We open every school day with the Gayatri Mantra. Some of our girls arrive knowing the verse by heart. Many arrive not knowing it at all. Both groups know it, and mean it, by the end of the first term.

The mantra is not, in our reading, a matter of religion. It is a matter of orientation. Before the timetable begins — before the first bell, the first lesson, the first negotiation of the day — the whole school stops for four lines of Sanskrit that ask, more or less, for the light of the mind.

In a hurried world, we think it is worth asking. In a school for girls, we think it is especially worth asking.