A welcome message written on a school blackboard

My Story: Learning alongside students

It began in 2010, in a village school in Champawat. Since then, learning alongside students and teachers in rural India has shown me that education has two strands: the syllabus the system asks for, and the yearning to learn, the ability to keep learning, and the skills to live a meaningful life. I believe that whatever the future holds, two kinds of skills will always matter: those that make learners future-ready, and those that make them life-ready. Everything on this site is about the second strand: helping students build the skills they need for both life and livelihood. Atul Pant

How my thinking evolved

2010

Yearning to learn
In 2010, I got a chance to visit a few rural schools in Champawat and discovered how much these children yearn to learn but lack guidance. An idea got seeded.
2010

Vertical skills, horizontal skills
I was running an e-learning company, first in Singapore and then in London, and meeting senior people at corporates and organisations such as UEFA, WWF and WHO. Each had a specialist ‘vertical’ skill, such as marketing, communication or finance, yet they all shared the same ‘horizontal’ skills. Finding those horizontal skills became a passion.
2010

Why “Timeless”
My research turned up the phrase ‘life skills’, but that list included cooking and crossing the road safely. So I added the word Timeless, also a nod to my years of yoga and my interest in Indian philosophy.
2010–12

Learning to teach by teaching
I am not a trained teacher. So on every visit to India I ran workshops in whichever schools would have me, private, government or public, to compress the ‘time to learn to be a teacher’ without a formal degree.
2011–12

Fire Up the Learner Within
The workshop of that name, and later my first self-published ebook: a way to make sense of my experiences so far, as a fun ‘performance of understanding’ for myself. Later, I self-published a second ebook, Only the Curious Shall Thrive.
2013

Two strands of education
Conversations with the eminent educationist Prof M M Pant led to ideas like RGB skills: yearning to learn • learning to learn • learning to be. Like the two strands of DNA, I began to see formal education as the first strand of education and Timeless Lifeskills as the second.
2012–19

Jeevanshala, in village Maram
Jeevanshala, now closed, was a three-room school 50 km from Almora, run by two young people with very few resources. On repeated visits we experimented with field trips and a school newspaper, written on paper and pasted on chart paper. Then came tablets, to make learning fun through stop-motion animation; then tinkering with simple components and circuits; and finally robotics.
2012–19

Workshops: first, fascinate them
Hands-on workshops of about 90 minutes for students aged 11 and up: Thinking like a Scientist, Thinking like an Engineer, Tinkering with Electronics, Electronic Art & Craft, Robotics, e-Textiles, Animation & Film-making, Citizen Journalists, User Manual of Me and Web Quests, plus Fire Up the Learner Within for teachers. The idea was simple: first catch their attention, amaze them, and spark the wish to learn.
2015

K, the boy inspired by Eklavya
The story of Eklavya was my favourite way to open self-directed learning. Did the mud statue of Dronacharya teach Eklavya archery? Children said no, and then named what did: focus, determination, interest, resilience. Years later this became an eComic about a boy called K, launched on Indiegogo.
2018 onwards

STEM 2.0
The focus shifted to STEM 2.0: coding with Scratch, robotics, IoT, drones, 3D printing, AR and VR. Cheap, open-source tools such as the micro:bit worked better than expensive kits.
2020–21

Remote classes during Covid
I was back in Singapore when Covid closed the schools. Classes moved online, and a new initiative began: Forever Learning. Students from different schools, each at home, worked together to create animated stories: teams wrote the script, drew the animation, composed music with apps like BandLab and edited the final video. We explored NASA’s mission to Mars, under way at the time, and I ran a course on misinformation and deepfakes. Weekly ‘Get Mentored’ sessions brought thousands of students together on Zoom with mentors from many fields, much like the earlier Cut to the Chase series, which gave a glimpse of a day in the life of a writer, a radio jockey, a fashion designer, a film director and more. On the personal front, in January 2024, my wife’s job took us from Singapore to Australia. I have now lived and worked in six countries: India, Russia, Singapore (twice), Japan, the UK and Australia. Where next?!
2012–2026

From Kutch to Assam, Tawang to Nagercoil
Over the years, I have worked with rural schools from West to East, from Kutch in Gujarat to Assam, and from North to South, from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh to Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu. Besides conducting workshops and setting up TLS Labs and Clubs, I have helped 9 schools get the Government of India's Atal Tinkering Lab grant, and guided several schools to take part in, and win, prestigious awards like Manak.
2026–

Next: AI and Know thyself
Learning made more fun with AI for young learners, and AI as a personal tutor for grown-ups, both without outsourcing one’s own thinking to AI. And knowing yourself: the most important Timeless Lifeskill of all.
Future-ready and life-ready
The aim has always been to make young people ready in two ways: Future-ready: to work and earn a living in a fast-changing economy. Life-ready: to stay healthy, build good relationships, stay balanced, and live a joyful, meaningful life. That takes more than information: it means building fundamental dispositions, the right attitudes, and useful skills and competencies.
Always

What stays with people
It is hard to gauge the impact of good education. Exams and marks are probably the worst indicators of future success, however you define success. Having been at this for a while, I sometimes meet former workshop students who tell me that something they learnt in a TLS workshop has been very useful to them. Teachers often say that, more than the workshops, it is my energy and enthusiasm that inspires them, and the fact that I keep coming back! It is all very satisfying, and I feel a deep sense of gratitude for everything TLS has taught me.
Acknowledgements
- Manan, my son, who has come along to run workshops since he was 12
- Pooja, my cousin, co-creator of Cut to the Chase and author of the comic book The Adventures of K, who also ran workshops at TWES in Kutch and at SDSN near Raebareli
- Shalini, my sister-in-law, who has run several workshops and challenges at Isha Vidhya schools and at SDSN, and online courses, including during Covid
- Arvind, my cousin, co-creator of the video series Brahmand ka Adbhut Itihaas
- Vandita, my wife, the backbone: without her financial and moral support, TLS would not be possible
My sincere thanks also to Ranjan ji, Lalit ji, Tara Dutt ji, Kalyan ji, Thilga akka, Barani anna, Amit, Anand, Kush, Mehul, Aditte and many others who have helped me on this journey and in shaping Timeless Lifeskills.