Chennai’s Sishya school turns 50
The Hindu
Colonial-era buildings, an art and literary festival and an active alumni… Take a walk through the cheery corridors of Chennai’s Sishya school as it celebrates turning 50
It is a blustery day with the promise of a thunderstorm. The PT teacher blows his whistle, signalling to boys skirting the puddles in the playground to get back to their classrooms. A parade of umbrellas, under them a gaggle of girls, makes its way to the tuck shop adjoining the principal’s office. Despite the weather, little ruffles the calm of the urbanely self-confident atmosphere at Sishya school in Adyar.
The confidence-building exercise has been on for 50 years now, ever since Sishya’s founder KI Thomas (affectionately called KIT) and its co-founders Thangam Thomas and Grace Cherian, brought their experiences honed at other hallowed institutions across the country, to establish the school in 1972.
KIT graduated from Madras Christian College, following it up with a post-graduation in Teaching from Edinburgh and London during the War years. He taught at Rajkot and Sindh before settling down in sylvan Lovedale in 1951 where he became the headmaster of Lawrence School, with the onerous task of transforming the British military institution into one of India’s premier public schools.
Thangam, his wife who studied at Lady Irwin College, Delhi, is credited with naming the new school they founded.
Grace, who had taught at Lovedale and the other Lawrence school at Sanawar, was the first to be recruited, teaching math and manners, aided by a blackboard and her booming voice.
The school is now run by the KIT Thomas Educational Society, with KIT’s daughter-in-law Omana Thomas at its helm. “Sishya began with 25 students. Today, we have 1,200. On campus, we also have Chennai’s first French school, Ecole Franco Indienne Sishya. One follows the ICSE/ISE curriculum, the other follows the French baccalaureate. Over the years, we have expanded but our core values to ‘Aspire and Excel’ have remained unchanged,” says Omana.
The school that began on Edward Elliot’s road moved to a many-pillared, vanilla shuttered, red-tiled house that belonged to a complex once owned by the royals of Travancore. It lends the campus an old-world charm.
While residents are worried over deaths due to diarrhoea in Vijayawada, officials still grapple to find the root cause. Contaminated drinking water supplied by VMC officials is the reason, insist people in the affected areas, but officials insist that efforts are on to identify the disease and that those with symptoms other than diarrhoea too are visiting the health camps.