The Theme

Taana Baana

The Timelessness of Humanity

Taana Baana — taana, the warp; baana, the weft — names the threads that cross to make cloth. Kaafila 2026 borrows that word for a simple idea: across every era and every culture, certain threads in us never change.

Through music, dance, visual arts, and theatre, this year's Kaafila traces what stays constant in the human spirit — emotion, storytelling, rhythm, and imagination — even as the forms that carry them keep changing.

Our Purpose

Why Kaafila

  • Encourage creative expression across every art form, not just the ones students already feel confident in.
  • Build confidence through performance and display, in front of an audience that is rooting for them.
  • Celebrate collaboration and individual talent side by side — group acts and solo work both have a place.
  • Connect students with the timeless nature of art and humanity, across generations and forms.

Credits

Meet the core Team

Kaafila is put together by the people below — the staff who steer it and the students who run it.

  • Finance

    Student Heads

    • Siddharth Sinha
    • Angad Gupta

    Mentors

    • Sanjukta Mukherjee
    • Sonali Bajaj

  • Digital Design

    Student Heads

    • Gokul Preejith
    • Saanvi Bisht

    Mentor

    • Liza Oleman

  • Logistics

    Student Heads

    • Bhavni Mahajan
    • Shivansh Sharda
    • Nivedita Singh
    • Sarthak Aggarwal

    Mentors

    • Radhika Kathal
    • Rohit Kumar

  • On Ground Design

    Student Heads

    • Anika Seth
    • Bhavneet Kaur

    Mentor

    • Ashok Pattananayak

  • Outreach

    Student Heads

    • Diya Upadhyaya
    • Agastya Kashyap

    Mentor

    • Charita Arora

  • Curation

    Student Head

    • Mehak Bharti

    Mentor

    • Shwetha Gopalakrishnan

  • Digital Marketing

    Student Head

    • Navya Wahi

  • Website Developers

    Student Heads

    • Manan Batra
    • Dev Bagri

  • Festival Directors

    Student Heads

    • Devina Pushkarna
    • Isbah Nayyar

  • Leadership

    Principal

    • Anju Soni

    Vice Principal IC

    • Anshu sharma

    All Campus Arts Lead

    • Neel Sengupta

    Head of Arts

    • Mohammad Faheem

    Mentors

    • Saumya Jakhmola
    • Niharika Kasturi

Words from the Founder

How our Kaafila Came to Be

Our Kaafila was born in 2019, under a leadership that believed in Arts as an integral pedagogy. Shiv Nadar School in 2012 was a space that put children first, treating the aesthetic space not as a secondary luxury, but as essential to learning.

By 2015, as our first cohort reached Senior Years, we began exploring how to develop a take-charge attitude in our learners. In 2016, we introduced a writing-directing-producing programme in Theatre, but came to realise its failures; mentoring required rethinking, processes needed structure, and expectations had to evolve. We returned to the drawing board.

In 2018, spurred by an impetus from Neel, we launched Bread and Circuses, a Theatre festival for Grades 11 and 12. While successful, it taught us that students needed better mentoring, genuine agency and more scaffolding to develop true personal leadership. Other Arts disciplines wanted similar opportunities. Through these reflections, the idea of an integrated, student-led Arts festival took root.

In many ways, Kaafila was shaped by the students who launched the first edition. We started ideating with a small group of Grade 10 students, who simply wanted to work in Theatre. No one really had a clue what they were doing. As the planning came together, students from Grades 11 and 12 joined us. We set an early non-negotiable rule: student organisers could not participate as competitors or performers. Designing a student-led festival meant massive legwork—pitching concepts, anticipating issues, and repeatedly returning to the drawing board. It was stressful, exhausting and pushed us to our limits.

The team focused constantly on the why and how alongside the what. That’s how the name was chosen—we liked the idea of something on the move, involving community and purpose. We wanted a platform where students saw the Arts as accessible and inclusive—a space to participate, not just consume. This was the disruption: countering the high school trend where students drift away from creative pursuits toward ‘career-oriented’ subjects. Kaafila offered a space to engage with the Arts as a valid way of learning. We created collaborative learning opportunities: workshops, panel discussions, open mics, jam sessions, flash mobs, and open art exhibitions. Once Col. Gopal gave us the go-ahead in July, the ball was rolling for something unique in the Indian school space.

We had an eclectic group with quiet students producing designs with alacrity, eloquent speakers pushing us to think deeper, and students who ‘hung out’ at meetings who became our most diligent foot soldiers. Many were Science students with 14 hours of weekly tuition. Meetings happened occasionally at school and most often past 9 PM, after sorting out other ‘priorities’. Fittingly, the theme picked for the first festival was ‘Speaking from the Margins’!

What heartened us most as teachers—was the transformation in each student. We saw a remarkable development of ‘quiet confidence’. External mentors and vendors praised their alertness and calm, solution-oriented approach. Naturally, glitches happened, but the children learned what it meant to be in charge, figured out their strengths, and accepted their areas for growth with emotional maturity we hadn’t seen in many adults. We had passed the litmus test for success.

Today, Kaafila stands apart from typical school festivals, and not only as an Arts graduation program and an incubator for creative entrepreneurship. We constantly examine the aesthetic of Kaafila – how we deal with each other, present ourselves, and communicate – through the lens of the Arts. We offer it as a glimpse of an alternative way of living, which is why addas, breakout sessions, and ‘roadside innovation’ matter so much. We’ve had teachers and students sharing creative entrepreneurship in the corridors, and judges having lunch with competing teams to offer gentle feedback, reinforcing the goal as a commitment to excellence—not settling for defeating another.

Kaafila celebrates the Arts as a valid way to learn and live for everyone. With it, we journey to discover the best versions of ourselves, with the Arts as our lighthouse and our path.