An Award & A Controversy

No. This post is not about the N-Obama controversy. You might have already been overloaded with cartoons and articles condemning the Peace Prize conferred on the United States President. Yet, this theme of undeserving candidates getting prestigious awards continues.

Let's not go deep into history. Last three names of that illustrious list read as follows.
2007 - Rakesh Rollands
2008 - Mishel Johns
2009 - Archith Mohan

Three names that did justice to the prestige the title conferred on them; Best Loyolite. Go back in history and you will get the names of people like Rakesh P, Varun Murali, Arun Andrews etc. It lies upon the school management, the responsibility of finding the best person to be given this title every passing year. And all these years, selection of a person for this award never yielded a sense of awkwardness; a sense that a more deserving candidate was out there among his batch mates. Year 2010 gave us just that - sense of awkwardness.

There were at least two other more deserving candidates in the passing out batches, both in the CBSE and ISC classes. What resulted in the selection of the ultimate winner is what worries me more than the selection itself.
Quoting from Ashok's blog on Loyola School,

An amusing feature of elections in Loyola in the 1980s was the undercurrent of caste politics. I refer to the ICSE vs SSLC “war” of those days as caste politics because it was a battle over group identities based on which division you belonged to. As the ICSE was a tougher course in high school, the SSLC students were perceived as lower castes; on this blog and elsewhere, I have been told by recent ISC students that the discrimination turned more open in the 2000s. No wonder that the ISC vs HSC war continues in Loyola at the time of elections.

The newest battle in school; is ISC vs CBSE. With the teachers in CBSE and ISC sections not teaching the students from the other sections (apart from one or two exceptions), they don't get to know all the students in the passing out batches. This unfortunately results in the teachers voting en masse for the candidate from their section. This problem, I believe, is here to continue unless there is transparency in the selection process of the Best Loyolite award.

I therefore appeal to all those involved in the process of conferring this prestigious award to be more careful in future to preserve its stature.