Pow Wow for freedom is a series of heterogeneous, energetic and curious multi-disciplinary workshops for the fresher batch. Each workshop has an interesting underlying sense of freedom in it. Students creatively explore a new activity and are let to break barriers and feel free to express themselves.

Day 1 of Pow Wow at the Naraina campus witnessed a fresh wave of the new batch busting with excitement and energy!  Here is what happened – so that you don’t miss the fun at Pearl:

The Ultimate Freedom- a workshop on life skills – Shree Damble, the facilitator of the workshop, feels that kids in their teens harbor some thoughts in their minds that limit their growth as a person. Hence, her aim is to empower these kids with the unwavering self-belief so that they are not apprehensive of expressing themselves. After an interactive introduction the kids were asked to express their idea of a best friend on a canvas. The clueless bunch of kids reluctantly started drawing and wondering whether or not they were doing the right thing. There were several other activities that followed which helped them let go of their fears and self-hindering beliefs.  At the end of the whole day exercise, it seemed like the students walked out with a sense of freedom through self-love as their face were now brighter and they all had a big smile on their faces. They all are eagerly waiting for tomorrow to experience what lies before them!

How would it be if one could create his own tools to draw and paint? Sounds unusual, right? But that’s exactly what happened at the Multiplicity (Draw Free) workshop facilitated by Nitin Bal Chauhan. Here the students enjoyed the freedom to create their own paint brushes. So they joined 3-4 sketch pens/bold markers to create one alternative for brushes. Some students explored the idea of combining crayons and markers. Once they had their self-created tools to draw and paint, they were all given the same image to draw. So they all created the same image but each one of them was unique.

Bringing Home the Bacon was a workshop on how does one observe and draw. Shanker Chandra, workshop facilitator aims at sensitizing the students to their inherent sense of aesthetics. The facilitator made them students circulate their sketch books several times while they were drawing so that they get exposed to new lines and strokes and blend their own into it. The students understood that how to observe objects in relation to the background and they were having a good time drawing.

At Bamboo Installations workshop, students gave their best in expressing freedom through their work. The workshop took a high ride and moved with a direction. Workshop facilitator Pankaj Narain tried to open up students mind to another level of exploration. Students came up with innovative ideas. They were explained about different types of Bamboo’s, ways of cutting it and how to tie them with ropes. They were told to make 3D structures of Bamboo’s. Many Interior Architect Designer students showed up their interest in material exploration. They had put their hard work and efforts to come up with interesting 3D forms. The Professor quoted, “I want them to understand Space and I have given them freedom to explore themselves as it is the main motive of these workshops.

Campus also experienced something out of the box. Bake for freedom workshop was something unexpected from a design college. The facilitator Caelisa Appleton minutely explained every detail of Baking to students.  He said, “Baking is half Science and half Art”, and explained very patiently about the key points of Baking. Caelisa also shared her experiences and gave recipe for baking cookies.

It was a buzzing day where students had a lot of questions in their minds before they plunged into this myriad of craziness. We hope to see the buzz back in campus tomorrow. Until then…have a great day!! Keeping expressing!!

Check out the glimpses of Day 1 here: Photographs

(* Student contributors – Geetanshi Arora, Shivani Gupta, Sanya Gulati, Amalu R Nair, Aailya and Drishti Vij)