An honest account of what brought us here, what we built, why we moved, and what we are still reaching for.
The question that changed everything was not dramatic. It was quiet — and it came while watching our children.
My husband Arasu and I are both educated in the conventional sense. I hold a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Plymouth State University; Arasu has a Master's degree from Southern New Hampshire University. We worked in schools in the United States. We knew education from the inside. And perhaps that is exactly why, when we became parents, we couldn't unsee what we were seeing.
We kept asking: what is all of this preparation actually for? We couldn't find an honest answer we were satisfied with. So around 2020, we chose to unschool our children, leave the familiar, and move to Tiruvannamalai — where we registered Inner Companion Alternative Learning and Research Foundation and began building something different.
It was not always beautiful. There were fights over what to say and how to say it, empty cold calls, events scheduled and cancelled, savings drying up faster than we expected. That was real. But so was what we found.
A physical learning space in Tiruvannamalai where a small group of open schoolers enrolled in a year-long programme — learning outside the institution, inside community.
A home-style vegetarian cafe where healthy food became a gentle entry point for conversations about regenerative living and conscious community.
Small gatherings where families came together not to be taught, but to be in community — asking questions alongside each other over weekends.
Regular circles and public talks bringing practitioners exploring regenerative ways of living into conversation with families in Tiruvannamalai.
A community effort to support local artists and artisans — connecting them with wider networks, helping them share their work, and weaving them into the life of the community we were building together.
The most profound impact was interior — in ourselves, in our marriage, in how we parent, and in how we hold relationships across generations, including with extended family who see the world quite differently from us.
We could not stay in Tiruvannamalai indefinitely — we wanted our children to have more community, and ourselves to be closer to extended family. We moved to Chennai, where we are now part of a homeschoolers network of around two hundred families. What we have found, almost without exception, is that alternative learning spills into alternative choices about lifestyle and livelihood. These families are not just rethinking school. They are rethinking everything. So are we.
In Chennai, we expanded the scope of what Inner Companion does. We developed our Readathon — bringing families and children together around books and the quiet practice of reading. We built our essay series: a body of writing on learning, stewardship, intentional living, and community, drawn from years of lived experience and research, freely available on this site. And Arasu, entirely self-taught, has become our full-stack developer — building the website, the digital infrastructure, and now a community platform to translate what we created in physical space into something reachable beyond place.
We are also developing what we call regenerative leadership — the conviction that the inner work we do as individuals and families must connect to the larger systems we are part of. India's non-profit sector is full of people working hard and burning out, leading from older frameworks that were never designed to be sustainable. We believe our combination — educational leadership, community building, spiritual practice, and a willingness to do our own inner work — gives us something specific to offer.
The alternative path is not a destination. It is a practice. It requires that you show up for it every day, fail at it regularly, and choose it again anyway.
Tiruvannamalai holds a special place in our story. We own a small piece of land there — a farm — and our deepest dream is to return someday and build a regenerative community space rooted in spirituality: a place where learning and living coexist, where the land itself is a teacher, and where families can come to ask the questions that matter most.
Ed.D. in Educational Leadership, Plymouth State University. Unschooling parent, community builder, and social enterprise owner. Her work centres on building communities of individuals and families who pursue alternative means of learning, earning, and living.
She writes honestly about the inner work of this path — the parenting questions, the slow shifts, the things that don't resolve neatly.
M.S. in Organizational Leadership, Southern New Hampshire University. Founder Chef of Cafe Recenter. Entirely self-taught as a developer, Arasu builds and maintains the digital infrastructure that makes the foundation's work reachable — the website, our digital presence, and the community platform in development.
His investment in how information can be made accessible and reachable is as much a part of the alternative path as anything done on the ground.
Recenter was cited alongside Jail University, Kanthari, and the Dharavi Dream Project as an example of the ecoversities movement taking root in India — spaces that reimagine where and how learning happens. Jayashree is quoted describing Recenter as "an intergenerational community learning space facilitating learning for individuals and families seeking regenerative ways of learning, earning and living."
Read on The Hindu (subscriber access) ↗We are not a large organisation with thousands of beneficiaries. We are a family that has genuinely tried to walk the talk — and a foundation creating real work in writing, community, and education. If you are asking the same questions we were asking, we would love to be in conversation.