Sevalaya

Had a very unique experience yesterday, visiting an institution,Sevalaya.It is not yet another orphanage;neither is it yet another old age home; it is not another village school either; nor is it a charitable institution with an eye on media publicity.
It is a unique experiment of the dream of 3 young men who wanted to follow the teachings of swami vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Subramanya bharati, in letter and spirit.Started in a thatch hut with 3 children, is today a big family of hundreds of students,teachers and staff.I liked the environment which is very friendly.I found all the inmates both old and young and all ages in between genuinely at peace with themselves and happy.There was a sense of being partners in the entire process. The villagers also participate actively in the school activities in return for free education and upkeep of their children.We were shown a big platform under the trees and were told that it was built by the villagers themselves to enable their wards to perform during annual day celebrations!We saw a 'goshala' and the 'hay' was provided by the villagers.
The library is very neatly and well maintained and computerised(yes,the the youngsters were software professionals who dared to dream!) The school has a mobile van in which books are taken and parked in the nearby villages by rotation, and books are borrowed by the village youngsters.We saw some very good magazines in Tamil stacked there.
The goshala has some very healthy cows and is able to meet the needs of milk and milk products of the inmates.There are occasions when they do have a surplus, which they are able to sell quite easily.They also give shelter to those cows which are no longer useful as milch cows.We were told that the cow dung is used in the gobar gas plant .The electricity so generated lights the bulbs of senior citizens in their rooms!How poignant can you get.
The school has classes upto 12th standard; the classes are spacious and well ventilated.The labs are very very spacious and we saw the computer lab having latest computers.The school does conduct computer classes for villagers during summer holidays, we were told.
Good emphasis is given for physical education and games. The school has two PT masters; no they are not the terror among students, but are facilitators. I was quite impressed when i was told that one of the girls from the school is presently undergoing a training in a camp organised by Sports Authority Of India in their MRF Grounds near Chennai.She is training in athletics for 100 metres run.
The school also had 100% results in 10th and 12th for the last 3 years; not only that but the highest mark of 1028/1200 was scored by a student from the school and he now studying engineering in a city college!You should go there to hear the pride in the voice of the teachers and the management when they talk of each and every achievement;and they are none of them mean achievement either.
The school is more than 50 kilometres from the city, and there are stretches when the road gets really trying(the car tyres).It is really tucked away in a far corner.When we mentioned this, the administrator told us, yes, that is the dream of the founders that we should go to villages where there is not even a post office!
They have some land and grow vegetables. As the institution grew there was need to augment the quantity of vegetables. They were able to get a koyambedu merchant to come over to the school. On seeing the school so well run, he offered that they can bring their van to koyambedu market every week and pick up whatever vegetables they want!This arrangement is going on for some time now. We had lunch in the school and had the choicest of vegetables in their sambhar and had a very tasty cabbage kootu!
Bought a packet of organic manure there and also a sevalaya logo t shirt.
Plan to get involved in a regular basis in this school.It is a pleasure to see an institution started with very good ideals running very humanely and efficiently for more than a decade and a half and growing!
They have dreams of starting a rural university and i would definitely like to take an active part in their future plans.
I really wished we had known about this place earlier, so that we could have had appa's sathabhishekam celebrated with the inmates!