The IIT Adivasi’ who became a frontbencher
At 4.30pm on July 7, as the shadows lengthened on the freedom memorial, Hijli jail, in Kharagpur, Yama took away a campus favourite. Living alone and quietly in a small apartment outside the IIT campus was a bespectacled, diminutive, 89-year-old professor.
He was “The IIT Adivasi”, the only surviving original. His name, Gitindra Saran Sanyal, meant “the path of music and poetry”. His was a path of teaching and leading technology education.
“Professor Sir” to today’s IIT directors and the 25,000 Kharagpur graduates over the last half a century, Sanyal was among the few able to recall first-hand how a modern and premier technical institution was created in a newly independent India. […]
“Do not merely say ‘yes’ and forget about it. In our tradition, a promise given to a teacher must be fulfilled — and remember, I am into my late 70s!” he reminded me. […]
Sourve: “The IIT Adivasi’ who became a frontbencher” by R. Gopalkrishna, The Telegraph Calcutta, Saturday, July, 2011:
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110709/jsp/nation/story_14216515.jsp
Date Visited: Thu Nov 03 2011 10:19:10 GMT+0100 (CET)
[Bold typeface added above for emphasis]
“We shall first have to give up this hubris of considering tribes backward. Every tribe has a rich and living cultural tradition and we must respect them.”
Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on India’s Constitutional obligation to respect their cultural traditions
Gandhian social movement | Constitution >>
“Air is free to all but if it is polluted it harms our health… Next comes water… From now on we must take up the effort to secure water. Councillors are servants of the people and we have a right to question them.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi, Ahmedabad address on 1 January 1918; quoted by his grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, in “On another New Year’s Day: Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘khorak’ a 100 years ago” (The Hindu, 1 January 2018)
Photo © Indian Express
“We have to write our own stories, about our issues, from our own perspectives” – Abhay Xaxa >>
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