
Wise Owl Club: A recreational club for seniors that is off the beaten track
The Hindu
While addressing the emptiness in their own lives, two residents of Adyar, Jayanthi Sekhar and Pushya Sitaraman, have managed to ease the loneliness of many senior citizens who find themselves in a similar situation. They run a recreational club in Chennai
Recently, in an ancestral house in Mylapore, traditional games kept a gathering enthralled. The sight of shells moving across a wooden board revived memories of pallanguzhi. There was a game of Seven Stones. Paramapadam and aadu puli were among other games that took a motley group of senior citizens down memory lane. Numbering over 20, the group had gathered at the house of a member as part of the monthly activity of Wise Owl Club.
Led by two sisters - Jayanthi Sekhar and Pushya Sitaraman — the activities of the Club are run under the Wise Owl Foundation, a registered body born in October 2023. Wise Owl Club currently has 40 members and is keen on growing bigger.
The forum was started for senior citizens looking for a recreational club that is off the beaten track. The meetups do not have a fixed venue or date — they are held either at a club or a member’s house.
The idea to start a recreational club for seniors came up when the sisters themselves were trying to infuse fresh meaning into their lives.
“Our children are away and there is some emptiness, that is when we thought of starting this club,” says 65-year-old Jayanthi, a resident of Adyar, who was helping the family business before starting the Foundation.
The curated workshops try to offer activities that people are really longing to take up or something that they had grown out of but now want to return to.
Book owls, gardening owls, theatre arts owls, creative owls, playful owls, healthy owls and armchair travel are the broad themes of these workshops, offered to members as well as non-members.