The last half of senior year often consists of spending time with friends and family, enjoying your last few months of work-free school, and making sure you eat at your favorite local restaurants as many times as possible before leaving for college. For the seniors of YICG, however, this time also allows them the opportunity to participate in their Senior Seva project.
There was a claim this was hard work!
The Class of 2017 (left to right: Anjali, Akshara, Rahul, Adarsh, Ashwin, Nandita, Naome) posing with their graduation cake at YICG’s Gita Vicara.
Designed to involve the graduating students in YICG’s Vedic class, the Senior Seva project requires a commitment of approximately 2 hours a week from each student. During this time, the members of the class of 2017 met at the YICG office at the Herrick’s Community Center, where they were given a certain task from the Games for Seva team. As their Seva, they would read through English adaptations of the Ramayana to collect insightful and educational quotes on a spreadsheet. It is unclear, however, if this seva was totally selfless as they were treated to pizza and chocolate during every meeting.
Hardly working?
Playing cards were then created using these Ramayana quotations. Using Adobe Illustrator, we developed a template with graphic images on which we wrote the original quotation, a modern interpretation of the quotation, the chapter of the Ramayana from which the quotation was taken, and the card number in the deck. As the cards were developed, the possibilities for game play variance and card usage continued to grow. After many many hours of editing and play testing, we were finally ready to print our first deck! In case you were wondering who did all the post editing, it was Haarika Reddy and Rathi Raja. It would be safe to say many hours were spent toiling over layout and typos, fueled by pizza, coffee, and dessert! All this while the graduating seniors were enjoying a profound case of Senioritis!