Headmaster tales

It’s a season of change in some of India’s top-ranked private boarding schools. Several legacy residential schools across the country have new incumbents in the office of principal/headmaster. Among them: The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS, estb.1935), routinely ranked the country’s #1 all-boys boarding school in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings and the Lawrence School, Sanawar (LSS, estb.1858), also routinely ranked among the Top 3 co-ed boarding schools. Peter Mclaughlin, an alum of the London School of Economics who had headed international schools in the UK and Egypt before he was appointed headmaster of TDS in 2009 after a global search, has put in his papers. Moreover after a long hiatus, Vinay Pande, who served as faculty at TDS for 19 years, has been appointed principal of the Lawrence School, Sanawar, where he had begun his teaching career. To this list, one might add Mayo College, Ajmer (estb.1875), although the new principal, the formidable Lt. General (Retd), Surendra Hari Kulkarni PVSM, AVSM, VSM, took charge over a year ago. Although EW (estb.1999) was the first publication to acknowledge the valuable contribution these vintage schools have made towards developing the nation’s human capital stock, the admiration was less than mutual. It was only after 2007, when your editors introduced the annual EW India School Rankings in which public opinion recognised the superior education provided by these islands of primary-secondary excellence, that their lofty headmasters deigned to acknowledge this pioneer publication. And while Praveen Vasisht, the long-serving principal of LSS, wrote some columns for EW and was inclined to share the frustrations of having to manage a board packed with government babus, Mclaughlin earned the jokey appellation of Perfidious Albion — a descriptive he didn’t quite appreciate — for having reneged on a contract to sign up every TDS parent as a subscriber. Nor was he amused by your editor’s narration of the no doubt apocryphal story of a Scotsman run over by a taxi while pursuing a pound coin in Regent St, London. Coroner’s verdict: Death due to natural causes. Crab culture complaint Most people — including media scribes — are probably unaware, but June 13 was a historic day in Indian journalism. In the insightful column he contributes to the Times of India, ad guru and social commentator Santosh Desai was allowed to acknowledge the existence of rival dailies Indian Express and also the Hindustan Times. This is a historic departure — although it could be a sub-editor’s oversight — from the established practice of Indian journalism and its competitive culture, under which every publication feigns ignorance, probably born out of contempt, of the existence of all rival publications, real or imagined. Hitherto, it was quite de rigueur for mighty media pundits to debate with phantom, unspecified enemies. Thus despite being promoted with the highest motive of raising Indian education to global standards, which would help the sales of newspapers, the isolationist mind-set of Indian media and the crab culture of editors, have denied this once-struggling publication even the tiniest…