Guru Vandana ! - SYMA Growth celebrated Teachers' Day 2025

                       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 12^th 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
11^th Sept  2025