Last year, I wrote about two schoolgirls who approached me at the Science City auditorium with the request to hand over their little purse to the rickshaw-puller in Balurghat who takes care of education of village girls on the outskirts of the Dinajpur town.
This year, during the same event — The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence — the audience were stunned to hear the announcement by Barry O’Brien that students of Loreto contributed in the fund created by The Telegraph Education Foundation for scholarships to be awarded. The contribution may not be a huge amount, but the generosity and fellow feeling of girls of a Calcutta convent — from where one Skopje-born girl became Mother Teresa some 60 years ago — are truly inspiring. The girls created the fund with small savings from their tiffin money they used to get everyday.
The aim of the awards ceremony was never to shower cash awards on meritorious students, but to recognise efforts of little brave hearts. In its 13th year, the event bore more fruit than ever before with students joining hands to help each other, teachers of a little-known school donating a month’s salary to start a scholarship or a poet’s 60km journey from Jamshedpur to Purulia every weekend for decades to start an ashram for Santhal students with lakhs of trees around.
Take the example of Krishna Pada Bhattacharya. A year after the Quit India Movement, a 35-year-old man with a vision to change the face of rural Bengal came from Karimpur in Nadia to Nekurseni in Midnapore (now West Midnapore) to join as station master at the small halt on the Howrah-Madras (now Chennai) line.
The station master, Krishna Pada, believed that a school and hospital could uplift the lives of villagers, mostly tribals on the Bengal-Orissa border, about 165km from Calcutta. With some like-minded friends, he established Nekurseni Vivekananda Vidyamandir, which was upgraded to a high school 14 years later. When the first batch passed school final (matriculation exam) in 1960, tears rolled down his cheeks. Throughout his career spanning over decades, the station master did not leave the village even when he was offered promotion because he wanted to involve with the school and the hospital built later till the last day of his life. Today, the 90-year-old is still going strong with the firm conviction that villagers too can be enlightened with education and healthcare. This year, Krishna Pada was inducted in the Hall of Fame of the foundation with a contribution of Rs 50,000 to the school so that it can build a girls’ hostel on its campus.
The annual awards ceremony —held on the last Saturday of August — leaves us with the message of serving humanity, not always demanding Rs 2,000-tagline Nike shoes or a pair of Levi’s jeans, as told by Barry on August 30 morning, from our parents.
(Links to some of the news reports related to the event that appeared in The Telegraph)
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080831/jsp/frontpage/story_9767961.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080831/jsp/calcutta/story_9759845.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/calcutta/story_9766726.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/calcutta/story_9766727.jsp
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080901/jsp/siliguri/story_9770271.jsp
http://telegraphindia.com/1080911/jsp/calcutta/story_9811499.jsp
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