During a recent meetup held at a member’s house in Mylapore where participants played traditional games

Recently, in an ancestral house in Mylapore, traditional games kept a gathering enthralled. The sight of shells moving across a wooden board revived memories of pallanguzhi. There was a game of Seven Stones. Paramapadam and aadu puli were among other games that took a motley group of senior citizens down memory lane. Numbering over 20, the group had gathered at the house of a member as part of the monthly activity of Wise Owl Club.

Led by two sisters – Jayanthi Sekhar and Pushya Sitaraman — the activities of the Club are run under the Wise Owl Foundation, a registered body born in October 2023. Wise Owl Club currently has 40 members and is keen on growing bigger.

The forum was started for senior citizens looking for a recreational club that is off the beaten track. The meetups do not have a fixed venue or date — they are held either at a club or a member’s house.

The idea to start a recreational club for seniors came up when the sisters themselves were trying to infuse fresh meaning into their lives.

“Our children are away and there is some emptiness, that is when we thought of starting this club,” says 65-year-old Jayanthi, a resident of Adyar, who was helping the family business before starting the Foundation.

The curated workshops try to offer activities that people are really longing to take up or something that they had grown out of but now want to return to.

Book owls, gardening owls, theatre arts owls, creative owls, playful owls, healthy owls and armchair travel are the broad themes of these workshops, offered to members as well as non-members.

In the book owls, for instance, participants stitched a story together — each adding a para in what would finally emerge as an audio book.

Nostalgia is a big hook at these workshops. Pushya, a practising lawyer who is in her 70s, recalls how two ladies discovered that they went to the same school and was taught Bharathiyar songs by the same teacher during a session to remember the writer and poet.

While experts are brought in for the workshops, in some cases members would volunteer be the resource person.

The cause

Until last year, Wise Owl Club has been conducting two activities a month — one online and the other offline. While the online events are free to attend, the in-person ones levy a nominal fee for workshops as they would entail the purchase of material such as canvas and paint.

The recent one at Mylapore was a free meetup. There were many new faces among the participants.

“If any of our members offers to host a meetup, we encourage it, as that has the potential of bringing a new set of people on board,” says Jayanthi, adding that K.R. Jambunathan and wife Visalakshi were invited as “special guides” to help participants gets their moves right in the traditional games.

The sisters have been trying to pass on the benefits of such recreational activities to an old age home in the city.

“Whatever little we get conducting activities from our paid workshops is used to conduct similar activities at an old age home,” says Jayanthi. This year, Pushya says, they want to conduct at least one such workshop every quarter at an old age home.