“Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.” – John Dewey
‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan.’ These were the fundamental rights entitled to an Indian in every Bollywood movie. And somehow, most people thoroughly believed in this, which led to negligence of another basic right – Education. It’s true that we need the three basic rights to be fulfilled before we can actually ‘live’, instead of just breathing-eating-excretion-procreation. The malady of education has been gnawing at India since ages, when only a fraction of the society needed education to sustain the rest. But it can’t be so now. We have been realising over years that education, not only literacy, is imperative for everyone, especially in a country like ours.
We keep hearing about ‘free schools’ for children of lower strata, but aren’t most of them just to make them literate? Someone in Varanasi has realised the difference between ‘literacy’ and ‘education’, and jumped into a boat. Ajeet Singh has created a unique boat school for the children of Varanasi, who would spend two hours every day after their regular school hours in this boat. Is it a boat? Is it a school? No, it’s a #ScholarShip.
One and a Half Minutes 