The first instance
of our loving Black ! - our life was chiseled, corrected and made
better by the white chalkpiece knowledge imparted on School black board ! – [in tune with
technology the boards in most schools have now embraced change either in colour or the
material itself !!]
Guru Vandana means “Reverence for the Teacher” – it is the thanksgiving from a student to a teacher,
expressing his or her gratitude. In every Society, Teachers are to be respected most. In
our culture, they are reverred highly. Education is the most important thing in life – it will give
Worldly pleasures and give pleasure to the world too; it will not
diminish by giving; it will spread the fame of those possessing it; cannot be
destroyed… there is no better medicine than Education that can cure all
ills.
5th Sept is a special day
- …and those in Chennai – know well this road connecting Beach Road [Kamarajar
Salai] from Gandhi statue to Gemini flyover [Anna Membalam] …… is Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai,
earlier known as Cathedral Road. In India, 5th Sept, is Teachers Day… in
many countries, it is a special day appreciating the role of Teacher… but the
World Teachers’ Day is distinctly different, for it is on Oct 5th.
It was not randomly chosen
but chosen as the day representing the best minds of the Nation !!!
Due to multiple reasons,
SYMA celebrated Teachers’ Day today – we honoured our teachers and on the
occasion also recognized our students who stood first in each subject in recent test conducted at Growth, as also
some for being punctual and attending the classes without absence !
Today evening at NKT Boys
High School, we organized function honouring teachers and recognizing students
with rewards. Some of the Qs to students
touched upon during my brief interaction with them in the function today.
1.
Who is a Polymath ?
2.
Do you know or remember
Kumara Gupta I
3.
What was Lyceum
4.
Yajnavalkya Smriti
5.
Where is Sarvepalli and
its connection with Teacher’s Day
6.
How a President of India
was honoured in Muscat, Oman ?
SYMA has an unsaturated
desire for serving the Society. SYMA [Srinivas Youngmen’s
Association] has been in the field of Social service since
1977. At SYMA, we realize that Education can refine a
person and ensure one’s success in life. We at SYMA, feel
strongly the primary responsibility of improving the Society and
helping the underprivileged providing quality educational support through SYMA
Growth, started in 2008.
The success of SYMA
Growth in uplifting the students from lower echelons of society is fully
because of the untiring efforts of teachers of SYMA Growth. SYMA places on
record our profound thanks to the Management of NK Thirumalachariyar
National Boys High School, to our beloved
teachers of SYMA Growth, and you all who had supported SYMA in all
its endeavours. Thanks to our dedicated teachers for
providing quality education to students from economically weaker sections,
lighting their path and showing them the way for a bright future.
.. .. and in case you
remember the Qs still !!
·
Polymath : The word Polymath cannot define anyone better than ‘Leonardo da
Vinci’. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was an Italian
polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman,
engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his
achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which
he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology.
Leonardo is identified as
one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art and is often
credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite having many lost works and fewer than
25 attributed major works – including numerous unfinished works – he created
some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon. The Mona Lisa is
his best known work and is the world's most famous individual painting. The
Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his
Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon.
Revered for his
technological ingenuity, he conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured
fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine that could be used
in an adding machine, and the double hull. Some of his smaller inventions, however,
entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin
winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made
substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology,
optics, and tribology.
As a successful artist,
Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa
Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to
1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre,
professor of Anatomy at the University of Pavia. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and
wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy. Leonardo's anatomical
drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of
muscles and sinews.
·
Kumaragupta I was Gupta
emperor from 415 until his death in 455. He was the son of the Gupta king Chandragupta II and
Queen Dhruvadevi, grandson of Samudra Gupta.
India’s glorious connection
with Education systems dates back to centuries before Islamic invasions and
British entry. Many great places of
wisdom including University at Kanchi, Nalanda and many other places prospered
providing classic wisdom. Nalanda was a renowned Buddhist mahavihara (great
monastery) in medieval Magadha (modern-day Bihar), widely considered to be
among the greatest centres of learning in
the ancient world and often referred to as "the world's first residential
university". It was located near
the city of Rajagriha (now Rajgir), roughly 90 kilometres (56 mi) southeast of
Pataliputra (now Patna). Operating for almost a thousand years from 427 CE
until around 1400 CE, Nalanda mahavihara
played a vital role in promoting the patronage of arts, culture and academics
during the "Golden Age of India. At the end of 12th century invader
Bakhityar Khilji demolished the Monastery, killed the monks and burnt to ashes the
valuable library containing thousands of literature.
·
The greatest teachers in
ancient Athens were Socrates, who
pioneered the dialectical Socratic method, Plato, founder of the Academy and
influential philosopher, and Aristotle, who established the Lyceum and
organized knowledge across various fields, significantly shaping Western
thought. These philosophers, through their unique teaching styles and lasting
institutions, fundamentally changed how people learned and thought, laying the
groundwork for Western philosophy and critical thinking.
The Lyceum was a temple in
Athens dedicated to Apollo Lyceus ("Apollo the wolf-god". It was best
known for the Peripatetic school of philosophy founded there by Aristotle in
334 BC. Aristotle fled Athens in 323 BC, and the university continued to function after
his lifetime under a series of leaders until the Roman general Sulla destroyed
it during his assault on Athens in 86 BC.
The remains of the Lyceum were discovered in modern Athens in 1996 in a
park behind the Hellenic Parliament.
·
The Yajnavalkya Smriti is one of the many Dharma-related texts
of Hinduism composed in Sanskrit. It is dated between the 3rd and 5th
century CE, and belongs to the Dharmashastra tradition. The text was composed in shloka (poetic meter) style. The legal theories within the Yajnavalkya
Smriti are presented in three books, namely achara-kanda (customs),
vyavahara-kanda (judicial process), and prayascitta-kanda (crime and
punishment, penance).
The text is the "best
composed" and systematic specimen of this genre, with large sections on
judicial process theories, one which had a greater influence on medieval
India's judiciary practice than Manusmriti. It later became influential in the
studies of legal process in ancient and medieval India, during the colonial
British India, with the first translation published in German in 1849.
·
The School of Athens (Italian: Scuola di Atene) is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance
artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as part of a commission by
Pope Julius II to decorate the rooms now called the Stanze di Raffaello in the
Apostolic Palace in Vatican City.
The fresco depicts a
congregation of ancient philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists, with
Plato and Aristotle featured in the center. The identities of most figures are
ambiguous or discernable only through subtle details or allusions; among those commonly identified are Socrates,
Pythagoras, Archimedes, Heraclitus, Averroes, and Zarathustra. Additionally,
Italian artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are believed to be portrayed through Plato and
Heraclitus, respectively
The painting is notable for
its use of accurate perspective projection, a defining characteristic of
Renaissance art, which Raphael learned from Leonardo; likewise, the themes of
the painting, such as the rebirth of Ancient Greek philosophy and culture in
Europe were inspired by Leonardo's individual pursuits in theatre, engineering,
optics, geometry, physiology, anatomy, history, architecture and art.
·
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975), a
philosopher and statesman served as the second President of
India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of
India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet
Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras
Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra
University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan started his political career
"rather late in life", after his successful academic career. He was a
distinguished member of the Constituent Assembly of
India. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and
distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy. He
held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of
Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at
University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
was born in a Telugu Brahmin family in a village near Thiruttani India, in the
erstwhile Madras Presidency near the border of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu
states. His father's name was Sarvepalli Veeraswami (indicating lineage to the village near Nellore)
and his mother's was Sitamma. His early years were spent in Thiruttani and
Tirupati.
His philosophy was grounded
in Advaita Vedanta, reinterpreting this tradition for a contemporary
understanding. Radhakrishnan wrote his thesis for the M.A. degree on "The
Ethics of the Vedanta and its Metaphysical Presuppositions". It was
intended to be a reply to the charge that the Vedanta system had no room for
ethics." Radhakrishnan was awarded several high awards during his life,
including a knighthood in 1931, the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in
India, in 1954, and honorary membership of the British Royal Order of Merit in
1963. Radhakrishnan believed
that "teachers should be the best minds in the country". Since 1962,
his birthday is celebrated in India as Teacher's Day on 5 September.
Dr Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan represented the
University of Calcutta at the Congress of the Universities of the British
Empire in June 1926 and the International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard
University in September 1926. He delivered the Hibbert
Lecture on the ideals of life which he delivered at Manchester College, Oxford
in 1929 and which was subsequently published in book form as An Idealist View
of Life. In 1929 Radhakrishnan was invited to take the post vacated by
Principal J. Estlin Carpenter at Manchester College. For his services to education he was knighted by George V
in 1931 and formally invested with his honour by the
Governor-General of India, the Earl of Willingdon, in April
1932. However, he ceased to use the title after Indian independence,
preferring instead his academic title of 'Doctor'. He was also nominated for
the prestigious Nobel Prize 27 times, which included 16 nominations for the
Nobel Prize in literature, and 11 for the Nobel Peace prize.
·
Qaboos bin Said Al Said ( 1940 –
2020) was Sultan of Oman from 23 July 1970 until
his death in 2020. A fifteenth-generation descendant of the founder of the Al
Bu Said dynasty, he was the longest-serving leader in the Middle East and Arab
world at the time of his death, having ruled for almost half a century.
Shankar Dayal Sharma an Indian lawyer and politician served as the president of India from 1992 to
1997. Born in Bhopal, Sharma studied at
Agra, Allahabad and Lucknow and received a doctorate in constitutional law from
the University of Cambridge and was a bar-at-law from Lincoln's Inn and a
Brandeis Fellow at Harvard University. During 1948–49, Sharma was one of the leaders
of the movement for the merger of Bhopal State with India, a cause for which he
served eight months' imprisonment.
Tammur Bin faisal who ruled
Oman and later spent his last days in India was the grand father of Qaboos
bin. It is stated that Sultan Qaboos
learnt from Dr SD Sharma during his visits and in honouring his Guru, received
Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma at the Muscat airport in 1996 when he visited Oman and
took the dignitary in his cavalcade, breaking protocols.
SYMA places its regards
and respects to Teachers at Growth :
Mrs Jayasudha Sanjeevi
(Principal); Mr Srinivasan, Mr KS VenkataKrishnan, Mr C. Gururajan, Mrs L. Padmapriya, Ms K. Swarnamukhi, Mrs S. Subashini, Mrs S. Vidhya, Mrs D. Grahalakshmi, Ms V. Saranya, Mrs E Vijayabanu, Mrs K Mahalakshmi, Ms R Kavitha, Mrs Jothilakshmi.. .. ...
Special mention of Mrs
Thara, our Coordinator & Ms Jothika
(volunteer) in ensuring smooth conduct of classes. Here are some photos of the function.
A BIG THANK YOU !
With
regards – S. Sampathkumar
11th Sept 2025
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