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January 2016
The following excerpt is from a 31 page pdf docket consisting of compilation of articles by a motley crew of alumni of The New Era School, Kemps Corner, Bombay (sic). The excerpt is extracted from the foreword penned by Salil Tripathi (batch of 1977).
Salil Tripathi's bio as mentioned at the end of the foreword: Salil Tripathi started at New Era in Kandubhai's Montessori class in June 1964. He completed his SSC in 1977, and did one year of junior college at the school, before leaving for Sydenham College. Later he got his MBA from Dartmouth College in the US, and lived in Singapore and now London. He is a journalist and author. He is contributing editor at Mint and Caravan in India, and has written for publications around the world. His books are Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy (Aleph, 2014 and Yale, 2016), and Detours: Songs of the open Road (Tranquebar, 2015). His next book will be about Gujaratis. He is also senior adviser at the Institute of Human Rights and Business in London.
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What made New Era special was not its location, nor the number of laptops per student (we had none), nor indeed the gym facilities (none, again), but the quality of its teachers, and its ethos, and the values it imbibed in students. It is not a cram school that produces top-rankers at competitive examinations; nor is it a finishing school for children whose eyes are firmly set on moving abroad, never to return.
This 85 year-old institution at Kemp's Corner is special: It has witnessed the city's political and cultural history and stood firm, like the moral conscience of a once-tranquil area. In an area now teeming with traffic, it is situated at a spot that's a real-estate developer's dream. But look at its other side, flanking the August Kranti Maidan, or what we called the Gowalia Tank Maidan --- and that sense of history returns. Across, the hall where the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885; across the school, the maidan, where Gandhi told the British -- Quit India -- in 1942.
The Vyas family that started the school built its ethos on the soft power they drew from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. It was nationalism with a small "n", the kind Tagore emphasized, where vasudhaiva kutumbakam -- the world is my family -- was an ideal. Ami Kantawala, an alumna who teaches art in New York, says: "Those principles and philosophies of Gandhi and Tagore need to be kept vibrant and reframed in the present context of education without losing the history of the institution." It meant pride in one's culture without disrespecting other's cultures (even if it meant standing in attention during never-ending sarva-dharma-pratharna -- for the agnostic in me, who still finds atheism attractive, I have to admit those were five agonizing minutes every Friday). Here, several teachers (Pushpaben Joshi, for example) and students (my friend Kaushik Laijwala, for example) chose to wear khadi (homespun) clothes; and where the old uniform of khaki shorts and skirts and white shirts represented the Gandhian ideal of swaraj and it was not debased by the divisive propoganda of strident nationalism that prevails today in India, strutting around in the same uniform; where the school's anthem, composed by Pinakin Trivedi, himself a student at Santiniketan at one time, resonated with Tagorean cadence. It was a school whose face to the world was a gigantic mural --- now sadly and inexplicable (sic) torn down by the new management --- created by Dineshbhai commemorating Gandhi's life. It has re-emerged at the home of Paula (nee Sonawala) and Ravi Mariwala, of the great clan without which any New Era story is incomplete. The Mariwalas, the Sampats, Bhatias, Mehtas, Shahs, Bhansalis, Desais, Parikhs, Jhaveris and many, reading like entries of a special phone directory made of the city's finer families.
That school taught us the spirit of fearlessness, which is drawn from its past: During the Quit India Movement of 1942, Gandhians Usha Mehta and others ran a clandestine radio station from the school, mocking the British authorities. "There is so much history here, it must be preserved," Paula (who went on to get a doctorate at Stanford and is now a venture capitalist) told me once when I was admiring Dineshbhai's mural at their home. Indeed, during the Emergency of 1975-77, some of us, with the full knowledge of our teachers, made copies of pro-democracy material that was distributed quietly at homes in Napean Sea Road, Warden Road, Peddar Road, Laburnum Road and beyond, the catchment of the school, comprising middle-and-upper-middle-class Gujarati families who wanted their children rooted in Indianness, but able to deal with the world with confidence. Chaula Bhimani, your classmate (and Kaushik's cousin), once told me, "Today when I see people streaking their hair and wearing tattoos, I feel proud of my firm identity, about my Indianness, which is all thanks to New Era."
It was not uncommon to talk about Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar in our classes. Kartick Kumar and Zakir Hussian played at our assembly. Vijay Merchant and our alumnus Anandji Dosa told us stories about cricket. Umashankar Joshi and Niranjan Bhagat read us poetry. Morarji Desai spoke about Gandhi, Father Wallace about spirituality, Karsandas Manek told us stories.
It was a Gujarati medium school, but it never disregarded English. You could study French or Sanskrit, until state regulations made it impossible. We could take optional classes on weekends for Bengali, which I did for two years --- other New Eraites - Lopa Seth and Sonal Mehta, both senior to me by three years --- also studying with me out of choice, drawn by Ray and Tagore, about whom we first heard from our teachers.
Many of us felt drawn to the school even during vacations. My friend Darshana Shilpi Rouget, an art director who lives in London told me: "I loved going to school so much that I used to pretend to be well when I would be sick so that I wouldn't miss school." And the school trusted its students in return. My classmate and chartered accountant Nandita Parekh reminds me how we did not have invigilators for the preliminary examinations in 1977, because we asked the school to trust us, and the school did.
We are now in a new, shining India, where the school is known by some who didn't know its magic as the school next to the Porsche showroom, but what do they know of India, who only know Vande Mataram because of A.R. Rahman's video? New Era taught us to shine and remain decent and modest. As I reflect back on the school's alumni, we didn't do too badly: Alumni I recall include the scholar on erotic art, Devangana Desai; corporate lawyer Bijesh Thakker; banker Falguni Nayar; mountaineering pioneer Harish Kapadia; stockbroker Hemendra Kothari; figurative painter Ila Pal; musician Vanraj Bhatia; Bollywood and Gujarati stage actors Satish Shah, Deepak Gheewala, and Siddharth Randeria; cricket commentator Anant Setalvad and broadcasters Amin Sayani and Hamid Sayani. There are many more.
Gandhi once said: "I want the cultures of all land to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet with any." The New Era school taught us to be proud as Indians, and yet be world citizens.
It gave us the best of what it meant to be an Indian. Those values made us. By living those values we honour that time and keep the school, and ourselves, alive.
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