India’s School Education: Waves of tragic cries, concerns, and yet some hope

Even seven decades after Independence, the properly schooled are still a ‘small lot’ in India’s immensely vast and diverse society. But it is the room for hope that dedicated teachers as transformative figures try to bring into the system, even if at the margins, is what emerges from this chronicle of real life stories that author Sandeep Rai, has put through, along with his own experiences and reflections in this book, ‘Grey Sunshine: Stories From Teach For India’. Sandeep Rai, who had received training at ‘Teach For America’s five-week Training Institute’, has imbued a part of that metaphysic in the rough and tumble of American life, writes that though he “rarely paid heed to Christian theology”, he found it impossible to ignore that while dealing with themes of “acceptance, service, poverty and love, our lives are measured by how we treat the least amongst us, by our recognition that we are all recipients of unmerited grace.” “Three years after, after I first stepped into Wells in my final year of college I told my parents that I would no longer be pursuing a career in medicine. The Founder of ‘TFI’- a two-year fellowship programme that gives an opportunity to talented young people to take off from their work and teach in government schools-, Shaheen Mistri, could have had a very good education abroad and had a good career for herself - her father was a Citibank executive which took the family from one country to another, as the author points out. Sandeep Rai in various chapters discusses number of individual cases, riveting stories, particularly girl children, for whom completing school education is like ‘many a slip between the cup and lip’.