Buddha's Smile School

The Hindu: India still has the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, but has made “rapid advances” in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, a new UN report on education has said. The Education For All-Global Monitoring Report, released here on Wednesday finds that out of the total 759 million illiterate [...]

When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

In a recent example of India’s horrific caste system, a 16-year-old Dalit school boy died after he was thrashed almost unconscious in front of other students by an upper caste teacher for writing a poem to an upper caste girl. He was also beaten by family members of the girl the next day, found semi-conscious and taken to hospital where he later died. Local leaders have sought an inquiry into the incident as the police appear to be siding with the upper caste girl’s family and the teacher. ->> MeriNews | Read the Full Story

I first met Rajan Saini and her husband Sukhdev in 1999 when they were living in Ashapoor and I was visiting the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. At that time, that which is now the Buddha’s Smile School was a bare patch of brown land, on the far side of which were [...]

In February 2005 Vanessa Turner wrote an article about Buddha’s Smile School for Yoga & Health — Europe’s best selling Yoga magazine. Jane Sill, the Editor of Yoga & Health kindly agreed to send us the article so we could make it available for download here. Here is a excerpt: Dream in Sarnath: Buddha’s Smile [...]