THE WEEK THAT WAS! (22/01/2016)

The building next to our office i.e. the “SHASTRI BHAVAN” remained fortified this whole week- thanks to the agitation over the suicide of a student in Hyderabad. Death is ever tragic and suicide on campus is something that pains and disturbs every parent who has a ward in hostel of colleges or university. Parents send their ward to educational institutions expecting a flowering career for their ward and this is least they expect from university administration. Career counseling and psychological counseling go together in institutions so that students do not wilt under academic pressure. Yet, often the college administration fail to handle issues with the sensitivity that such a situation warrant, leading to such unfortunate incidences on campus. While death of a student anywhere in any university sends shivers down the spine of parents throughout the nation, irrespective of their caste creed or religion, categorizing these into dalits or non-dalits, Hindu or Muslim has become the hallmark of politicians. I wonder whether our politicians will ever become mature leader of the nation.

This week I took time to make a couple of visits to the National Archives of India which is located adjacent to the Krishi Bhavan. The place is being readied for the proposed visit of the Hon’ble PM Sri. Narendra Modi.  The Hon’ble PM shall be visiting this historical building tomorrow i.e. 23^rd January coinciding with the birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose to declare open to public access all files pertaining to “Netaji”. In this era of RTI this is a welcome decision. It will be good if the PM directs the authorities to digitize all the records at this archives and upload these on their website for free access by public, as getting these documents through the official procedures is still a tedious process, as I came to know recently when I sought to retrieve historical documents (and there a plenty of such records) pertaining to my grandfather Sri. K. B. Sahay.  We need to come out of bureaucratic hurdles which are still aplenty.