SIFE champions
Five students of Loyola College, Chennai — Ignacy Arockiyaa, Gracia Joseph, Samson Durai, Keshav Nair and Midhun Joseph — all members of Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) were adjudged joint winners of the SIFE National Competition 2007 held in Mumbai on June 19-20. Sponsored by information technology major Syntel, the open event attracted 20 teams from across the country. The Loyola College team not only bagged the SIFE National Cup but also won the Rookie Award given to first time participants. The Loyola quintet will now proceed to New York to compete in the SIFE World Cup scheduled to be held on October 12, 2007, where it will face-off with teams from 46 countries from around the world.
Founded in the US in 1975, SIFE is a global non-profit organisation which supports student bodies in 2,000 college and university campuses in 46 countries worldwide, providing opportunities for socially purposive work and concomitantly developing their entrepreneurial, communication and leadership skills. Loyola College signed up with SIFE in 2006 and currently the college unit of SIFE has 600 members.
The Loyola team’s award winning, year-long SIFE project involved considerable research and field visits to rural areas."We made a 23-minute multi-media presentation of three educational and community outreach projects which focused on teaching rural backward communities the principles of free enterprise to help them attain financial independence. We were judged on our capability to apply market economics in real workplace situations and ability to train communities to become self sufficient by sustaining their businesses. The national award is acknowledge-ment of the meaningful work we have done in the past one year," says team leader Ignacy Arockiyaa, president of SIFE, and final year M.Sc student in the visual communications faculty of Loyola College.
The team’s outreach projects targeted three backward communities — Dalits, Narikurava (gypsy) and poor students — in Tamil Nadu. Over 150 people within these communities were given vocational training while for poor students the team established a student entrepreneurial centre in Loyola College.
Even as team members are preparing for the SIFE World Cup competition scheduled for October 12, future plans have been chalked out by Loyola’s SIFE members. On the anvil is a full-length feature film project involving 350 VISCOM students and plans to increase SIFE membership to 3,000 by next year.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)
Lekha Kamat
Although only 15 years of age, Lekha Kamat has a commendable sense of balance. Even as she is an excellent swimmer with a rich haul of trophies in national and international aquatic championships under her belt, she is also a star pupil of the Father Agnel School, Navi Mumbai, averaging 91.38 percent in her class X board examination which she wrote in March this year. Soon after, at the 34th Junior National Aquatic Championship held in August, this sprint swimmer who specialises in the 50 and 100 metres free style and butterfly stroke events, bagged four gold medals in these categories and one in the 50 metres backstroke event.
At age five, Lekha took to swimming and started training at the Navi Mumbai Sports Club, participating in her first national aquatic championships in Bangalore four years later in 2003. "I was too nervous and didn’t do well in my first national meet. But I got an idea of the level of competition and came back determined to improve my timings," she recalls.
Since then she has made good her resolution. Following rigorous training, she was selected to represent India in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Games conducted in Colombo between August 9-19, 2006. Lekha struck gold in the 50 m and 100 m events in both the free style and butterfly stroke categories. Although well short of Olympic records, her timings of 29.55 seconds in 50 m butterfly (Olympic record 25.57), 1.04.51 in 100 m butterfly (56.61), 1.00.76 in 100 m (53.42) and 27.70 in 50 m freestyle, are the best in SAARC countries.
Though pleased with her performance in the classroom and swimming pool, like a growing number of youth in young India who aspire to meet global benchmarks, Lekha is not content. Now a class XI science student at Fr. Agnel School, she has set her sights on attaining Olympic timings in the 50 m butterfly and freestyle. "I have to improve my timings 25 percent. It’s a tall order but not impossible," she says.
Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)