In 1998, the school opened its doors to sixteen children from five nationalities. The following year, our founders committed to the IB Primary Years and Middle Years programmes. Neither programme had yet found a home in India, and the PYP itself had been live in the world for less than two years. It was a bet placed on a particular idea of education by people who believed it was worth making.

That decision is the seed of almost everything we are now. In 2005, MIS became the first school in India accredited by the Council of International Schools. With the IB Diploma Programme added soon after, we became India’s first IB Continuum School. Almost none of that happened on my watch. It was carried, year by year, by the directors and educators who came before me, and I think of that lineage often.

I thought of it especially on the morning of 31 March, when Jane Larsson, Executive Director of the Council of International Schools, and Dr Sudha Sunder, Associate Director of School Support and Evaluation, arrived on our campus.

CIS today has more than 1,600 member institutions across 121 countries. Its leadership could have spent that morning anywhere. They chose Pune, and they chose MIS as the venue, and they brought together leaders from thirteen schools across Pune and Mumbai for a half-day conversation about something we hold close: socially responsible leadership.

Socially responsible leadership can mean many things. At MIS, it means something specific.

It means hands, hearts, and brains held in balance, instead of academic ability standing in for all the other forms of intelligence we have. It means children who, by the time they leave us at eighteen, are fluent in what Loris Malaguzzi called the hundred languages of a child. And it means living the values the Mahindra group has stood on since 1945: diversity, dignity, and integrity.

The CIS framing widens the lens. Socially responsible leadership, as the Council describes it, sits at the intersection of global citizenship, intercultural understanding, and inclusion through diversity, equity and anti-discrimination. Read in that light, what we do every day with children from more than 35 nationalities, in classrooms shaped by the IB and held to CIS and NEASC standards, is the daily practice of socially responsible leadership.

The moment that captured this for me was the student panel. Our children, aged nine to fifteen, interviewed Jane Larsson and Sudha Sunder. Jane wrote about it afterwards in her newsletter, “Our time in India,” and called the conversation “one of the most impactful moments” of her two weeks of travel in the country. She described our children’s questions as showing “a quiet determination and intent as they focused on what they can bring forward from their education to help them throughout their lives.” Three of those questions:

“How can schools play a more active role in helping students explore those interests and recognise their individual strengths in a way that feels meaningful?”

“If you could remove one subject from school forever, what would it be?”

“What is your dream for students like us in the future?”

One of our students said afterwards that the conversation had made her feel how connected learners are to each other, regardless of where any of us come from. An educator from another school said something that has stayed with me: in international education, everyone in a room is both a learner and a leader. That is the room we try to be in every day.

Anand Mahindra wrote that when the news broke, the group’s vision, when it took over the school in 2019, was for “universal values, global standards and a deep sense of responsibility” to grow together. The CIS visit was, in part, a verdict on whether that vision is taking root. I think it is.