Monday, May 25, 2009

LUMDING STATION



Lumding Railway Station is a place that always remains closed to my heart. It was the place I had to cross atleast twice daily as I had to cross it to go and return from school. It was the place we used to eat Dosa, I remember. A small town life can be exciting enough if simplicity remains there in heart. I now thinks those were the golden days of my life.



I still remember when me, Kanai, Chandu (Prasenjit Das), Raghu (Biplob Nandy) used to go to wheeler in the station everyday in the evening, to buy a copy of Assam Tribune.



Lumding Station is the first lesson of communication to most of the children of Lumding still now, as train is the only means of communication leaving aside the erratic and painful bus service to nearby areas like Diphu, Lanka, Hojai, Nagaon etc. So, we are the generation who grew up knowing that Indian Railways is the safest, luxurious and the only mode of travelling out of station!
Railway Station is a place where one would find people from different segments, classes of society, having altogether different viewpoints about society! So-called "High Class" (read railway officials and businessmen of the town) to labour class people from Gadhi Nagar to "Coolie Patty", Lumding Station is for everyone.



For many of us it the place where we had got our first lesson of psychology.
I still remember my first journey through "PAHAR LINES" i.e. the NC HILLS section of NFR ( Northeastern Frontier Railways). The scenic route passes through beautiful hill valleys, miles after miles of wild bamboo orchards, wild banana orchards. The beauty of NC Hills is beyond any description. The platform no.1 is alloted for MG Train (Meter Gauze train) towards Silchar through "pahar lines". So many memories are there with Lumding Station that it is impossible to forget it's charm.



REALLY HOME REMAINS ALWAYS A SWEET HOME AND I MISS LUMDING SO MUCH.



"ONCE A LUMDINIAN.....
FOREVER A LUMDINIAN..."


...subhankar karmakar

Friday, May 15, 2009

Lumding Railway H.S. School: from its days of glory to the present gloomy condition......

In the year of 1948 this school was established by the Railway Government.
Since then it has been constantly grooming the talents of Lumding, achieving many milestones in between. Over the years it has produced many talents who are well established both in India and abroad. Many students secured ranks in the merit list in the history of Railway School, yet it could not modernized itself to compete with the other premium schools in this region.....
Lumding Railway Higher Secondary School, the school that have been grooming hundreds of real talents since its inception in 1948 was established by railway government to cater the quality education to the children of railway employees of the Lumding Railway Division. Justifying the cause of its inception the school quickly had established a niche' for itself among the schools of Assam. It is evident from the list of the students who had secured position in HSLC examination (Xth board) conducted by SEBA Secondary Education board of Assam).

The students who secured rank/position in HSLC Examination from Railway School:

Mr. Hemchandra Majumder (6th, 1953);
Mr. Jagadis Kumar Chachra (9th, 1953);
Mr. Sailendra Nath Chakraborty (7th, 1956);
Mr. Prantosh Kumar Bhattacharjee (10th, 1957);
Mr. Prabhash Ranjan bhattacharjee (12th, 1957);
Mr. Ardhendu Bikash Dasgupta (4th, 1958);
Mr. Partha Pratim Bhattacharjee (6th, 1958);
Mr. Pranab Chakraborty (6th, 1959);
Mr. Vidyasagar Bajaj (6th, 1960);
Mr. Sekhar Nath Chakraborty (8th, 1960);
Mr. Bijoy Bose (7th, 1964);
Mr. Nripati Roy (3rd, 1969);
Mr. Ashish Das (3rd, 1974);
Ms. Uttara Dey (19th, 1986);
Mr. Subhankar Karmakar (13th, 1991);
Mr. Sumanta Das (19th, 1991);
Mr. Jyotirmoy Biswas (19th, 1993);
Mr. Arghya Chattarjee (16th, 1998);

Although the school couldn't produce rankers since 1974, but the performances were not so bad from 1974 uptu 1985, but it had successfully churned out bright students who had just missed the merit list narrowly. Among them one was Dr. Atul Krishna Banik, now an Asst. Professor in NIT Durgapur (incidentally it was my Alma Mater too). In 1986 Uttara di got position breaking the jinx of bad spell of luck. Our previous batch also produced a group of multi-dimensional talents like Ajitesh, Debal Majumder, Priyojeet Chakraborty, Snehashish, Tanmoy Som and others.
Our next batch was very good, Anirban Sammaddar (who now works in Bijoya Bank) did very well, there was Rajib Mitra (who is an MBBS now, working in NF Railway). Jyotirmoy Biswas of 1993 batch again had secured rank (he is a software professional now). So the batches up to late '90s were good enough to churn out groups of brilliant students from Lumding and Railway School still was influential, as the legacy was still alive.But the new millennium had at last put the last kill on the coffin, as DBS was continuously out performing Railway School on board examination. This in turn made people to avoid Railway School for their children, as by that time DBS, Lumding had become matured enough to produce very good results with an enviable consistently making railway schools traditional students base as well-to-do families had started to choose DBS for their children. It had created a mess as the total system efficiency had been greatly reduced due to the lack of good students. Although there were few good students still then, but the lack of proper teaching always discouraged them to be innovative.
So exactly what was the principal reason behind these lackluster performance of a school which was once considered as one of the best schools of the state?
As far as my intuition says, I believe that there was no single principal reason behind these quality erosion of the students, but of course there were some major factors behind these continual degradation of academic standard of the school. One of them is the change of the method of studying. As cramming became the most popular trend among the students of present generation without having a proper understanding of the subject topics and this in turn made the theoretical base of the students very weak particularly in the subjects like Mathematics & Physics. The second most important factor was the shortages of quality teachers at the school level. Moreover, the school administration had separated the girl's block into the boarding house and distributed the faculties into two groups, as a result the shortages of quality teacher became more acute forcing the results to degrade. And of course emergence of DBS had a profound impact on Railway School as good students migrated to DBS as well as to Kendriya Vidyalaya, Lumding. During the last couple of years Pranav Vidya Mandir, the English Medium School run by Bharat Sevashram Sangha had scored well in HSLC Examination.
Still we hope that in near future the school administration
would be properly reformed to gain its LOST GLORY.