Wisdom and Storytelling - A Conversation with Deepak Ramola

Sep 17, 2023

Deepak Ramola, founder of Project FUEL, discusses the significance of wisdom and storytelling in education. He highlights the value of valuing different perspectives and shares insights from observing the Calais Refugee Camp. The podcast emphasizes the importance of wisdom in education and the value of teaching for wisdom, especially in children. It also explores the need to incorporate wisdom in non-traditional careers and to view wisdom as play in education.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Learning from Living and Valuing Different Perspectives

02:12 • 2min

Capturing and Sharing Life Lessons

04:31 • 5min

Observations at the Calais Refugee Camp and the Importance of Dreams and Education

09:55 • 2min

The Importance of Wisdom in Education

12:16 • 9min

Teaching for Wisdom and the Value of Children's Insights

21:14 • 15min

Exploring Wisdom and Curiosity in Education

36:13 • 8min

Deepak Ramola is the Founder and Artistic Director of Project FUEL. A two time TED Talk speaker & UN Action Plan Executor, he also previously served as the Kindness Ambassador for UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Deepak is a storyteller and artist forwarding the understanding of life lessons of everyone from women of the Maasai tribe to young girls in Afghanistan and sex workers of Kamathipura, earthquake survivors in Nepal to Syrian refugees in Europe.

Founded in 2009, Project FUEL collects life lessons from people all over the world and turns them into interactive and performance activities, to pass on the learnings. The passing on happens by way of workshops, seminars, and sometimes even over coffee.

Every life is important and so is what each person's life teaches them. At FUEL, life lessons are continuously collected, documented, thought about deeply and then turned into performance activities. This ensures that you don't just hear someone's lesson in words but experience it tangibly, and apply it practically in your own life.

One way that the life lessons are shared globally is through the World Wisdom Map - a collation and exhibition of human wisdom that invites people to engage, contribute and learn from everyone's stories in an artistic and interactive way.

Project FUEL's methodology has been recognised as a world's top 100 innovations in education by Finland based organisation HundrED and has also been adopted by the Education Board of Antwerp in Belgium, and schools across Asia and the US.

A celebrated lyricist in Hindi Cinema, Deepak's songs have been voiced by Amitabh Bachchan, Farhan Akhtar, Rekha Bhardwaj amongst others. His first collection of Hindi poetry titled Itna Toh Main Samajh Gaya Hoon received the prestigious Young Writer Award in 2020 at Jaipur Literature Festival. His latest book, 50 Toughest Questions of Life, has gone into a reprint two weeks after its release.

Social Links

LinkedIn: deepak-ramola

Twitter: @deepak1811

Instagram: @deepakramola; @projectfuel