- these sustainability games, designed by our Socratus team, turneD serious topics like waste segregation and river health into moments of play and dialogue. Then we ended the plog event with a pledge to follow sustainable practices.
A few participants also took the opportunity to visit the Everyday Materials experience center, deepening the connection between individual as well as collective action and the larger ecosystem of learning we are trying to build
Why This Matters
The ambition of these initiatives is not to create solutions for the neighbourhood, but to create the conditions for people to shape solutions together**.** Whether it is through an Experience Centre on Everyday Materials or a shared morning cleaning the stretch of Gattahalli Lake, the goal remains the same: to stop “bowling alone” and start finding our people.
We are grateful to every resident, volunteer, and partner who joined us. They have shown that a cleaner, greener Kodathi is not just a dream, but something we can build, one morning at a time.
September at the Everyday Materials Know Your City Centre, Kodathi
A little over a month since the Everyday Materials Experience Centre opened in Kodathi, the place is beginning to develop a rhythm of its own.
Since opening its doors, the centre has welcomed 150+ visitors across five weekends. Some came for Bhoomi Santhe, some wandered in during a nature walk, and others came specifically to make something with their hands.
September happened to coincide with Ganesh Chaturthi, so we decided to spend two weekends making things that could be part of the celebrations without creating a pile of waste afterwards
On 5 September, 25 people, including 15 children and their parents, gathered around lumps of natural clay to make their own Ganesha idols. Fifteen idols took shape over the course of the workshop, each one looking a little different from the next.
The workshop was a chance to think about how we celebrate festivals and what happens to the things we bring into our homes for those celebrations. But mostly, it was a cozy, fun-filled afternoon of parents and kids sitting together, working with clay, and making something from scratch and getting really messy while doing it.
The following weekend, on 12 September, 12 participants picked up scraps of textile waste instead.
They turned old fabric into colourful cloth buntings, using hand sewing, fabric glue and loop-knots. The idea was simple: festive decorations need not begin at a shop and end in a bin.
A pile of leftover cloth can do the job quite nicely.
Across the month, the centre also continued its regular weekend activities.
At Bhoomi Santhe, residents could buy organic produce directly from farmers. Nature and butterfly walks took visitors outside to look at the biodiversity around them and the connections between the different species sharing the neighbourhood.
Inside the centre, visitors explored the Everyday Materials exhibits through walkthroughs, conversations and Benga Quest games. The invitation was to Pause. Explore. Rethink. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.
Perhaps this is what we are beginning to see with the centre.
It is becoming less about people coming to see an exhibition and more about people doing things together.
A child making a clay Ganesha. A parent learning a new way to use leftover fabric. A family buying vegetables from a farmer. Someone stopping to ask a question about an object in the exhibit. A group heading out on a butterfly walk.
Small encounters, but they begin to make a place feel inhabited.
And there is more to come. As the centre settles into the neighbourhood, we are looking forward to bringing residents, schools, RWAs, local organisations, panchayats, Wipro employees and volunteers together for RRR Maadi, plogging drives, lake clean-ups and other neighbourhood initiatives.
For now, September left us with clay on our hands, fabric scraps turned into bunting, a few new questions about the things we use every day, and quite a few people who came back the following weekend.
More Kathas to come from Kodathi.
RRR Maadi Rewind
From Students to Changemakers: A Student-Led RRR Maadi at Sparkling Mindzz
BY VIVEK S.
22 August 2026
At Sparkling Mindzz School’s Freedom Mela, one corner of the campus was filled with things that usually have little reason to meet each other: a cobbler, an umbrella repairer, a knife sharpener, a thrift stall, a pile of household goods waiting for collection, and a group of students trying to keep the whole thing moving.
This was RRR Maadi, a Refuse, Reduce and Repair event organised as part of the school’s Sustainability Street.
The idea was fairly simple. Bring repair and reuse into the school, make it easy for families to participate, and work with people from the neighbourhood who already know how to repair, reuse and keep things in circulation.
What made the day interesting was that the students were not there just to participate. They were running it.
Student-led and Student-run
In the weeks leading up to the event, students were involved in planning the stalls and figuring out how the day would work. On the day itself, they took shifts, coordinated with repairers, logged items, tracked payments, managed the thrift stall and helped visitors find their way around.
The thrift stall was entirely student-run. Students collected pre-loved items, sorted them, catalogued them, priced them and handled the sales. It was, in a small way, a lesson in everything that has to happen between deciding not to throw something away and actually finding it a second home.
There was a similar rhythm at the repair stalls. Items came in, students recorded them, the repairers assessed the work and visitors returned later to collect them.
Socratus and Saahas helped with the initial planning and local vendor mapping. But the intention was for the school to be able to run an RRR Maadi largely on its own. That meant finding repairers who lived nearby rather than bringing in an external service for the day.
Some of the repairers were from just around the corner.
A stitch in time saves nine
Ganapathi and Nathiya, cobblers and zip repairers, came from about 1.5 km away. Knife sharpener Mohammad Ali joined them. Selvi, an umbrella repairer, spent the day bringing damaged umbrellas back into use.
For many visitors, these are the kinds of services that are easy to overlook until you need them. A broken zip, a blunt knife, an umbrella that no longer opens properly. The people who fix these things are part of the everyday infrastructure of a neighbourhood, even if we rarely think of them that way.
Bringing them into the school changed the interaction a little. Students got to see repair as skilled work rather than as something that happens somewhere outside their lives. The repairers, in turn, met families who may not otherwise have known where to find them.
There were some nice surprises too. Visitors saw women working as cobblers and men working as tailors. Selvi repaired umbrellas that might otherwise have ended up in the bin.
It is hard to make a better argument for repair than watching something you were about to throw away become usable again.
A thrift stall is more work than it looks
The thrift stall gave students a different view of reuse.Someone has to collect the things. Someone has to decide what is worth putting out. Someone has to sort them, record them, price them, keep track of sales and speak to the person who wants to buy them.
The students did all of this. Families also brought items for bulk waste collection. These were collected for appropriate recycling and reuse channels, rather than becoming another pile of mixed waste.
So across one street in the school, there were several different things happening to things that might otherwise have been discarded: some were repaired, some were sold to new owners, and some were sent into recycling streams.
What students learn when they have to make something work
There is a difference between learning about sustainability and having to organise something around it.
The students had to coordinate with adults they had never met, keep track of things, deal with visitors, solve small problems and make decisions without waiting for someone else to step in.
They learnt about event planning and inventory management, but also about the less visible parts of getting something done: showing up for a shift, answering the same question ten times, finding a missing item, checking a payment or figuring out what to do when something doesn’t go according to plan.
By the end of the day, they had not just attended a sustainability event. They had run one.
What could this look like beyond one day?
RRR Maadi was an experiment in whether a school could run a local repair and reuse event with its own students at the centre of it.
It also brought the school a little closer to its neighbourhood.
A cobbler from 1.5 km away was working alongside students. Parents were bringing things from home. Repairers were meeting potential customers. Students were learning skills from people whose work they might otherwise never encounter.
None of this required a new technology or a large infrastructure.
It required a school to open its doors a little wider and give students something real to be responsible for.
That may be the more interesting part of RRR Maadi. The students were not being asked to imagine themselves as changemakers. For one Saturday, they simply had to make the stalls work.
And they did.
At Assetz 63 East, Things Got a Second Chance
BY DIVYASHREE N.
A shirt with a broken zip. A blunt kitchen knife. A bicycle that has seen better days. An umbrella that refuses to open when it is supposed to.
On 5th September, at Assetz 63 East, these things began arriving through the morning as part of RRR Maadi, our repair campaign and bulky waste collection drive. Residents came carrying things they could have easily replaced, but had instead decided to try and fix.
There was plenty to choose from: tailoring, cobbling, knife and zip repair, bicycle repair, umbrella repair, watch repair and kitchen repairs. Some of the vendors came from the local area, including the team handling kitchen repairs.
By the end of the day, 205 repairs had been completed for 103 residents, with the repairers earning ₹24,280.
Those numbers tell you something about the scale of the day. But they don’t quite capture the more interesting thing that was happening.
People were remembering that repair exists.
Book Swap
The Book Swap turned out to be one of the busiest stalls.
Residents arrived with books they had finished with and left with others they wanted to read. There was no complicated system to it. A book that had spent a few years on one person’s shelf could simply move to another person’s.
It is a small form of reuse, but perhaps one of the easiest to understand.
The foldable cup problem
At another stall, SatatYug was showing residents some of the everyday things that can replace disposables: bamboo brushes, steel straws and foldable steel cups.
The foldable cups attracted a surprising amount of attention.
People wanted to know what they were like to carry, whether they were actually convenient and how they might fit into everyday routines. Enough people liked the idea that, by the end of the event, the cups had run out.
There was similar interest in the bamboo brushes and steel straws.
Nearby, MITU Foundation was talking to residents about sustainable menstrual hygiene and showing products that offer alternatives to disposable options.
None of these were particularly grand interventions. They were objects people could pick up, look at and imagine using on an ordinary Tuesday.
543 kilos of things people no longer wanted
Alongside the repair stalls, residents were also bringing things they no longer needed for the bulky waste collection drive. By the end of the day, 543 kg of bulky waste from 33 beneficiaries had been collected for appropriate reuse or recycling.
That is another side of the RRR Maadi idea. Not everything can be repaired. Not everything has another use in your own home. Sometimes something simply has to leave.
But even then, there is a difference between putting something out as “waste” and asking where it should go next.
“When are you doing this again?!”
Perhaps the most encouraging part of the day was what residents said afterwards.
People enjoyed having repair services available within the community. Several residents asked for another RRR Maadi and expressed interest in making repair a more regular part of life at Assetz 63 East.
Three principles guide our work:
- 9980711104
These invitations were not outreach-driven; they were partner-initiated, signalling Socratus’ role as a trusted connector across the ecosystem.
Working Group set up by the Climate Action Cell (CAC) to develop Ward Climate Action Plan (WCAP) reports for pilot wards. This comes out of the Bengaluru Climate Action and Resilience Plan (BCAP) launched in November 2023. Beginning with Shanthinagar, the process brings together scientific expertise, local knowledge, and citizen participation to address flooding, pollution, and water stress.
, a small, manned, waste drop-off stall where you can drop off your waste anytime, even if you miss the collection truck. The Kasa Kiosk makes it simple to dispose of waste responsibly and keep your area tidy.
- we’re always open to new partnerships! 
What you’ll see inside:
Follow our journey on Instagram:
Biodiversity Walk – Bheemanakatte Lake
. It was the surprise of it all, that such abundance sits so close to home, largely unannounced, offering a wonderful reminder of the biodiversity that urban lakes continue to support.
Upcoming 5th KYC Experience Centre
Reflections from the Zero-Waste Experience Centre (Namma Hasiru Gnana Kalika Kendra
Met the Loom 
For artisans here, this shift has been deeply felt. **Skills honed over generations are finding fewer takers. Shops that once depended on impulse stops now contend with declining footfall, cheaper imports, and the added weight of compliance frameworks like GST. Even with a 
Geographical Indication tag and renewed attention through 
“Vocal for Local,” the reality on the ground remains uneven. Many artisans—particularly women—are gradually moving away from the craft, turning instead to daily-wage work that offers greater predictability.
Tipu Sultan, Channapatna’s wooden toys🧸have evolved through layers of exchange, including lathe techniques believed to have arrived through Persian influence. What exists today is a 
living, hybrid tradition — one that blends inherited knowledge with adapted tools, sustained through generations of skill.
The Art and Craft Experience Centre at Circular Square, centred on the Channapatna craft. We had partners from the social sector with us, along with artisans from Artisan Pride, Channapatna, and their manufacturing arm, Fairkraft. Visitors heard from Mrs. Shahida, CEO of Artisan Pride, and Mr. Ramesh, Head of Fairkraft, along with a walkthrough by Aswana from the LVBL Accelerator team.
interactive exhibits, 
close-up displays, and the presence of 
raw wood to finished toy 
, or just stand nearby and listen in as conversations unfolded. Some people spent time reading through the exhibits; others stayed with the artisans, asking questions, going back and forth.
seemed to gather a bit of spirit of its own. What began as a gentle backdrop grew livelier, without anyone noticing. One voice joined in, then another, and before long there was a rather enthusiastic chorus- if not in the most dulcet of tones. 
By the end of it, the formality had slipped away, and what remained was something much closer to a cheerful, unplanned gathering.
history, and hopefully 
leave with a slightly different sense of how these crafts endure, carrying their legacy even as the world around them shifts.
, home décor. Items that had been outgrown, outread, or simply out of mind.
. Parents lingered, flipping through pages, picking up modest stacks.
and participation—buying:handshake:, donating 
, asking where else they could contribute, suggesting other apartments, other networks.
Smriti Tiwari, with her deep knowledge of multispecies ecosystems, and 
What followed was both delightful and instructive.
bandicoots to Amaranthus leaves, 
water hyacinth, and the 
Pink Trumpet tree.
They were equally sharp in piecing together where these organisms live and thrive.
Learning that bandicoots are expert diggers
You don’t have to go far to encounter biodiversity, it exists all around us.
