Fr Felix Raj (right) with the children and the volunteers. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

It was an attempt by a few students of St Xavier’s College to bring a smile on the faces of 65 children from three villages of the state.

Project Prayas is an initiative by the commerce students of St Xavier’s College to educate village children, under the supervision of Father Felix Raj, vice-principal of St Xavier’s College.

A three-day summer camp was organised for children from Gurap, Pandua and Jhantipahari on the college premises from June 7 to June 9.

College to Village and Village to College’ — as the camp was called — involved both students and the teachers of the college.

The children, aged between 10 and 15 years, were given special classes in Math, English and General Knowledge. “We hope that some day these children will study in this college,” said Father Raj.

The camp also included educational trips to places like Victoria Memorial, Science City and Indian Museum. “This is for the first time I have come to Calcutta. I learnt many things at the camp and want to study very hard,” said Biswajit Kora, a Class III student from Gurap.

The project was started in 2006 and is coordinated by the class representatives. It caters to children from four villages — Gurap, Pandua, Jhantipahari and Mirgaha. A total of 200 children are benefitted from the project.

Each student from BBA and B.Com (morning and evening) departments contributes one rupee everyday for the project. The money is distributed on a monthly basis in the four villages. On an average, Rs 150 is allotted for each child. They stay in the village boarding centres and study there.

“Prayas is a movement that needs to reach every village to bring about an educational revolution,” said Father Raj. “If 16,885 colleges in the country adopt one village each, the problem of illiteracy would be solved.”

Abhisek Banerjee
First yr, MA, Journalism and Mass Comm, CU

Perfect step : Aloka Kanungo (extreme right) during a workshop on Odissi dance at Rabindra Sadan. Picture by Aranya Sen Fr Felix Raj (right) with the children and the volunteers. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

Adieu

The JUDE (Jadavpur University Department of English) PGII farewell is a recent affair, this being the second time. On May 18, semester exams dispensed with, students from several departments assembled at the Indoor Stadium, the sultry afternoon notwithstanding. Months ago, the class representatives had donned their ‘taxman’ avatars, hounding us for a measly Rs 30 (most of us managed to dodge them, anyway). The farewell happened, despite the lack of funds and the lackadaisical attitude with which all JUDEans are seemingly cursed.

The PGIIs, attired in their formal best, looked ready for their foray into the world outside. The programme started with individual performances by the students, mostly in the form of sad songs of leavetaking designed to tug at one’s heartstrings.

This was followed by a skit by first and second year students: Bapi Keno Papi?, an adaptation of the first act of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a laugh riot full of hilarious couplets. Who could have thought blank verse could be so transformed?

Chocolate cake and pudding by resident cook Arunava Banerjee of UG II were served during the break. This done, Crusaders — a band comprising representatives from various departments including our own — took the stage. The versatile performers kept interchanging the musical instruments among themselves (apparently most of them could sing and play most of the instruments). They played melodious numbers like Coldplay’s Yellow and The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony (with a real violin, no synthesizer).

Second Earth, a regular at JUDE freshers and farewells, followed. It was late in the evening and their loud rock numbers set the mood for an evening of headbanging and footstomping, which continued with a DJ from the department taking the stage.

The organisers put together a yearbook (in CD form) for the graduating batch, with cheeky quips from juniors and nuggets of wisdom from professors.

Doyeeta Ganguly,
UG II, English, Jadavpur University

Type casters cast away

Only Connect

Abhijit Gupta

Having just written a longish essay on the history of printing and publishing in India, I am moved to pay tribute to the unjustly neglected Karmakar family, particularly the man called Panchanan Karmakar, a smith from Tribeni turned punch cutter and type caster in the early days of the East India Company. We speak a great deal of sense and nonsense about IT nowadays. But how many of us remember that during the first three decades of the 19th century, the market leader in IT in the whole of south and south-east Asia was a town called Serampore? And of the four men who made it possible, one was Panchanan.

Panchanan’s name surfaces for the first time in the 1770s, when Charles Wilkins, an official with the Company is seen preparing type for the first-ever printed Bengali book — Nathaniel Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengali Language — in the company of Panchanan and one Joseph Shepherd, a seal and gem cutter. A few years later, Wilkins was put in charge of the Honorable Company’s Press, where Panchanan perfected his skills, cutting type in Bengali and other Indian languages. There he stayed till the closing years of the century, not imagining how crucial a role he was about to play in the next.

In January 1800, an ex-cobbler and Baptist missionary called William Carey set up a Baptist mission at Serampore, which was then a Danish colony called Fredericksnagar. Along with two other missionaries, Ward and Marshman, Carey installed a printing press at Serampore and then approached his friend Wilkins in Calcutta for a two-week ‘loan’ of Panchanan. Wilkins agreed, somewhat reluctantly. Carey took Panchanan to Serampore and put him under virtual arrest. He was to stay there for the rest of his life, casting type for almost all major south and south-east Asian languages.

Carey’s aim was simple: to print and disseminate Bibles in as many languages possible. But in order to do so, the Bible first needed to be translated and then printed. While the translations were done by the missionaries, the task of cutting punches and casting type was entrusted to Panchanan, who had by then been joined by his son-in-law Manohar. In the type foundry adjacent to the mission, the Karmakars produced type in 13 different languages in the first ten years of the press. In 1816, the Karmakars were able to produce moveable metal type in Chinese. According to a calculation made by the missionaries themselves in 1832, the press was printing in a small matter of 40 languages, and servicing a market stretching from Indonesia in the east to Afghanistan in the west.

This was not the end of the Karmakars. In the 1840s, the grandson Krishnachandra joined the press and carried on the family tradition of fine printing. Since then, we have done our best to forget these three men.