Sri Ramakrishna Vidyashala

Sri Ramakrishna Vidyashala is a residential junior college for boys located in Mysore, southern India. Offering high school and pre-university education (eighth to twelfth grades), it has earned acclaim as a model for the Mysore region and beyond.

The founder and his muse

Vidyashala, sometimes abbreviated SRKVS, is operated by the Ramakrishna Mission. Alongside Mysore's Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, it is one of the Mission's nine centers in the state of Karnataka.

The institution was founded in 1953 due to the pioneering efforts of the Vedantic monk, Swami Shambhavananda, an educational leader of Mysore and Kodagu districts who also served as an early president of the Ashrama.

Shambhavananda's vision for Vidyashala was to offer a "man making education" as idealized by Swami Vivekananda and described as a "total development of man which includes the physical, mental and spiritual."

Vidyashala was preceded for at least three decades by the Ramakrishna Students Home, a boarding facility for underprivileged students some of whom went on to be well known writers, poets and politicians of the Mysore region in the pre-Independence era. Vidyashala is said to have started in a small house in the Vontikoppal locality, but later shifted to its current campus in Yadavagiri which Shambhavananda had transformed from barren wasteland into a verdant green.

According to legend, Shambhavananda not only physically led the building construction despite his advancing age, he also went round Yadavagiri seeking bhiksha for the new school ("bhiksha" is a Hindu tradition of begging for alms with a purpose of self-effacement or ego-conquering).

The campus

The main building, a four-story T-shaped structure whose terrace offers a panoramic view of the institution's 69-acre campus, was thrown open by C. Rajagopalachari, the first Governor General of Independent India. The open-air swimming pool, 33.3 metres long and one of Mysore's oldest and finest, was inaugurated in 1953 by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who, the legend goes, was so pleased he expressed a desire to dive in for a swim despite his busy schedule.

The campus hosts about 1000 species of fauna including a few rare species such as the North American Giant Redwood and a Thai tree that blossoms every 12th year, as well as plantations of sapota, coffee, elephant grass, coconut, and silver oak. The campus is also a sanctuary for nearly 400 species of birds, some of them migrants such as the cormorant. An index of the campus flora is available on signs to the left as one enters the gates.

The campus' biodiversity is attributed to the efforts of the charismatic monk Swami Sureshananda ("Hari Maharaj"), who served as correspondent for some three decades before taking on other responsibilities at the Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore, in 1990. He later served as Ashrama president, building a new auditorium and monks' quarters for the Ashrama before moving on to spiritual practice in B.R. Hills.

Sureshananda optimized the productivity of Vidyashala's campus, planting and tending to vast numbers of coconut, coffee, sapota and silver oak, and setting up a biofuel facility attached to the dairy.

A legend is that Sureshananda never traveled outside Mysore without bringing back a new variety of plant for Vidyashala.

Sureshananda remained involved in Vidyashala's management in the 1990s when the popular Swami Paratmananda ("Gangadhar Maharaj") served as correspondent. The current correspondent, Swami Muktidananda ("Yogesh Maharaj") took office in 1997.

Muktidananda, a trained botanist, took an equal interest in the fauna, building a new "nature classroom" akin to the thatched hut of a typical Indian "gurukul," besides leading many other campus improvements during the golden jubilee year of 2003.

On the southeastern corner of the campus is located the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education, a teachers' college offering a Bachelor of Education program, whose prayer hall is topped by a Pallava-style "gopuram" (tower) that can be seen from about five kilometers around.

The infrastructure

Other than the main building and the swimming pool, Vidyashala's infrastructure comprises a library with nearly 15000 volumes, a 400-seat auditorium with film projectors, a separate audiovisual theater, a computer laboratory, and an astronomical observatory with 14-inch Celetron telescope.

The chemical/physical laboratory is said to be better equipped than any other Mysore junior college's.

There is also a biological and fine arts section, a sports stadium used as parade ground, an award-winning battalion of the National Cadet Corps (Army wing), an open-air theater, teachers' quarters, an electric bakery, opthalmic and dental clinics, a dispensary, a two-floor gymnasium with indoor shuttle badminton, table tennis courts, an automated laundry and a 50-cow mechanized dairy.

In addition, there are 22 playgrounds including fields for soccer, hockey, basketball, volleyball, and kho-kho, as well as a relatively new cricket pitch for net practice.

There are also a couple of small cottages, called "kutiras," by a scenic pond in the campus, used for meditation by visiting Ramakrishna Mission monks. The students live in dormitory-style facilities with a warden, often a resident monk, for each dorm.

In 2003, a new Golden Jubilee block, with classrooms, dormitories, a prayer hall, and a small amphitheater, was constructed about 200 yards south of the main building. The golden jubilee year also saw numerous other infrastructure improvements, including a pagoda-style waiting area for parents, a new facade at the entry gates, a new audiovisual theater, and new bathroom tiles in the main building.

Student activities

Vidyashala's students number about 400 and fall in the age group of 13-18 years, with many hailing from outside Karnataka, particularly from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Maharashtra. For many years, Vidyashala actively recruited students from the northeastern states, particularly Manipur. The diversity of representation was rather unique in Mysore.

All students follow a demanding regimen from the time they rise at 5.15 a.m. until they go to bed at about 10 p.m. The typical day is packed with physical exercise, literary activities, hobby pursuits including art and music, sports, Vedic (often Upanishadic) prayer and meditation, in addition to classroom work. The medium of instruction is English, with syllabi adopted from the state boards of secondary and pre-university education. Two days a week the students go swimming, a few times a year they perform manual or social work, and two or three times a year they participate in educational excursions to places of historical or scientific interest.

The students eat four times a day. All meals are vegetarian, prepared by resident cooks, and had sitting cross-legged (yoga style). Lunch and dinner are preceded by chanting selected verses from the Bhagavad Gita. Many Indian festivals, including Krishna Janmashtami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Upanayanam or Munji, and Christmas, are celebrated with special activities. The students clean their own toilets and participate in extensive voluntary activities coordinated by an elected Students Council comprising a president, a general secretary, a vice president and a joint secretary, in addition to about 20 other secretaries. Students Council officers are typically elected in July using electronic voting machines.

Vidyashala's students have achieved consistently excellent examination results over the last two decades. There is no record of failures in the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examinations or in the Pre-university (PUC) examinations in that period, and class averages tend to be around 85 per cent. The school performed well even in 2004 and 2005 when Mysore district as a whole recorded a relatively poor performance.

Annual celebration

Vidyashala's annual day, typically celebrated in early January, tends to be a spectacular showcase of its students' talents, physical, artistic and intellectual. Actually a two-day event, it attracts parents and others from around Mysore district and outside. The event typically includes an attractive gymnatics show as well as a stage-drama on a classical theme, and is also an occasion when the Old Boys Association conducts an alumni meeting followed by a five-course lunch whose highlight is typically the "Prabhakar rasam" (named after a popular cook) and the "fruit salad" (said to be prepared from campus-grown fruits), all served on leaf plates called patrawallis woven from dry areca leaves.

Praise and criticism

All educational institutions run by the Ramakrishna Mission tend toward being non-profit, and consistent with the Mission's motto of Atmano Mokshartham Jagad-hitaya Cha (आत्मनॊ मोक्षार्थम् जगद्धिताय च in the Devanāgarī script of the original Sanskrit), which translates as, "For self-realization and for the universal good."

Vidyashala, in particular, has received praise for never demanding donations (dubbed "capitation fees" in Karnataka), for its fee-per-cost model, for its emphasis on personality development, for the quality of its teachers, for the guiding presence of Vedantic monks on campus, and for offering a number of scholarships to poor and otherwise disadvantaged students who are accepted for admission.

Critics, on the other hand, have accused Vidyashala of sporting an elitist attitude given that little more than a tenth of applicants to the eighth grade receive admission offers. In recent years, some eyebrows were raised at Vidyashala's preference to renounce state support rather than accept state intervention in teacher recruitments. An interesting observation, possibly of concern, is that almost all of Vidyashala's students go into engineering or medical programs, with few taking up the arts, the humanities and physical sciences, management, or commerce.

Recent visitors to comment on Vidyashala include George Fernandes, the former defense minister, who commended the institution for its emphasis on character-building and personality development, and A. Jayagovinda, director of the National Law School of India University, who praised its "value-based education."

Famous teachers

Many of Vidyashala's teachers have earned state award nominations and other accolades. Some are particularly highly regarded in the Mysore region, among them K. Jagannath (now deceased), who served as headmaster, B.S. Srikantiah, who served as social studies teacher, headmaster and later as principal for well more than two decades, G.S. Subramaniam, who served as English teacher for also some two decades, and Keerthi Kumar, who served as mathematics teacher for nearly 15 years and then as principal for about ten.

Other well known Vidyashala teachers (some now retired) include T.N. Venkateshaiah (mathematics), H.G. Anantharamaiah (science), M. Rama Rao (English), S.V. Ramaswamy (science), H.S. Srinivasa Murthy (English), M.N. Joshi (Kannada), K. Laxminarayan (mathematics), K.P. Ananthapadmanabha (science), N.N. Chandrashekhara Bhat (Sanskrit), B.S. Venkateshaiah (social studies and drama; now deceased), N. Bhima Rao (Hindi), Narayana Shastry (Sanskrit), S.P. Suresh (science and English), B.A.P. Bhat (art), A. Peter (laboratory assistant), K. Narayana Rao (chemistry; now deceased), K.V. Arkanath (physics), M. Rama Moorthy (mathematics), and B.R. Suresh (biology).

In 1990 and in the years following, the institution acquired a new crop of teachers including Rahul S. Kini (English; served as principal for about five years), S. Balaji (chemistry; current principal), S. Ramesh (Kannada), S. Murugesh (physics), and S. Hebbar (biology).

External links

• Sri Ramakrishna Vidyashala