Monday, November 23, 2009

Budhanilkantha School scandal

Budhanilkantha School has a big reputation inside and outside Nepal because of its resources, infrastructures and the amount of successful graduates that it has produced. Recently, a sex scandal was reported by a lot of media. Things were already looking nasty for the school, when Avenues TV pounced into the case and shot videos inside the school.
There's a teacher called Badri Gautam inside Budhanilkantha School, who calls young girls at nights into his room, and then rapes them.
Badri Gautam was then fired from the school after a long period of what was said to be occupied by the investigation. After a few days, Mrs. Priya Poudel (who teaches Nepali) was also suspended from the school because she was the one who invited the camera crew of the Avenues TV and set up the whole show inside the school. She was also the one, who is said to have tricked and convinced the junior kids to give distorted interviews on the TV. Well, I don't know if that's actually what happened but things are said to have taken place like that.
The case of sexual assault by Badri Gautam aroused a lot of interest in a lot of the parties in the school. Firstly, Badri Gautam is a close-aide of the principal, Mr. Narayan Prasad Sharma. Secondly, there's a teacher's union now operating at the school that's trying to get rid of NP Sharma and establish themselves. They have been using this incident to oust NP Sharma. Well, for a fact, NP Sharma has been detested by a large majority of the students for a long time now. We always had discussions about his corruptions, and the miserable state the school was getting into time and again. There might be very few BNKS alumni, who do not want a change of leadership in the school. But, The UNION? The Teacher's Union is not the answer to this. Personally, I feel that this is a group of disadvantaged losers. When the Principal put them in posts, they licked his boots. They wouldn't listen to anything against him. When removed, they now threaten to remove him.
Avenues Tv, no matter how much impartial they claim to have been, have surely distorted this incident. There were many ways of perceiving this incident, but they have chosen to look at this incident from the eyes of Priya Poudel. Well, people also claim that Priya ( an active member of The Staff Union) 's actions are planned, and it's her politician husband that has been her Guru during these times.
After the Badri Gautam incident, when Mrs. Priya was suspended, her backing up force - The Teacher's Union (oh, it's TU - seems right for most of them are TU graduates) locked up the Principal's Office. The senior students protested and sat on the roads inside the school. Avenues TV, which seems to have been informed by the TU, or Mrs. Priya more specifically, tried to come back into the school again to shoot videos. No sane person would let a media inside their house, when they know for what reason they're there. This channel operates like India's Aajtak - by sensationalizing news. Even small news, that shouldn't have been news in the first place, are presented as if they are REAL BIG, with all those gestures of the news readers, and the sound and graphics effects. The students, who had by now realized that Avenues TV was simply coming inside the school for the desires of a small group of teachers, as opposed to the overall good of the school, decided to teach them a lesson. They snatched away their camera, and deleted all those scenes they'd captured in their tapes, and chased them out of school. That I feel was the right thing to do.

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