How do you teach respect, gratitude, and stillness to a generation that is always scrolling? We don't have all the answers, but here's what we've learned.

The word sanskar gets thrown around a lot. Often it's used as a complaint — 'kids these days have no sanskar' — and the conversation ends there. We don't find that complaint particularly useful. The young people we work with are not lacking values. They are flooded with conflicting ones, every minute of the day, on a small glowing screen they cannot put down. The question isn't whether they have values. The question is which values get to win.

Our culture programme tries to make space for the slower, older values to be heard amid the noise. We do this not through lectures — lectures are the worst possible delivery system for sanskar — but through experiences. We run weekend camps in farmhouse settings where phones are kept in a basket at the entrance. The first hour is uncomfortable. By hour three, the children are laughing, talking, and listening differently than they have in months.

We celebrate festivals together — Gudi Padwa, Diwali, Makar Sankranti, Ganesh Chaturthi — and we do them old-school. The kids help cook. They make rangoli. They learn the stories behind the rituals, not as religious lectures but as shared cultural inheritance. We sing folk songs. We listen to elders tell stories. We let silences happen.

We also run a 'Story of My Grandmother' project where children interview their grandparents and write down their life stories. The first few interviews are awkward. Most kids have never asked their grandparents anything substantial. By the third interview, they're sitting on the floor, tea cup in hand, asking about partition, about marriage, about loss, about resilience. The grandparents come alive. The children come home different.

We are not trying to drag anyone backward. We are trying to make sure the past has a seat at the table while the future is being built. Sanskar, in our reading, is not a set of rules. It is a way of paying attention. We would like to teach our children to pay attention to people, to small things, to themselves. The smartphones can wait.