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St. Stephen`s College, which celebrated its 125th Anniversary in 2006, has a special niche amongst educational institutions of excellence, not only in Delhi but also all over India. Apart from its revered internal traditions, the College has also been an integral part of the social and structural changes that have taken place in the nation. And it has been the school for a long and impressive alumni list which includes sportspersons, writers, poets, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs, politicians, bureaucrats, ambassadors, techno-crats and corporate executives.
This volume, written by Ashok Jaitly, a former student, traces the history of the College from its original conception by the Cambridge Mission as an institution for higher education in 1881, through the travails of the freedom struggle, Partition, Independence and into the present world of relentless academic pressures, sporting compulsions and ever expanding opportunities. During all these turbulent and exciting years, St. Stephen`s College has stood firm for certain fundamental values which celebrate cosmopolitanism, pluralism, a degree of iconoclasm along with an immense enjoyment of learning in the widest sense.
"Mahatma Gandhi or plain Mr Gandhi as he was then, first came to St. Stephen`s early in 1915... On the persuasion of... C.F. Andrews who was then the Vice Principal, he stayed in the house of Principal Rudra which continued to be his Delhi abode for several years. The `Burra Sahib`s` house thus became the rendezvous for important national leaders like Rabindranath Tagore, Madan Mohan Malviya, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Surendra Nath Banerjee... It was here that Gandhiji, perhaps for the first time, enunciated his doctrine of non-violent non-cooperation or Satyagraha... It was here that Tagore completed his English translation of Gitanjali. And it was here that the pact between the Congress and the Khilafat Movement was sealed."
"Most would agree that it could only have been idle minds busy in some devilish workshop which gave birth to Kooler Talk, `the first purely student run rag aimed at providing an avenue for budding and `froost` - College slang for frustrated - Stephanian writers who could not find solace in the sedate pages of The Stephanian magazine.` Sarwar Lateef, Roshan Seth and Peter `Tubby` Philip were the intrepid perpetrators of this plot way back in 1960... To add respectability luminaries such as Kamalesh Sharma, Shankar Menon, Swaminathan Aiyar, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Inderjit Badhwar were co-opted onto the editorial board while poor, unknowing Rev R.I. Shankland was persuaded to act as the figurehead editor." ISBN - 8174364439
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Pages : 141
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