Why I run a small school in a big-platform world.

Think of anything you're genuinely good at. Chances are, you didn't learn it from content. You learned it from a person — someone who stayed around long enough to know how you think, who corrected you at the right moments, and who cared whether you got it, not just whether you finished it.

I spent seventeen years building software, much of it at IBM, before I left to teach children instead.

Somewhere along the way, coding education traded that away. It became content delivery: video libraries, badge trails, certificates that arrive whether or not anything was understood. The children complete a lot. They carry away less.

Then AI arrived and asked the question out loud: if machines can write the code, why should a child learn to? Most coding schools have no answer, because they were only ever teaching the part the machine now does — syntax, drills, tidy puzzles.

Our answer is that the code was never the point. The point is what forms in a child who builds real things over years: the judgment to decide what's worth building, the discipline to check whether an answer is actually right, and the taste to know the difference between working and good. Machines generate. Someone still has to be worth listening to about what to generate. We are raising those someones.

That kind of formation doesn't come from a platform. It comes from a teacher — the same teacher, across years — which is why Sanketana is built the way old craft schools were built: small on purpose, personal on principle, slow where slowness is the feature.

Since 2020, this has meant a few hundred families across 6 countries, teachers whose student relationships run four years and counting, and an enrolment policy that pauses when our teachers are at sustainable load. We will never be the biggest school. We intend to be the one whose graduates you can pick out of a room.

A year in, IIT Madras invited me to judge the national Scratch competition its Shaastra festival runs for teachers. I mention it only because of who I was judging — not children, but the people teaching them.

If that's the kind of education you were hoping still existed — it does. Come talk to me.