A typical final year at school, with academics, at the centre. Be it assembly gatherings or social gatherings, people of varied shapes, sizes and dimensions have immense interest in your studies. For me year 2000-2001 was no different. The countdown for the Boards has begun right from Day 1. Unit Tests, Semesters, Prelims bulleted 1,2,3 (3 was optional) pre-decided by school authorities.
In such scheduled atmosphere, anything out of routine attracts attention. For our batch, it was Ratna Khemani’s personality development workshop. The 1.5 hours session in the Science Laboratory, minced a few surprises. For once, somebody said “Exams are not important”. For a fraction of second, our eyes gleamed, smiles spread, murmurs rose. What followed was a structured reasoning in a passive tone, suggesting how the statement needs to be taken in context. A series of philanthropic narrations followed, importance of health was discussed. “Water is the passport of life”, one recallable quote I can remember offhand.
The next day, the city local daily, carried an article about her. I was super- thrilled, to see the picture of someone in the Newspaper, whom I had just met the previous day. It was as though, I met a celebrity. Immediately I got the Newspaper cutting done. I clipped a 1 page write up, on her interaction with us, at school and placed this, in my bag of handwritten diary events.
Each time, thereafter, whenever I browsed this bag, this clipping would come forth. May be that’s the reason why I remember this name so well.
++++++++++++++++++++++
03rd April 2011: Times Wellness: Make Your Child a Winner: By Mrs Ratna Khemani.
++++++++++++++++++++++
PS: I thanked her on the session she held with us at School. She promptly acknowledged.
Its quite rare we come across people, we have met years ago. I can sense, how you must have felt.I experienced similar thing, recently.
ReplyDelete