Pratima Gupta - Courage

Pratima Gupta, Head of School at Sunbeam Suncity (School & Hostel), Varanasi in India explores what courage looks like in schools and poses the question: when our students step into the world, will they simply be qualified or will they be courageous enough to redefine it?

Transcript

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Good day everyone. I'm Pratima Gupta, the head of Sunbeam Sun City School and Hostel Varanasi in India. It's a nippy February morning here in Varanasi. I'm surrounded by the quiet hush of a school preparing for the upcoming annual examinations. The occasional bird chirps, and if I strain my ears, I can hear the ganges in the far distance flowing serene and placid. And yet this very river can become tumultuous and torrential in the monsoons. Much like the course of life, serene and quiet at times, and suddenly something happens, and then there is so much of a churning that you feel as if, oh my god, where was the serenity of the previous few days? When I look back upon my journey of almost two decades plus in the schools, I feel that there is something which defines the path of the later course of life. And if I were to link it to the round square ideals or to the discovery framework, also, I feel courage is something which is so important in an adolescent's or a child's journey through life. And I would want to share my reflections on courage. Because what we generally perceive courage as, when we think of the word courage, the visual that springs to our mind is a soldier bravely defending the frontiers of a nation or a mountaineer in his dogged perseverance, braving the snowstorm or the blizzard as he or she trudges up an Ardos mountain path, or something equally grand. But as I have uh met courage in the corridors of a school, courage has not been so in your face, so aggressive, so bold. Sometimes courage has been a tiny voice within. It has been a quiet, determined, yet fierce stance which a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, or a 15-year-old has taken. I look back, and one of the shining examples of courage which have stood the test of time in my experiences in school has been the case of one of my students a few years back who was uh preparing for his uh grade 10 examinations, which are board examinations in the Indian education scenario, as well as the grade 12 examinations. Uh Rishikesh was uh an ardent, I would say, devotee of music. Music was his passion, and he sang so amazingly, mellifluously well that the entire campus fell into you know revered silence whenever he came upon the mic or even hummed to himself. And uh this boy lived for music and still labored under the weight of the expectations of his parents and I would say the society at large, because uh come to think of it, who takes a 15-year-old seriously when he says that I want to have a band of my own someday? I want to be a musician, and that that's the only thing which which kind of makes my day seem relevant. I remember these uh mammoth uh talkathons which uh all of us at uh Sun City used to have with his very anxious and and um overwrought father every time he was presented Rishikesh's report card, and he would say, What is to become of this child? And we would tell him, Oh, but he was so amazing at this concert, and oh, but he was so brilliant on the stage in the annual functions, so on and so forth. And you know, his father would look at us and say, so much for all that, but what about a profession? What about a career path? And and singing songs and strumming a guitar is not all that I sent him to the school for. What I feel when I look back upon Rishikesh's journey is that he didn't go to war with a gun. He he didn't have to actually give his life, he chose to live his dream, his passion, and that was his courage. Or for that matter, another example, and I really don't know why I'm talking about all my examples from the field of performing arts, perhaps because um the parallel curriculum fights its own battle for existence along with uh academic excellence in in a school premises. So um Aryan is yet another person who was passionate about pursuing Kathak, a dance form of Hindustani classical dance uh area. And um Aryan battled not only the skepticism of his parents, but sometimes ridicule and mocking of his own peers and colleagues who felt that learning classical Indian dance was uh something so ultra effeminate and that who strikes such kind of girly poses and who who wears the traditional anklets and and you know performs to such a dance form. Again, in spite of all that, Aaron stood his ground. Not because he was a rebel, not that he had a point to prove that, look, I'm so different, and look, I dare to be different, but the pursuit of his own dreams mattered to him. Uh, the stance that he took about his own interests mattered to him. And for me, the journey of these two 16-year-old kids would always remain as a touchstone for uh for people who sometimes keep quiet, give up their dreams because they lack the courage to pursue them. So I feel as educationists, what we have to question ourselves is when our students step into the world, will they simply be qualified? Or will they be courageous enough to redefine it? Because the future does not belong merely to the talented, it belongs to the courageous. And to quote Bukowski, what matters most is how well you walk through the fire. So here's wishing all of us the courage to be what we are, to stand by our convictions, to not only be a face in the crowd, but to be someone who matters and is important to themselves.