Why I Started Chigurus — Vishwajith Singh

People often ask me why I started Chigurus, and the honest answer is that it began long before I had a name for it. I have spent my whole life inside and around schools — first as a child, then as a teacher and a school owner — and somewhere along the way I stopped being able to ignore a feeling that kept returning. The feeling was simple: that many bright, curious children were slowly being dimmed by the very systems built to help them grow. Chigurus is my attempt to do something honest about that. It is founder-led guidance for Indian families who want to homeschool their children with confidence, mainly through the NIOS pathway, and it carries everything I have learned about how children actually come alive.

I grew up in classrooms before I ever chose them

My parents ran schools. That meant the rhythms of a school — the bells, the staff rooms, the parents arriving anxious about their child, the quiet conversations after the gates closed — were simply the texture of my childhood. I watched my parents care for other people's children as if they were their own. I saw, very early, that a school is not a building or a syllabus. It is a thousand small human decisions made every day about whether a child feels seen.

That upbringing taught me to respect teaching as serious, sacred work. But it also let me see the machinery up close, including the parts that do not serve children well. I learned that good intentions are everywhere in Indian education, and that good outcomes are still rare, because the system asks every child to fit the same mould at the same pace, and then quietly judges the ones who cannot.

Running my own school, and seeing the same pattern

Today I own and run my own school, Vidya Sagar School in Davangere, Karnataka. Running a school is the most clarifying experience I know. You stop theorising and start meeting the actual child in front of you — the one who is anxious before exams, the one who is brilliant but bored, the one who has decided, at eleven, that he is simply "not a maths person" because someone once made him feel that way.

What troubled me most was watching individuality get sanded down. A child arrives in Class 1 full of questions and wonder. Somewhere in the years that follow, for too many of them, the questions stop. Not because they ran out of curiosity, but because curiosity was not what was being measured. I do not say this to attack teachers — I am one, and most of us are doing our best inside a structure we did not design. I say it because I have seen the cost, and it is paid by children.

I have come to believe that the saddest thing in education is not a child who fails an exam. It is a child who was made to feel ordinary while still carrying something extraordinary inside.

An engineer and a theatre artist walk into a school

My own path was not a straight line, and I am grateful for that. I hold a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering, so I think in systems, sequences, and structure. I am also a professional theatre artist, which means I have spent years in the world of imagination, presence, and the courage to be fully yourself in front of others. For a long time I thought of these as two separate lives. Now I see them as the two halves of how real learning works.

Engineering taught me that a child's education needs a sound framework — a clear path, honest milestones, a plan you can actually follow. Theatre taught me that none of that matters if the child's spirit is not in the room. The best homeschooling I have seen holds both: the discipline of an engineer and the aliveness of an artist. That balance of structure and creativity is, more than anything, what I try to bring to the families I work with. You can read more about how I think about this in why excellence is possible at home.

The conviction that became Chigurus

For years I assumed the only way to do better by children was to keep improving the school. Then I watched a few families take a braver route — they brought their child's education home, used the open-schooling route through NIOS, and gave their child room to breathe and grow at the right pace. The change in some of those children was not loud or dramatic. It was quieter than that, and more important: they became themselves again.

That is when my conviction settled. I do not believe homeschooling is for everyone, and I will always say so honestly. It asks real effort from both the child and the parent, and it suits families who are willing to be present and patient. But for the right family, done well, it can give a child something a crowded classroom often cannot — the time and trust to go deep, to recover their confidence, and to build genuine capability. If you are weighing this honestly, homeschooling versus traditional school is a fair place to start.

What Chigurus is — and what it is not

Let me be very clear about what I built, because the word "edtech" has come to mean a lot of things I want no part of. Chigurus is founder-led guidance. When you work with Chigurus, you are working with me and the approach I stand behind — helping your family understand the NIOS pathway, plan it sensibly, and walk it with confidence. If you want a map of the road, the guide to starting homeschooling in India and the NIOS admission guide lay out the practical steps.

Chigurus is not a tutoring service that replaces school with more of the same drilling. It is not a content mill churning out worksheets and video lectures to keep a child busy. And it is not a sales funnel designed to push you toward a product. I am not interested in promising that your child will top an exam or land a particular admission — no honest educator can promise that, and I will not pretend otherwise. For anything official, including fees and eligibility, I will always point you to nios.ac.in rather than guess.

What I do believe in — and what I see as my mission — is helping Indian children grow into what I think of as the top one percent. By that I do not mean a rank or a percentage. I mean character and capability: curiosity that survives childhood, the depth to truly understand things, resilience when life is hard, and real skill they can stand on. That is a belief I hold and work toward, not a guarantee I can hand you.

An open invitation

If any of this resonates — if you have a child who feels too big for the box they have been put in, and you are wondering whether there is another way — I would genuinely like to talk. There is no script and no pressure. The best way to begin is a free discovery call, where you tell me about your child and your situation, and I tell you honestly whether this path fits your family and how I can help. You can book a free discovery call here whenever you are ready. That conversation, more than anything I could write, is why I started Chigurus.