In 1948, Pramatha Ranjan Thakur a Member of Parliament, set up the Thakurnagar High School and things haven’t quite been the same. Without waiting for the government to help it, Thakurnagar has produced 11 IAS and IPS officers, two university Vice Chancellors, four doctors with FRCS and a number of senior civil servants, engineers and other professionals. One of the old boys is a Sahitya Academy Award winning poet and another studied economics under Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh.

Everyone recalls 1948 and Thakur as the turning point. Now grateful alumni have bought and handed over a 12 acre plot for setting up the St Stephen’s College of Science and Technology.

Maybe the government should get pro-active in setting up elementary and secondary schools instead of throwing sops at under-privileged people.

Shabbir Hussain, a star among them has sung at Badrinath, the Puri Jagannath Temple, Delhi’s Gurdwaras and even Chattarpur Mandir whose orthodoxy does not permit film playback singers to perform. Another of the famous Sheikh Muslims, Sajan Shola says he always begins a concert with an invocation to Ganesh. Another, Jameel Bharti says, “I don’t know much but ours is an art, and art has no religion, or it encompasses all reigions.”

This article appears at a time when a controversy rages across the country as some Muslim leaders have declared the patriotic song ‘Vande Mataram’, idolatrous and anti-Islamic.

Now they are flexing their marketing muscle. TV channels and corporates have realised that dabba racks are premium, mobile billboards. Dabbawalas have corporatised their Trust with expert professional managers. The Trust has a huge database of customer information which it can ethically, effectively use to target advertising and sales. They are also not averse to delivering small products for a fee.

Consideration of ethics will come in not just with customer information- dabbawalas have decided they will screen advertisers for suitability. Read this delightful story here.