Antonio Diniz
The news item “School Boys meet their Principal after 40 years” (Herald Café, January 26) is truly nostalgic and heart rendering. The very fact these old school boys of yester years, Alumni of Class of 1977, of St Vincent’s High School, Pune, decided to come together and travel all the way to Goa to greet and pay tribute to the man with a smile and former Principal Fr. Romauld D’Souza, is certainly an act of great reverence, respect and affection towards this exceptional nonagenarian personality and educational stalwart and also founder of two institutions of higher learning, including the prestigious Goa Institute of Management (GIM).
What an amazing feeling must have been for Fr Romauld to be surrounded by his past pupils, some of them highly successful personalities in different professional fields such as medicine, business, law, engineering and technology and share with him their precious time over a luncheon meeting.
Now on reflection, will the present generation of students remember their Principal and teachers, who also give their best to them even after 20 years from leaving the high school? Most probably not, the reason being the tremendous changes in conditions and circumstances, under which the students are growing up in our schools.
Nowadays if at all it happens, students will have to be grateful not only to the Principal and the teachers but also to their different subject tutors, coaching institutes, mobiles with Whatsapp and even Google for providing all the necessary inputs such as knowledge, learning materials and instant information that could be copied and pasted easily, for their success in getting 95+ marks.
Finally it would be befitting if these40 highly accomplished individuals, who specially came to meet the Jesuit Priest Fr Romauld, do come forward and decide to institute some kind of scholarships in the name of their beloved ex-principal, so that his lifetime achievements and memories as a fine human being and an extraordinary educationist, perpetuates in the years to come.
I am certain that it will happen.
