The crinkle of paper; an explosion of giggles from school girls; little heads with two braids each bent over in concentration as their hands fold paper — the origami workshop comes as a breather to the students at Lady Sivaswamy Ayyar Girls Higher Secondary School, Mylapore, on an exam day. Origami trainer Thiyaga Sekar starts by showing them how to fold five types of headgear, including the bishop’s mitre, Nehru topi, and police caps. Soft-spoken Sekar lets his hands do the talking — the 36-year-old lights up in the presence of students and paper, his muse.
Sekar travels across Tamil Nadu to teach children origami. He has been on the move since 2008, and has taught in over 400 schools, most of which are Government-run. For someone who ran away to Chennai discontinuing college, Sekar has found meaning in paper craft. “I spent a major part of my early 20s in search of something meaningful,” says Sekar, seated on the dusty grounds of the school.
Sekar hails from Nakkambadi village in Thanjavur. He was the boy whom everyone sought for intricate handwork — putting up streamers for festivals at home and village fairs, cutting and sticking paper flags for NSS events… “I’ve always been good with paper-related work,” he says. Sekar says his interest in origami can be traced back to his school days in Papanasam. “Every day, after school, we had a bookstall put up in the verandah,” he recalls.
They were pop-up books, and the salesman would sometimes demonstrate how the pop-ups were cut out.
“I would pocket all the scraps he left behind,” says Sekar. He was too shy to approach the salesman for paper. “But he had been watching me all along. He called me one day and handed me a pair of scissors and taught me to cut and fold paper,” he says. Sekar doesn’t remember the man’s name, but he was his first teacher. “I didn’t know that what I was learning had a name, that it was called origami,” he says.
Today, Sekar has mastered over 500 models, that he self-taught. “The Japanese, who are associated with the origin of origami, have over 10,000 documented models,” he explains.
“The Arivoli Iyakkam (a mass literacy movement) has been teaching origami to children from Government schools. Sadly, they’ve been repeating some 20 models for the past 50 years, adds Sekar. Sekar wants to introduce more and is working on creating his own. The current course of Sekar’s life boils down to a handful of people — Sivaraj of Thiruvannamalai-based Cuckoo Movement for Children, with whom he works closely, science toys expert Arvind Gupta (his website has several origami models), and artists from the Government College of Fine Arts who helped him perfect the craft.
In all these years of working with children, Sekar has seen first hand how much origami can teach them. “It teaches symmetry, geometric shapes, and math,” he says. But a lot of the learning transcends all this.
“Give a child a square piece of paper and show him how if folded 20 times a certain way, he will get a crane and see how he reacts,” smiles Sekar. Forget geometry, for a child, the thrill of seeing a flat piece of paper change shape, is something else. “It’s a nice feeling — their eyes gleam and they are in their element,” says Sekar.
This is what drives him to keep marching with a paper-filled cloth-bag slung across his shoulder from one dusty village to another.
