Schools Teach You How to Win. Who Teaches You How to Be?

An IAS officer said out loud what most of us have quietly felt. We think a river, a rock face, and the right question asked at the end of a hard day might be part of the answer.

IAS officer Divya Mittal — IIT Delhi, IIM Bangalore, UPSC topper — posted something last week that the internet couldn’t stop sharing. “I got the best education my country had to offer,” she wrote. “It taught me how to crack tough exams and manage big responsibilities. But it never taught me how to quiet my own mind or handle loneliness.”

We read it and felt the familiar ache of recognition. Not because it’s new — but because it’s still true. Year after year, we produce extraordinarily capable young people who have never once been asked: what did that feel like, and what does it tell you about yourself?

The gap Divya names isn’t a character flaw. It’s a design flaw. And design flaws, thankfully, can be fixed.

“We spend many years learning how to achieve. But not a single day learning how to simply be.” — IAS Divya Mittal

At inme, the founders understood something early that is now becoming urgent: the outdoors is not a backdrop. It is a teacher — one with very high standards, no favourites, and an uncanny ability to surface exactly what a child needs to learn next about themselves.

A child navigating white water learns to regulate panic. One who has to persuade their group in the forest discovers what influence actually feels like. Someone who fails at a high ropes element and tries again is building the resilience Divya never found in a textbook. The child who sits quietly by a river on the last evening, missing home but also not wanting to leave — that child is learning something about loneliness that no classroom ever made room for.

These are not soft skills. They are the skills Divya Mittal — brilliant, decorated, accomplished — said she never had the chance to build. Self-awareness. Emotional regulation. The ability to be with discomfort long enough to learn from it. The courage to lead not because you’re the smartest in the room, but because you know yourself well enough to be trusted.

“Both my kids have gone to these camps more than four times. Every camp has been a lifetime experience for them — a memory to cherish forever. My kids continue to talk about it for months.”

— Parent, inme community

They continue to talk about it for months. That doesn’t happen after tuition. It happens when something reaches below the surface — when an experience touches something in a child that was waiting to be met.

The future we want — thoughtful leaders, grounded humans, people who can be alone without panic and together without losing themselves — is not going to be built inside a classroom alone. It is going to be built on riverbanks and mountain trails, around bonfires, in the charged moment before a child decides to try something they’re not sure they can do.

This summer, schools will close and the long weeks will begin. There is a choice, as there is every year: to fill the time, or to use it.

We know what we’d choose. And we think, somewhere, so do you.