Originally reported and written in February 2023, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.

A strange world exists in the village of Gunehar in Himachal Pradesh. Here, children associate the word ‘school’ with ‘fun’ and possibly the best place to be. Here, colouring outside the lines is applauded and standing out from the crowd is encouraged more than fitting in.

But, this wasn’t always the case with the village. Before 2020, it was similar to the many other remote areas that dot rural India, where kids do not have much access to creative tools and learn lessons that are just enough to promote them to the next standard. Imagination and creativity were unheard of.

But in 2020, this changed. The reason for this metamorphosis was a friendship that brewed between two individuals far away from Himachal, in Delhi.

Anoop Chugh (40), a theatre director in an ad agency, and Jasmine Kaur (35), a footwear designer, met that year when Jasmine joined in one of the storytelling sessions that Anoop was holding with his group. The two bonded over a mutual love for rural spaces and uplifting the communities. And Jasmine, keen to explore this avenue in more depth, joined Anoop in the various gatherings that followed.

As he recounts, there was one such incident that changed the both of them.

He shares, “Being a bunch of performance artist storytellers, we would often travel through India, writing narratives, and then performing them. We would be called for such sessions from time to time. In May 2020, we were called for an art festival at Gunehar. The goal was to interact with the local communities and produce an audio album on the stories and experiences we came across.”

However, he says that after a month of doing this, when they returned to Delhi and back to their corporate lives, something had changed. They had fallen in........

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