Skip to main content

Creating Winners

 These are busy days for me and that's the reason for the irregularity of my presence here. What keeps me busy is the state level cultural competition of CBSE being held in my school. The event started yesterday and will go on till Sunday.

About 7000 students from 1400 CBSE schools of Kerala are here on the campus of my school participating in events like singing and dancing and acting being held on 21 venues . These are all winners from their respective zones.

The purpose of this Kalotsav is the all-round development of the students of CBSE schools. It is based on the conviction that every student is a precious individual with immense potential. Events like this seek to provide the students with a hierarchy of platforms where their potential can be materialized, skills honed, and personality unfolded to its ultimate fulfilment.

Education is not all about textbooks and the labs. In fact, there is more that should happen outside the classrooms. The writer and the musician and the artist are born not in classrooms. Ironically, the classroom seems to stifle such potential. (Sometimes the potential does show itself in spite of the stifling. The other day I was amused by the opening sentence of an article written by a grade 11 student of mine. The topic was 'Students and Social Media'. My girl warmed the cockles of my heart with this opening: 'A mobile phone without internet is like a tomb without a corpse.' I loved the analogy and its creator. I prophesied a prospective auctorial future for her.)

I love that sort of creativity in my students. I gave my phone to a grade 9 student who was assisting me at the announcement desk yesterday, Delna Anna Benny, and asked her to click a few snaps from the Kalotsav. Delna turned out to be creative too. Let me bring some of her pics here to end this post.





Trophies for winners





Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanNovember 25, 2022 at 4:16 PM

    Hari OM
    What a heart-warming and uplifting thing, to see so many youngsters striving for improvement and approval. Seems you had an enjoyable time too! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 25, 2022 at 6:15 PM

      It's still going on and I get to meet a lot of students and teachers/parents from other places.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeNovember 25, 2022 at 4:45 PM

    Loved the last pic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rakhi JayashankarNovember 25, 2022 at 4:46 PM

    So my daughter not a very studious student but when I went for the parent interaction surprisingly teachers didn't have anything bad to tell about her because they said that she knows the stuff just that she can't reproduce it on papers. As you said real learning happens outside the text book

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 25, 2022 at 6:17 PM

      Some highly successful people were not particularly good at school.

      Delete
  4. Merrin BijuNovember 25, 2022 at 10:40 PM

    Missing school and these kalotsav days❤️

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more