With Love MuSo.
At Mumbai's Museum of Solutions (MuSo), a six-day festival made space for children and the adults around them to explore emotional wellbeing through music, making, cooking, play and simply sitting.
Inside the Museum of Solutions in Lower Parel, the past week unfolded at two distinct volumes. There were moments of joyful noise: unfamiliar voices meeting in the Strangers Choir, children singing without worrying about getting every note right. Then there were pauses: a child intent on making something by hand, a family lingering in wonderous silence after a session, or a room learning the quiet pleasure of doing nothing at all.
Those contrasts gave With Love, MuSo its character. Created by the Museum of Solutions in partnership with Teach For India, the six-day festival invited children, parents, caregivers and educators to explore emotional wellbeing through music, art, storytelling, movement, conversation and rest. Its central idea was disarmingly simple: care should not enter a child's life only at a moment of crisis; it can be noticed and nurtured in ordinary experience.
That proposition feels urgent in a city-and a culture-that continually asks children to achieve more and move faster. Here, the counteroffer was time: to be curious, frustrated or bored; to make mistakes without an adult immediately stepping in; to participate rather than perform. A Teachers' Day evening centred on the Pedagogy of Love carried the conversation into classrooms and underlined the role of the adults who shape childhood.
"Emotional wellbeing is built through the everyday moments of childhood; when a child feels heard, has the freedom to express themselves, can play without an agenda, or knows that someone is genuinely listening. With Love, MuSo was about creating more of those moments and recognising that empathy, kindness and care are not lessons children must learn on their own; they are values we practise together, as the adults around them. This is the kind of space we hope MuSo continues to create, the one where children and adults can explore, question and experience what it means to care for each other."- Tanvi Jindal Shete, Founder, Museum of Solutions
Across the programme, these ideas took many forms. Pause Body by Dipna invited participants to reconnect with their bodies and the present moment. Cooked with Love by Shruti Taneja brought care and connection into the act of making food together, while Peace Through Play by Gautam Kabir explored how play can become a space for expression, connection and understanding. The closing experience, To Love Is to Rest, made space for the radical idea that rest need not be earned.
The festival also reflected MuSo's broader philosophy: children are not passive recipients of lessons but active participants in shaping an experience. Emotional wellbeing was therefore not presented as a chapter to be mastered. It was encountered-in how a room listened, how a child chose to engage, and how an adult resisted the urge to direct every moment.
"This festival also reflected a larger truth about childhood: the different worlds a child moves through cannot be separated from one another. Home, school, friendships and the wider community all shape how a child feels and experiences the world. With Love, MuSo brought these adults and ecosystems into the same space, making care feel less like an individual responsibility and more like something that can be shared."- Shaheen Mistri, Founder, Teach For India
That shared responsibility may be the festival's most enduring proposition. A child carries home, school, friendship, fear and hope at once; care cannot be neatly delegated to one institution or one adult. By bringing the ecosystem around childhood into the same space, With Love, MuSo made wellbeing feel less like a specialist intervention and more like a collective habit.
If the week left behind one lesson, it was that wellbeing does not always need a stage of its own. It can begin in small, unremarkable acts: noticing, listening, playing, resting, letting a child finish a thought. These moments rarely make a headline, yet they are often the ones that last.
MuSo is already looking ahead. Creative Quotient 2026, a two-day interdisciplinary art festival themed The Art of Play, is scheduled for 10 and 11 October, with Halloween Adventures and Christmas Chronicles to follow later in the year. With Love, MuSo is also set to return annually. Its challenge will be to preserve what made this first edition resonate: amid Mumbai's constant acceleration, the courage to protect a little room for childhood to move at its own pace.
