Cinderella stories will never go out of style. Heart-warming recounts of rags to riches tales — the poor, wretched boy with a heart of gold who acquires great wealth and fame through his determination and courage — are things we never tire of hearing. The reality, of course, is that in most cases poverty and survival are grim taskmasters and seldom grant reprieves. The daily battle for existence leaves one with little time to dream.
This is something Nazeer Ahmed appears well aware of, having had his fair share of hardship and pain. For a decade now, he has tried to bridge that gap — between the hopelessness of poverty and the hope of a better future — by starting the New Millennium School in Kumaraswamy Layout, which provides quality education to students from low and low middle class families, in the most economical way. Its students come from some of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city, for whom any kind of education at all would have been nothing but a distant dream.
“The idea was never to provide free education and bring children to school for the sake of it,” says Nazeer. “We want to give these children the same standard of learning they would get in an affluent institution.” And so, the school was set up by Nazeer and his friend Shuban, to cater to the poorest of the poor and provide them with a good, solid platform to help them find their way. With 300 students, the school accepts children from the pre-nursery level all the way to class 10, with a teacher-student ratio of about 1:25. “The teachers go through a training session and learn to handle the kids,” says Nazeer. “Elite schools don’t think twice about expelling a student who does not meet their requirements. That is something I never do; every child deserves the effort, no matter how weak he may be.”
Children who finish their tenth standard and actually make it to college are the success stories, of course, but there are plenty who fall by the wayside, crippled by poverty or a lack of inclination, often both. Instead of being simply dismissed, these children are provided with skills that will see them through. “We have outsourced our computer training to professionals because usually, there is a computer lab with a teacher and not much gets done, really. This way, the children will learn the skills that will stand them in good stead, like how to use Microsoft Word and Excel and how to trawl the internet,” says Nazeer. For the many who cannot afford education after class 10, all is not lost.
What’s more, the Brindavan Education Trust which has set up a lab at New Millennium School offers help and training to children with learning disabilities. “Special schools are usually very expensive because there are so few students in a class and moreover, unless a student discovers a learning disability as late as high school, a special school is not unavoidable,” says Nazeer. What Nazeer prefers to do is to spot the learning disability as early as possible and bring the children up to par with the rest by the time they get to high school.
Needless to say, heavy concessions are given to really needy, deserving children, so that nobody is deprived of what is their birthright. The burning question at the of this is, how do they make ends meet? “We make do,” Nazeer says simply. “The school is not run for profit so all the income we get goes back into running it. Of course, things are tight, that will always be the case, but we manage.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “We wanted to start a school and we just did. Help has come to us.” You can call it earthly or you can say it divine, but help really does come to those who ask for it.