Early Days
Researching the issue of our students’ suicides, we discovered that every country has its own basic attitude to social experiences. Thus, the English are relatively undemonstrative, the Americans strongly so, and so on. We identified that what typifies us Indians is the izzat factor – it’s all about our izzat, our prestige & status. The education system we chose in India however runs counter to this attitude, and so we respond differently than foreign youngsters do to their systems, because theirs is of their own choosing, whereas ours was imported during British days. This was an important discovery, and led us to design an Indian-friendly system, Where the child is without fear.
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Members of SERVE in Delhi with Dr Janaki Rajan of SCERT |
It was applied for years in Delhi under the SCERT-leadership of Dr Janaki Rajan who invited SERVE up to the capital to train her colleagues and teachers, and it was hugely successful in more than 50 schools there. Alas, with her departure from office the system was discontinued by an indifferent successor. (But Delhi is still on our map!)
| RS – who first believed in SERVE. |  |
Tantia High School Kolkata took on the system in the early days, and again the kids did far better than expected. But the enlightened Principal RS Upadhyaya passed away suddenly, and here again his successor abandoned the initiative. Still, the word spread that SERVE were onto something important, and we were invited to help schools in many alleviative ways even if they found it impossible to adopt the SERVE system holus-bolus. Newspapers welcomed us for some years as we perpetually prodded and poked government policies that failed to respond to an ever-increasing crop of young people committing suicide. Understandably, this support suddenly ended, with the papers self-righteously declaring that politics had nothing to do with the sudden (effective) silencing of our letters and articles.
However, the most inspiring and motivating experience of our early years was the suicide of our iconic little 11-year-old Sahana Pal. (See Student Suicides LINK.)
In 2002 we were invited to contribute full-length monthly articles to, The Telegraph about education, which for some years we did. They mostly exposed the shortcomings in the system as prescribed and practised, and SERVE intended to trigger increasing dissatisfaction with things, so that parents and other interested personnel would demand change. When this effort looked like succeeding we were told that no further pieces would be welcomed. We didn’t need an astrologer to identify why.