“India cannot afford to forever remain an intellectual parish… She must create within herself a place for highest intellectual research.”— Jadunath Sarkar
FARII is, at heart, a fellowship of researchers and entrepreneurs who were themselves shaped by the way of learning they now carry forward, and of the students who walk alongside them today. Each supports and is supported in turn. Our mentors do not see this as a service they render, but as a debt they repay: to nurture young minds, to strengthen research wherever it is done, and to stand by any student who is in need.
There was a time when research began only in graduate school. We have watched it begin far earlier: in a ninth-grader’s notebook, in a gap-year student’s workshop, in a question a ten-year-old would not let go of. Our programs exist so that such beginnings are not lost.
We hold that a field of knowledge is not a syllabus to be got through but a culture to be lived in, as one comes to live in music or poetry. No one is too young, too slow or too unlettered to enter it. All it asks is the wish to belong, and the patience to keep returning.
How every program begins
Learning does not keep to a semester. Our programs run in cycles of eleven months, and many continue over several years. Since no two students are alike, every program is bespoke.
The first couple of months are given to exploration. We come to know the student as one comes to know a forest: by walking through it, not by testing it. We watch how they learn when no one is grading them, what they reach for unasked, how they listen, where their attention runs. A test would make them self-conscious, and we would rather see them as they are. Only then do we settle together what the cycle should achieve.
The subject is the vehicle; the journey is the student’s own becoming.
Our programs fall into three broad categories.
Select a program to read more about it.
Accelerated Learners Program
Aimed at students in grades 4-12, including those in a gap year before their undergraduate studies, this program focuses on the fundamentals of learning and research through a thoroughly hands-on approach. Students work with subject experts and mentors all the way from first principles to highly specialised topics.
The material and pacing are tailored to each student's particular learning and research needs, and the environment resembles a research setting far more than a classroom, as is true of everything we offer.
Accelerated Learners Bridge Program
Meant for the same age group, the Bridge Program mirrors the Accelerated Learners Program while adding dedicated support for college admissions.
We are careful stewards of the time, effort, and expertise our research associates bring, and places in this program are therefore limited.
Scientific Inquirers Program
This program is designed for more advanced students pursuing their undergraduate and graduate studies. We assume a certain grounding in the fields of interest, which is not to say that support is withheld where it is needed.
The work typically begins with research collaborations that often grow into original research.
Accelerated Learners Program
“They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.”— John Holt, How Children Fail
If fear, boredom and confusion are what make children fail, this program is built to remove all three. Here, the fundamentals of learning and inquiry are laid with the hands as much as the head. Working alongside subject experts and mentors, students travel from first principles all the way to questions at the frontier of a field.
What the program does
- It begins with what the child already loves. A parent once worried that his son did nothing but play and tinker. Our mentor’s answer: “That is not a problem, it is the solution.” Games, gadgets and daydreams are not distractions to be removed. They are the energy we redirect towards learning.
- It separates learning from studying. Studying can serve learning, but learning does not depend on it. The aim is understanding that becomes part of the student, installed rather than merely instilled.
- It lets the mind run at its natural pace. The mind does not learn in a straight line; conditioning forces it to. Freed from a fixed syllabus, students often cover years in months, because they are no longer held to someone else’s speed.
- It makes research a habit from the first week. Students ask, build, test and record from the start. Inquiry is not a reward that waits at the end.
- It grows the person with the subject. Confidence, independence, and a sense of contribution are cultivated alongside mastery, never after it.
The setting is a laboratory far more than a classroom, as is true of everything we do.
Who it is for. Students from grade 4 to 12, and those taking a year before college, who have a question they cannot leave alone, or who have not yet found one and are ready to look.
Accelerated Learners Bridge Program
“Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.”— Aldous Huxley
The Bridge Program walks the same path as the Accelerated Learners Program, with structure added for the passage into college. What a student has learned and discovered is shaped into something the wider world can see. Inquiry stays at the centre; admissions are its natural outcome, never its substitute.
What the program does
- Everything the Accelerated Learners Program does, at the same depth and freedom.
- It gives the work a form. Explorations become projects, papers and portfolios that others can read, so the student’s real story reaches the people deciding on it.
- It guides the passage into college. Choosing where to apply, preparing for what is asked, and telling the truth about who the student is, all without letting it turn into coaching.
- It holds the student steady against the crowd. Many gifted students give up their own path under pressure to do what everyone else does. We have watched such young minds lost before they had anything to show. The Bridge Program exists so that the passage to college strengthens a student’s inquiry instead of ending it.
The time and care of our research associates are precious, and we hold them in trust. For this reason, places are limited.
Who it is for. Students in the same age group who are preparing for undergraduate study and want their own inquiry, not a coaching formula, to carry them there.
Scientific Inquirers Program
“The greatest luck is the discovery of a new truth. To that, recognition adds little or nothing.”— Franz Ernst Neumann
For those further along the road, this program assumes some grounding in the chosen field, though no one who needs a hand will find it withheld.
What the program does
- It begins as a collaboration. Student and mentor take up a real problem together. The student learns the craft of research by doing it beside someone who is still doing it.
- It grows into original work. More often than not, a question of the student’s own emerges from the shared one, and becomes research in its own right: papers, correspondence with others in the field, work that stands on its own.
- It restores the culture of the field. Coursework can reduce a subject to rote. We hold that what draws people into science is wonder, beauty and the sense of a hidden order, and that this living culture is what sustains them through hard problems. The program rekindles it.
- It aims at independence. The goal is a researcher who no longer needs a teacher, only fellow inquirers.
Who it is for. Undergraduate and graduate students who want to do research rather than only read about it.
Joining FARII
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”— Helen Keller
We do not admit by entrance test, and we do not sort students into “bright” or “slow”. Such labels limit what a person may become, and a three-hour examination says little about where a life is headed.
- Write to us at info@farii.org or WhatsApp us at +91 79756 06528 to arrange a conversation.
- Apply. If there is a fit on both sides, we share an application form.
- Begin the exploratory period, from which the shape of the first cycle emerges.
Applications are open throughout the year.