Manzil Mystics

Supported by: Wipro

About Manzil Mystics

Manzil Mystics is a one-of-a-kind musical band that inspires learning through music for the underprivileged children in government schools in Delhi. We use music as an active instrument of change for an enriched socio-emotional development of young minds. Our vision is to foster creativity and confidence through a unique musical education and training program that builds life skills and training in music.

We are a 27-member team comprising of percussionists, guitarists, pianists, tabla players, and western, Hindustani, and classical vocalists that collaborates with over 200 schools and NGOs in Delhi, India’s capital, to conduct over 2000 weekly music workshops and music performances in the lowest-income communities positively impacting thousands of children and youth. Through culturally sensitive and innovative music, we have empowered thousands of adolescent young girls on menstrual hygiene and young boys and girls on reproductive health, amongst many other critical topics that affect their lives daily.

Manzil Mystics also performs at high profile institutional events and has performed on stage over 350 times. We have been recognized as a collaborative partner that has made a significant impact for over a decade by schools, NGOs, corporates, and government.

Our response to the year of the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in human history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners across the world. Lockdown and social distancing measures led to school closures throughout the country. We had to shut down all our on-ground operations and go digital to continue with our music workshops.

This experience brought out many challenges related to the online learning infrastructure, availability of internet connection or enabling technology, the limited exposure of our musicians to online teaching, the information gap, non-conducive environment for learning at home, especially among the disadvantaged communities that we work in. But, we also realized that school closures had far-reaching economic and societal consequences, including food insecurity, compromised nutrition, homelessness, access to childcare, healthcare for the poor, and significant financial stress for those who lost their jobs.

Within just a few weeks of conducting online classes, the students who came online for music classes started requesting for help in getting ration as everyone started losing their jobs and the situation became worse. We decided to respond and divided the organization into three teams. For COVID relief work, 3 team members, Shahbaaz, Anurag, and Manik started spending most of their time distributing ration and doing COVID relief work. We decided to serve our communities of 3000 children and their families who have been severely impacted with a loss of income and employment.

We decided to ignite hope by serving them, since April 2020, with weekly food and hygiene kits with the help of our wonderful partners Goonj, Jamghat, and Mankind Pharma. During the pandemic time, we served more than 35000 meals to around 15000 people, and distributed more than 2000 sanitary pads in vulnerable communities of Delhi consisting of daily wage laborers, migrant workers, homeless, senior citizens, differently abled people, and street children.

Rashmi, Niti, and Preeti performed the role of digital facilitators and took charge of all the digital music workshops, content creation, and concerts. During the pandemic time, they conducted once-a-week regular workshops for 119 children through digital means and approximately 50 short-term workshops for 6000 children.

Niti and Anurag kept aside 4-5 hours a week for innovation and planning for our work in education and life after corona. The need of the hour was to innovate and implement alternative educational and assessment strategies, paving the way for digital learning in music, and other innovative ways to empower our children and communities.