A Sentient Soul

Today, in the age of corporatism and robotic life, demands are multifarious. Institutions, both families and schools, are put on high alert to meet these rising demands.

They provide suitable skills and required abilities to students; to chisel them into viable and valuable beings. The sole science of the schools, society and state today is to turn and train young generation for future-ready roles.

   

To nurture them into roles that could culminate them into pillars of support for the state.

These roles, however, can’t be reached at by fewer opportunities, for fewer opportunities create rigid expectations which unfairly tease student friendly leanings, barely exposing, or equipping them with tools and techniques to match the market milestones.

Sainik School Mansbal is paying heavy price today for being either ‘valued second’ or not being heard. We are not possibly privileged to be in prime priorities but we too are sentient beings and have played our part in knitting together society and state.

The school has produced men of letters and men who served and saved state and society through thick and thin.

Our NCC band is a new social capital for the Union Territory which against all odds (like glacial winters and scorching summer) perform every year perfectly for want of making society and state proud by featuring social and civic values.

Being one of the prestigious institution the school in the past has won laurels in every arena for imparting an education of ability and potential productivity among students.

However, school today is in a sinking boat with uncertainty looming large. Seeing a boarding school suffering this way generates a feeling of hopelessness.

Today Sainik School Mansbal, due to infrastructural poverty, like inadequate human resource and material resource, and above all absence of Principal is making headlines in both print and electronic media.

Absence of these pre-requisite facilities mars competitiveness in school. This scarcity amplifies stress and erodes efficacy which causes pain to both student and teaching community.

Today, School’s faith in ‘Just World’, where good is rewarded and bad is punished, has eroded. Students and parents desperately need a Principal, a fatherly figure, who can assure them good education. Sainik school students lose sight of their ‘real self’ in the kind of atmosphere that prevails right now.

This got echoed in the recent, workshop conducted in the ‘MP Hall’ of the JKSSM on ‘Depression’, where students spoke their heart out. They humbly complained about quality education for public or professional purposes. The status-quo-bias (leaving them to stick to what is available ) ruins their potential.

This under-resourcefulness of the school impacts the social and psychological behaviour of students. First, boarding culture of the school makes Sainik school student very vulnerable as he gets prematurely alienated from the social or familial atmosphere that are said to be central to one’s character construction.

Therefore, not heard or recognised further can find him distantly located in this age of competition.

Second, the school students seem inclined to halfhearted approach towards studies, morning assembly, and prep-exercises. Gathering in assembly is not for the sake of gathering, rather it is a pledge before man and God to be true to all assignments.

To put heads together, to nurse and nurture values and morals, ideas and ideals. Third, in our school parents living in bureaucratic bunkers essentially try to force their children to earn and learn what is at times different or allergic to their potential.

They burden them with goals of medical or military sciences and damage their in-built characteristics.

Fourth, this finding of no audience to their core concerns may aggravate the situation. Their coarse conversations can add to the problems of their life. Depression has no locale.

It is anywhere and everywhere today, and poses even most serious challenge to the ‘Young India’. Being sentient beings we (at JKSSM) all feel about this.

Before these buds fall prey to self-shame and their dreams die a sad death, it is high time to for the school to make a new name. So with a hat in hand, I, on behalf of all students, teachers (JKSSM) and parents request our honorable Lt. Governor to intervene and bring solace to our souls. Thanking you in anticipation, Sir.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.

The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.

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