‘Education of the right kind can do wonders’

BENGALURU: Sonam Wangchuk recalls his childhood as a roller-coaster ride, with various ups and downs throughout. Born in Uleytokpo, near Alchi in the Leh district of Jammu and Kashmir, Wangchuk feels the village has grown bigger to some ‘10 families’. Unavailability of quality education in schools at the time would be compared to a catastrophe, but Wangchuk disagrees as he says, “I learned that not having a school can also be a blessing, especially when the schools were not up to the mark. No school is better than a bad school.” Till the age of eight, when rest of the kids were in school, Wangchuk would experience his learning on field and grasped things in a more interactive manner. “Children grasp and grow while picking up languages and academic insights, which is not difficult, given the kind of confidence and grooming a young child needs,” says Wangchuk at an event in the city.

Considering himself lucky enough to learn from his mother who taught him in his mother tongue and did not resort to alien languages, he says, “I often joke with my friends on the fact that when they were learning about plants in a classroom, I was out there learning the same with nature as my textbook.”

In 1988, Wangchuk, who was the inspiration behind Aamir Khan’s character in 3 Idiots, and his group of friends founded the Students Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) and in 1998, the SECMOL campus, Phey, was inaugurated by the Dalai Lama. Built by using simple and traditional technique, part of SECMOL’s work is to develop techniques that use alternative energy sources. When it comes to learning, the students are taken in based on their ability and will to learn and not marks. They undergo an interactive method of learning, which is to do it while you learn. When asked about why the game-changing method has not caught up with the rest of the country, Wangchuk says,”We didn’t push or promote it in other places but people need to rise to the occasion and do their bit.”

A founding member of the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh, Wangchuk aims to complete the campus with his vision of providing students with meaningful education and to develop a sustainable economic living. “At HIAL, we follow the system of ‘do it while you learn’ where for example, business students can actually run a business on campus to implement their learning and this continues in every course,” he adds.

Transform lives through education
Nagaraj is one of the over 1,600 students, who have been helped by Vidhyadhan to finance their education. Sharing his experience, Nagaraj, an engineering student at RV College, said, “Problems started when my father passed away and left us with huge loans to pay, which my mother struggled with. I then approached Vidhyadhan. I want to launch a social enterprise, which works on waste management.”