Sharing circles launched in Bengaluru as part of Manotsava 2026

Some of the issues discussed in these circles include adoption, managing family expectations, finding support systems, reflecting on midlife, negotiating difficult family dynamics, and supporting caregiving

Updated - August 20, 2026 10:32 am IST

At one of the sharing circles | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Rema, an adoptive parent to a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, is deeply aware of the impact of childhood experiences and parenting style on the development of children. “I keep reading about things and am in touch with other adoptive parents,” she says.

This is perhaps why Rema found a recent sharing circle held in Bengaluru, titled The Adoption Conversation: When do you begin? How do you continue?, interesting. “I wanted to hear how other people are tackling the same situation.”

Having a platform like this, where everyone is on the same page, made it easier for her to walk in and share her thoughts, without judgement, explains Rema, who prefers to go by only her first name. “Every parent’s story is different, so having a space to share was beautiful.”

These sharing circles are part of a series organised as precursors to Manotsava 2026, an annual mental health festival co-hosted by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies (RNP), NIMHANS and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).

In addition to adoption, this series will also include conversations about family expectations, finding support systems, reflecting on midlife, negotiating difficult family dynamics, and supporting caregiving, among others, in a safe, accepting space.

Every parent’s story is so different, says Rema, who attended a sharing circle | Photo Credit: Getty Images

“I’ve always felt it to be powerful when you are able to speak your mind to someone and say what’s on your mind without being judged or having someone jump in and try to help you,” says Lakshmi Pattabi Raman, one of the sharing circle’s facilitators and an adoptive parent herself. This is especially true, Lakshmi believes, when the other people in the room already get it.

“It is cathartic to speak with other people who share the same experiences, not with the intent of solving things, but because hearing it out sometimes lightens it. And there is also the sense of finding community, knowing that you are not alone and that there are people holding similar questions that puzzle, trouble, or stress them out,” Lakshmi says.

The idea for these circles emerged at the previous edition of Manotsava, according to Natasha Joshi, Chief of Strategy at RNP and the festival’s programme curator. “The idea was to essentially marry neuroscience and clinical expertise with lived experience and put together a credible format for discourse on mental health,” Natasha says of the festival, which is co-curated every year through an open call for proposals. However, some of the proposals they received covered pertinent topics, but did not necessarily have a clinical angle or neuroscience lens, points out Natasha.

Caregiving is another topic that will be discussed at the festival | Photo Credit: SUDHAKARA JAIN

So they decided to ask the people who suggested these topics whether, instead of speaking about them on stage in a talk format, they could hold space and do it as a much more intimate sharing circle, led by lived experience, Natasha says.

“It was a risk, in the sense that we didn’t know whether there would be a demand for it and how it would actually play out in the festival. But we discovered it was superbly well-received,” says Natasha, recalling how they ended up having to turn hundreds of people away since every sharing circle was running at maximum capacity, with 50 to 80 participants.

“We had this whole experience of not just realising that the demand is greater than the supply, but that absorption capacity for this kind of thing is greater than what one imagines.”

This positive reaction to the sharing circles led the team to take it beyond the confines of the festival. “We got feedback from not just the participants, but also the facilitators, who had people reaching out to them even after, saying that they didn’t know such a space existed and that they wanted more of it,” says Yashasvi Murali, Portfolio Manager, Mental Health and Gender, RNP, who has played a crucial role in putting together these sharing circles.

Given that the facilitators, too, saw a lot of “value and potential, and given that they were willing to give their time to do more of something like this, we built on this,” Yashasvi says.

The Manotsava team began by reaching out to many of these facilitators, taking their feedback to understand what worked and what did not before getting into programming, explains Yashasvi.