It is the morning of Guru Purnima. At most schools, the day would pass with a speech, maybe a ceremony, and then back to routine.

At Sri Sri Vidya Mandir in Ghatsila — one of the Art of Living's tribal schools in Jharkhand — the children are outside, hands in the soil.

They are planting saplings. 685 of them — grafted and seed-grown — distributed across the school grounds, one child at a time. This is not a photo opportunity. It is the beginning of the school's annual plantation drive, which will put nearly 2,000 saplings into the earth before the season ends.

But what happens after the planting is what sets this apart. Teachers and students don't walk away once the sapling goes in. They return — week after week — to water, monitor, fence the saplings to protect them from grazing animals, and keep them alive. The result is an 80% survival rate. In a country where most plantation drives end with the photograph, that number tells you something about the culture of this school.

The children were told a simple thing that morning: a Guru gives wisdom without expecting anything in return. A tree does the same — shade, oxygen, fruit, shelter — and asks for nothing. Gratitude, then, is not a word you say. It is something you do.

So they did it. They knelt down, dug small holes, placed saplings in, and pressed the earth around them.

Some lessons don't need a blackboard.

The Art of Living runs over 1350+ free schools across 20+ states in India, providing holistic, value-based education to children from tribal, rural, and underserved communities.