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9.11
School Runs and Small Revolutions
Akhtar’s Auto and the Education of Two Children
While the hospital was modernising, our personal lives were revolving around a different kind of infrastructure: schooling. It is one thing to plan wards and workflows; it is quite another to plan a child’s education in a small town where choices appear suddenly, disappear quietly, and always come with conditions. In those years, Bhavana and I discovered that raising children is essentially a series of decisions taken with incomplete information, followed by long periods of hoping you chose wisely.
Ashwini’s early schooling was eclectic, almost like a tour of Sevagram’s educational landscape. He began at Mahila Ashram, a Gandhian school with a Marathi-medium curriculum and a certain simplicity that suited the place. Then he moved to Agragami Convent in Wardha for three years, and later to Kasturba Vidya Mandir in Sevagram for the fourth grade. Kasturba Vidya Mandir had one unbeatable advantage: it was across the road from our house. Ashwini could have rolled out of bed and walked into his classroom, half-awake and still chewing his breakfast.
A New School on the Horizon
In the mid-1990s, a new institution appeared, and with it came a new kind of parental restlessness. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan opened a campus at the Lloyd’s Steel Factory in Bhugaon. It was called Lloyd’s Vidya Niketan, and it promised what every ambitious school promises: a rigorous English-medium education, good facilities, and the reassuring glow of a famous name.
Bhavana and I were impressed by the Bhavan’s reputation, and we made a decision that felt bold at the time. We would move both Ashwini—now entering fifth grade—and Amrita to Lloyd’s. They took the entrance test, passed, and we paid a refundable deposit of Rs 10,000. It was refundable, yes, but it was still Rs 10,000—an amount that carried weight in those days, even when spoken casually.
The Commuter’s Dilemma
We had solved the admission problem and created a logistical nightmare. Lloyd’s was in Bhugaon, about fifteen kilometres from Sevagram. Unlike city schools, there was no neat yellow bus turning up at your gate, no uniformed conductor calling out names. We had traded a school across the road for one that required a daily expedition.
We were not alone. Dr Prakash Behere, a psychiatrist who had returned from the UK to join MGIMS, was also looking for a good English-medium school for his sons, Aniruddha and Shashank. Dr B S Garg’s daughter, Neha, faced the same problem. So did Aditya Farsole from Wardha. We formed what can only be described as a coalition of anxious parents—polite in conversation, slightly desperate in intent. We needed a daily chariot for our children, and we needed it quickly.
Akhtar’s Auto
The solution arrived in the form of Akhtar.
It was Mr Farsole who found him—almost by accident—at a time when we were still arguing about options and discovering, with mild embarrassment, how few of us actually owned a car. Akhtar was willing to do the long daily run, which in itself made him a rare man. He was tall, thin, and so soft-spoken that you sometimes had to lean in to catch his words. He drove his auto with a caution that was almost philosophical. At times, he drove so slowly that the children could have got down, walked a few steps, and climbed back in without changing the pace of the vehicle.
He tried, now and then, to discipline the children, but children have their own democracy. They listened when they felt like it and ignored him when they didn’t. The auto was a tight squeeze, and yet it worked. Every morning the “Lloyd’s Auto” buzzed through Sevagram and Wardha, collecting Ashwini, Amrita, Shashank, Neha, and Aditya. That auto-rickshaw became their moving clubhouse. For the thirty minutes it took to reach Bhugaon, they bonded over jokes, complaints, last-minute homework, and the bumpy rhythm of Wardha roads. Akhtar, in the front, drove as if he was transporting fragile glass.
Coming Into Their Own
The commute was long, but it turned out to be worth it. Under the leadership of the Principal, Mr Dass, and his wife—who became friends and even invited us to the school—the children flourished. Lloyd’s gave them more than an English-medium education. It gave them a circle, a shared life, and the confidence that comes from feeling you belong.
Ashwini found his tribe quickly—Shashank Behere, Aaditya Jain, Vaibhav Patni, Gayatri Saraf, Vikram Belkhode, Tahsin Taaj, Ram Agrawal, and Sudhir Rawlani. Many of them later became doctors or dental surgeons, which is what happens when bright children grow up around a medical campus and begin to think stethoscopes are part of the natural world.
Amrita built her own world too, with friends like Abhilash Dass (the Principal’s son), Neha Bhomiya, and Mahodaya. Looking back, I realise that the real education did not happen only in classrooms. It happened in friendships, in shared routines, in the small negotiations children learn to make every day—how to be liked, how to stand up for yourself, how to recover after a bad day.
The Return of Lloyd’s—One Generation Later
That daily thirty-kilometre round trip was a serious investment of time and effort. We didn’t call it that then. We simply did what needed doing. But when I see what those years gave our children—their friendships, their confidence, their sense of independence—I feel it paid rich dividends.
There is a pleasing circularity to life. Today my granddaughters, Diti and Nivi, go to the same school where Ashwini and Amrita studied. They travel in a school bus now, comfortably and safely, with a driver who does not whisper and a vehicle that does not invite children to get down and walk alongside it. They enjoy the same bonhomie their father and bua once did, only with better suspension.
What has changed most is not the school. It is the parenting.
Modern parents attend monthly teacher–parent meetings with the seriousness of a board exam. They sit for hours, discussing strengths and weaknesses, unit tests and part-completion tests, marks dissected into neat categories, and performance tracked like a stock market graph. There is a great deal of diligence in it, and also, if I may say so, a great deal of anxiety.
Bhavana and I never attended a single such meeting during the six years our children studied at Lloyd’s. We never “projected” them. We didn’t negotiate with teachers about grades. We were, in this one matter, blissfully relaxed—perhaps even irresponsibly so, by modern standards. And yet Ashwini and Amrita never let us down. They studied, they grew up, they found their way, and they turned out fine—without us hovering over their report cards like anxious auditors.
In the end, that may be the quiet truth of parenting: you do your best, you make a few sensible decisions, you worry more than you admit, and then you step back and let the children become themselves.