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A Rakhi Made of Love: Celebrating Siblings at School

There is a drawer in my mother’s house that still holds every rakhi I ever tied on my brother’s wrist. Some are shop-bought, glittery and slightly gaudy. Others are clumsy homemade things, made of coloured thread and glue, lumpy with too much enthusiasm. My brother, now a grown man with a serious job and a receding hairline, has never thrown a single one away.

I thought of that drawer last August, standing at the back of a classroom at Crayons Vidyarambha, watching a room full of children bent over tables, making rakhis with the grave concentration of tiny jewellers. And I realised that something I had always taken for granted, the bond between brothers and sisters, was being handed to my own children with extraordinary care.

The Festival That Is Really About a Promise

Raksha Bandhan is often described as a festival where sisters tie a thread on their brothers’ wrists. But anyone who has grown up with a sibling knows it is about something deeper than the thread.

It is a promise. I will look out for you. I will be there when you need me. Whatever happens, we belong to each other. It is a quiet, annual reminder that the person who shared your childhood, who knows your embarrassing stories and your secret fears, is bound to you in a way that nothing else quite replicates.

For children, who understand love through actions far more than words, that promise needs something to hold onto. A rakhi gives them exactly that.

What I Saw in the Classroom

On that afternoon, the children had been given coloured threads, beads, small paper flowers and glue. The teacher moved quietly between the tables, helping a struggling hand here, admiring a design there, never taking over.

I watched a six-year-old called Rohan work for twenty minutes on a single rakhi. He chose blue beads, then rejected them, then chose them again. He asked the teacher how to make the thread stay on without sliding. He tried three times, frowned, and tried again.

“Who is it for?” I asked him softly.

“My didi,” he said, without looking up. “She’s in Class 5. She always waits for me at the gate.”

That was all he said. But the care in his small, careful fingers said everything else.

The Younger Ones and the Bigger Ones

One of the things that struck me was how naturally the celebration crossed age groups. Because Crayons Vidyarambha teaches children from the earliest classes right through to Class 8, siblings are often in the same building, a few corridors apart.

During the celebration, older children visited younger classrooms, and younger children were brought to meet their elder siblings. I watched a ten-year-old girl kneel beside her little brother, who looked about four, and tie a rakhi on his wrist while he stared at her with total devotion. Across the room, a small girl proudly presented her handmade rakhi to a tall, slightly embarrassed boy in Class 7, who accepted it with enormous dignity and, I noticed, a very suspicious sheen in his eyes.

Those moments mattered. They told each child that being part of a family, and part of a school community, meant being looked after and looking after others in return.

For the Children Who Have No Siblings

What I appreciated most, though, was something I had not expected.

Not every child has a brother or a sister. In every class, there are children who are only children, or whose siblings live far away, or who are quietly aware that the festival is about something they do not have. A less thoughtful celebration might have left them standing at the edge of the room.

Here, the teachers had gently woven them in. Children made rakhis for classmates they considered close friends. They tied them on teachers, on the school helpers who greet them each morning, on the gardener who always waves from behind the hedge. A girl who had no brother tied her rakhi on the wrist of her best friend, and the two of them announced, with total seriousness, that they were now “school siblings.”

I found that wonderfully moving. The message was clear: you do not need to share blood to share a bond. Kindness, loyalty and care can turn friends into family, and a school can be a place where that happens.

What Siblings Teach Us That Nobody Else Can

Watching all this, I thought about what my own children learn from each other, day by day, without anyone formally teaching it.

They learn to share, usually after a heated argument about a toy. They learn to forgive, often within fifteen minutes. They learn that love can coexist with irritation, and that a person can drive you completely mad and still be the one you want beside you when you are scared.

My older child has learned patience from waiting for her little brother to finish tying his shoelaces. My younger one has learned bravery from watching his sister walk onto a stage. Neither lesson came from a book. Both came from simply living alongside another small human being, day after day.

Raksha Bandhan, at its best, celebrates exactly that quiet, ordinary education.

The Teacher Who Understood

I spoke afterwards with the class teacher, curious about how the activity had been planned. She smiled and said something I have not forgotten.

“We do not make rakhis just to make rakhis,” she told me. “We use the festival to talk about what it means to look after someone. To notice when a friend is sad. To share. To be kind to someone smaller than you. These are lessons children carry for life.”

She added that she always keeps a small box of spare rakhis in her cupboard on that day, just in case a child arrives without one. No child at Crayons Vidyarambha is ever left out of a celebration.

That tiny detail, a box of spare threads in a teacher’s cupboard, told me more about the culture of the school than any brochure.

The Rakhi My Son Brought Home

That evening, my son came home with his own handmade rakhi, a slightly lopsided creation of red thread and yellow beads that he had made for his sister.

He did not give it to her immediately. He kept it hidden in his bag for most of the evening, glancing at it occasionally with a secret smile. Finally, after dinner, he marched across the living room, stood in front of her, and held out his hand.

“This is for you,” he announced. “Because you let me sit in the front seat that one time.”

I do not know what the front seat incident was, and I did not ask. My daughter looked at the rakhi, then at her brother, and her eyes filled with tears. She tied it on her own wrist, since it was supposed to be the other way around, and neither of them noticed or cared.

I stood by the sink, pretending to be busy with the dishes, and wiped my face with a dish towel.

Traditions That Teach, Without Preaching

I have come to believe that festivals are some of the best teachers a child can have. They carry stories, values and rituals that no textbook can reproduce, and they do so wrapped in colour, food and laughter, which is the only language young children truly absorb.

At Crayons Vidyarambha, festivals are not treated as holidays to be gotten through. They are woven into the life of the school, with attention to their meaning and respect for every family’s background. Children celebrate Raksha Bandhan, and they also learn about festivals from across India and across the world, discovering that every tradition is, at its heart, about love, gratitude and belonging.

As a CBSE global school, Crayons Vidyarambha prepares children for a wide, connected world. But it does so while keeping their roots alive, helping them become young people who are both globally confident and deeply grounded.

What Every Parent Can Do at Home

If you would like to carry this celebration into your own home, here are a few gentle ideas.

Make rakhis together. Even if you have shop-bought ones, let your children design one for each other. The imperfect ones become the most treasured.

Tell the stories. Share how you celebrated as a child, who tied a rakhi on your wrist, and what that bond meant. Children love hearing about their parents’ childhoods.

Include everyone. If your child has cousins, friends or neighbours who are like siblings, invite them to join. Family is wider than we sometimes assume.

Say the promise out loud. Ask your children what they would promise each other. Their answers are often astonishingly wise.

Keep the old ones. Like the drawer in my mother’s house, a box of past rakhis becomes a small museum of a childhood.

A Thread That Holds More Than It Seems

A rakhi is, on the surface, a simple thing: a few strands of thread, some beads, perhaps a bit of glitter. But what it carries is far heavier. It carries years of shared meals, shared quarrels, shared secrets. It carries a family’s history and a child’s earliest understanding of loyalty.

Standing in that classroom, watching small hands tie small threads, I understood that what I was seeing was not just a craft activity. It was the quiet planting of a promise, one that these children would remember long after the beads had fallen off and the thread had faded.

Give Your Children a School That Celebrates the Bonds That Matter

At Crayons Vidyarambha, we believe that education is as much about hearts as it is about minds. If you are searching for a CBSE global school in Bachupally, Hyderabad where traditions are celebrated with warmth, siblings are cherished, and every child feels they belong, we would love to welcome your family.

Book a campus visit today, meet our teachers, and see how we help children grow into kind, confident and deeply connected young people. Admissions for 2026–27 are now open. Enquire today.