Our Mission
The Bay Area is among the most diverse areas in the country.For several centuries , immigrants from all over the world with dreams of better lives for themselves and their kids have landed on the shores of this place in search of better opportunities. Their lasting contributions, their hard work and innovation, has not only enriched the area, but changed several paradigms for the entire world.It is this diversity that makes the place so unique.
Yet, even today, each community is still isolated from the others and celebrating cultural diversity is probably limited to loving the varied offerings of each others cultural cuisines. At Satvik we believe in an open multicultural dialogue that goes beyond the mundane illusion of familiarity, and to develop a padagogy and new works that celebrate diversity, deeply in all its many facets.
Our mission is to help create and nurture a confident multicultural youth of tomorrow who feels at home with the many vibrant cultures in the US.
We plan to accomplish this by bringing our students in contact with innovative artists,performers, musicians, writers and dancers from diverse cultures. lecture-demonstrations that help expand their artistic and personal cultural horizons.
Small class sizes. a balanced student to teacher ratio.
Two hour sessions that allow for a leisurely exploration of the skills being taught. no rush.
Expert faculty specialized and experienced in the subjects being taught.
An open ended and customisable methodology that encourages collaboration and personal initiative.
Our Story
It may seem like a long drawn out, conspiratorial, happy accident; but there is a lot in common with the team members at Satwik.Its the strength of this commonality, which assures Satwik, of becoming the successful, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary artistic training institute that it aims to be.
All the team members at Satwik have traveled extensively in our lifetimes and at least think of three different places on the Globe when asked to point to " home". Diversity and multi-cultural identity, therefore is not a "selling point " at Satwik Its what all of us have live by,celebrate and thrive on.
The "Happy Accident" part of it though is this: A couple decades ago unbeknownest to all of us, we could all have been found doing our artistic things in one single place called Pune in Western India , three continents removed from here. Two decades from that timeline, all of us for varios reasons and purposes are finding ourselves in the same vicinity of each other again. The cementing of the varied ideas during the brain storming session comes easily because most of us have learnt from the same masters, created or rebelled in our creations or investigated at length the same paradigms of culture, awareness, and aesthetics: after having learnt the parameters from a single source.This unique kind of familiarity is our core strength.
What we did the past year
Though the team members are all expert professionals in their fields, yet when the concept of starting a studio was being developed we wanted to make sure that we were going to be offering something unique and sustainable.
So we took our questions to experts in child education and invited them to tinker with it.We asked instructors of continuing adult education,
we listened attenttively to child psychologists, elementary teachers, to activists and seers wanting to introduce meditation and arts as core values in american education and not just supplemental "enrichment". We picked the brains of some of the best mathematicians and scientists and took them seriously when they mused about the "ifs" and "if onlys" as they raked memories of their childhood and adolensence to provide us with answers.
The most innovative of suggestions came from the most invisible of teachers- the kids themselves.
The current methodology for these sessions has taken shape from these inputs.And we are pretty confident, and excited to be now unpacking these unique methodologies for you.