IAN DORAN SITTING 3RD FROM RIGHT

A happy, content, creative person, Vikram Karve, educated at IIT Delhi, ITBHU and The Lawrence School Lovedale, is an Electronics and Communications Engineer by profession, a Human Resource Trainer by occupation, a Teacher by vocation, a Creative Writer by inclination and a Foodie by passion.

PREM RAO

Prem Rao

Management Consultant & Executive Coach based in Bangalore, India
Alumnus of Lawrence School, Lovedale, Loyola College, Chennai & XLRI, Jamshedpur ('74)
First generation entrepreneur.
Founded People 1st Consulting in 2000.
Working with people for 34 years...and still learning!
Contact: bprao AT people1stconsulting

Her Schooling

She did her schooling at the Lawrence School in Lovedale, Ooty.
She did her graduation with a Bachelor in Hotel Management (BHM) Degree from the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration (WGHSA) at the Manipal University in Manipal, Karnataka, India in 2008. She is excelled not only in academics but also in co-curricular activities, and sports. Vice Principal of WGSHA, Dr. Kulmohan Singh says' "Kishore had constantly ranked amongst the 20 best students of the class."

Her Great Achievement

Kishore won the Miss India Earth title at the Pantaloons Femina Miss India 2009 beauty pageant in Mumbai along with Ekta Choudhary, who was crowned Miss India Universe 2009 and Pooja Chopra who got the Miss India World 2009. Kishore was crowned by Miss India Earth 2008 Tanvi Vyas.

Gul Panag (January 3, 1979 ; Chandigarh, India) is a critically acclaimed Bollywood actress and former beauty queen who has competed in the Miss Universe pageant. Her notable films are Dhoop , Dor and Manorama Six Feet Under.

Gul Panag hails from an Army background.Her father Lieutenant General H S Panag, is in the Indian Army and is at present Army Commander, Central Command. She has a younger brother , Sherbir Singh who is a nationally ranked Skeet shooter and is at present studying at her Alma Mater, The Lawrence School Lovedale.

IN LOVING MEMORY

A section photograph taken at The Lawrence School, Lovedale. It was taken by the school photographer way back in 2001. It shows Class 7-A.
Hari, who passed away yesterday, is third from right on the top row while the greivously injured Fazal is fourth from the right i.e. he stands right next to Hari. Pranav Singal, whose condition was also stated to be critical is fourth from the left on the same row. Esha, who also passed away is the fourth girl from the right in the middle row.
May the departed rest in peace. And I hope the rest get better soon.

Remembering the departed- An Obituary

“It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.”
-Samuel Johnson

This piece is about two people- Esha and Hari, people who played a role in quite a major part of my life, in more ways than one, and whose sudden demise has left a huge gap that will obviously take a long time to fill. I came to know both of them around eleven years back, when we met at The Lawrence School, Lovedale. In Prep School i.e. from classes 4-6, all three of us were in the same section and also in the same house. Over the next three years, I got to see these two grow into two fine people; people who knew how to stand up for themselves at an age that people don’t usually associate with maturity. With this, they lived up to the tag of being Lawrencians. While Esha was the only girl prefect of our house, Hari was one of the three boy prefects. Esha’s leadership skills were at a level that could only be matched by a handful of her peers, arguably the more illustrious ones. Hari wasn’t exactly what you would call a born leader and what made him stand out was his controlled aggression, something because of which he was able to exercise adequate authority as a prefect. Even my father remembers that he was the one who gave them their stripes as he had chaired the swearing in ceremony for the Prep School prefects for our batch.

Esha and Hari were what one would call diametric opposites. Esha was someone who loved to express herself. This, she did through activities like debates, music, drama and art. She was very good at playing the piano and also has a certificate given by the Trinity College, London for this very hobby. She was an avid reader and was always with me as part of the house quiz and literary teams in Prep School. Hari, on the other hand, found his calling in sport. He excelled in almost every game he played as he captained the house in all sports while he was in Prep School. He was particularly good in basketball and cricket. When I met him last i.e. three years ago, he was training hard to get into the Tamilnadu state basketball team. Only when my house changed in Junior School i.e. classes 7-8, did I come to know why they were among the most respected opponents in their respective fields- it was because of the sheer effortlessness with which they went about doing whatever they were supposed to be doing.

There was this instance in early class 8, just before we had shifted to Junior School, when we had the Inter-house Mathematics Quiz in Prep School and I somehow made it to the house team despite my curious love-hate relationship with the subject. Esha was also with me on the team which consisted of four members. The last round of the quiz required a single member of the team to answer a set of questions without any help. As my knowledge of the subject was rather limited, the team had decided on sending Esha to the hot-seat. However, a person sitting in the audience was the one whose decision was finally counted. It was Hari. He wanted me to represent the house team in that round. Though we came second in that quiz, our house managed to get the highest points in that particular round. I later came to know that Hari had planned this move and had taken Esha into confidence long before the quiz had even begun! This display of confidence made me overlook the fact that our house had lost the first position in a quiz after a really long time.

Esha was someone who was always an integral part of my life. It is a pity that our closeness was later affected by barriers like distance and lack of regular communication after I left Lawrence. We tried everything to stay in touch but nothing seemed to work. In fact it was her who got me on to Facebook in the first place. Misunderstandings also played their part and we were reduced to just being civil to each other. My personal equation with her is something which I don’t wish to comment about right now as it certainly deserves more space. I can’t say that I was in touch with Hari either. I just met him once after leaving Lawrence and all that made us stay connected was Facebook. How much would they have changed in all these years? Did I lose the same Esha and Hari who were in my life for a considerable amount of time? These are questions to which I don’t think I can find answers, no matter how hard I try.

I am still in a state of shock, something which I don’t think I can get rid of anytime soon. All I know is that I shall pull through, eventually. I sincerely hope that the souls of the departed rest in peace and meet us in the afterlife or whatever people call it, and take us on a journey filled with memories, memories that are lost for lesser mortals like us, at least for now.

WHERE ARE ALL THESE FLOWERS NOW( CLASS OF 60)

DEDICATION TO A BOY CALLED Alyosha

Alyosha Kumar, was born on 10th December 1984 during the freezing winter, in the far eastern Russian Port of Vladivostok, where his father, then Lt Cdr Arun Kumar, Indian Navy (later retired as a Commodore) was posted, undergoing Nuclear Submarine Training. Ever since his birth, it was apparent that Alyosha was a special child, exceptionally gifted. Throughout his primary and secondary schooling at Naval Public Schools, Lawrence School, Lovedale and later Modern School, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi, he excelled in academics and sports with equal ease. He appeared for SATS in 2001 and obtained a score of 1500, which was exceptional by any means. For his higher studies, he opted to go in for humanities and joined the National Law School of India University, Bangalore (No. 1 Law School in India), in June 2002, standing 9th in order of merit all India, in the entrance exam. He completed his graduation from NLSIU in end Sept 2007 and had already been appointed as a junior lawyer, by a reputed Law firm Wadia & Gandhi in Mumbai where he was to join on 16th Oct 2007. Destiny, unfortunately, snatched him from us in very unfortunate and tragic circumstances. In the wee hours of 30th Sept 2007 at Bangalore, he was brutally and fatally stabbed to death in a senseless frenzy of violence, none of his making. Alyosha was a very intelligent, compassionate and humane person, who always expressed his views with conviction and without fear or favour. He would stick his neck out to fight injustice and would often say“I cannot stay quiet in the face of injustice”. It may not be coincidental that he was born on Human Rights Day. During his stay at the Law School, he was funding the education (out of his pocket allowance) for the granddaughter of a lady (Amma as he would call her) vending tea outside his college premises. He had also desired to, later in his life, work in the field of micro financing for upliftment and empowerment of the poor. Wealth accumulation and materialistic values for personal comfort had no attraction for him. His parents and well wishers, in pursuance of Alyosha’ desire, have set-up a public charitable trust, “The Brave New World Foundation”. The name has suggested itself from Mr. Dev Lahiri’s tribute to Alyosha. Success of the trust would be a truly befitting tribute to Alyosha’s life and the values he stood for.

Susanna Arundhati Roy EX LAWRENCIAN

Susanna Arundhati Roy the first Indian woman to have won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, was born on 24th November 1961 in Bengal and grew up in Aymanam village, Kottayam, Kerala.

She was born to parents Mary Roy a well known social activist who won a landmark Supreme Court verdict that granted Christian women in Kerala the right to their parent's property and father a Bengali Hindutea planter. Arundhati's parents separated when she was small

She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard da Cunha

  When she was just 16, she left her home and settled in Delhi. There she did her degree in Architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture. During this period she met Gerard Da Cunha a fellow architecture student and married him but their marriage lasted only four years. After a brief stint in the field of architecture, she found that it was not for her. She left for Goa, making a life out at the beach, got tired of it after a few months, came back to Delhi. She took a job at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, met Pradeep Krishen, a film director now her husband who offered her a small role in 'Massey Saab'. She went to Italy on a scholarship for eight months to study the restoration of monuments. She realised she was a writer during those months in Italy.

She quickly became known for her work as screenwriter. Then she wrote a series of essays called 'The Great Indian Rape Trick' which attracted media attention, in defense of former dacoit Phoolan Devi, who she felt had been exploited by Shekhar Kapur's film 'Bandit Queen'. Then came her debut novel 'The God of Small Things' which shot her into prominence in 1997, by winning the prestigious British Booker prize in London and becoming an international best seller. The book, which took almost five years to complete, gives an insight to the social and political life in a village in South India through the eyes of seven year old twins and how it effects/disrupts their small lives. The book won £20,000 as prize and sold nearly 400,000 copies globally by October that year.
he years following her success, she has turned to activism, writing 'The Cost of Living' a book comprising two essays 'The Greater Common Good'(1999) and 'The End of Imagination'(1998); the former against Indian Governments massive dam projects which displaced millions of poor people and the latter; its testing of Nuclear weapons. She has been an active participant in public demonstrations against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in Western India and has donated a substantial amount around 1.5million rupees, equivalent to her Booker Prize money, for the cause. She was even arrested along with other protestors for campaigning for the cause. 'Power Politics' her latest book published, takes on Enron the power corporation based in Houston trying to take over Maharashtra's energy sector. She has also spoken on and published several articles such as 'Promotion of equal rights' supporting equal rights for lower caste in India and 'War on Terrorism' (2001)against the Iraq war. Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence. In January 2006 she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award for her collection of essays on contemporary issues, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, but she declined to accept it.

With her latest publications, Arundhati is carving a niche for herself as a political journalist. This unusual women who has been on several lists of 'the 50 most beautiful women in the world' is not intimated by her success and fame but is an inspiration to all those who seek to speak up against the powers in support of the poor and the oppressed. She now lives in Delhi with her husband Pradip Krishen, who has two daughters Pia and Mithva from his previous marriage

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MEHER MISTRY

Meher Mistry / Castelino: Miss India 1964 After the pageant, Meher returned to modelling. She also took up writing features on fashion in reputed magazines. She has authored two books, Manstyle and Fashion Kaleidoscope. At present, this proud mother of two is much sought-after fashion critic.