“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate”
Albert Schweitzer’s words have been elegantly epitomized by Shri Sathyanarayan Mundayoor or Uncle Moosa , as children call him after his pen name. In a country like India , having a well settled job is the dream of every common person. But this Man, left this dream to fulfil the dreams of several budding minds. Sathyanarayan quit his job as a revenues officer in Mumbai as he wanted to broaden the purpose of his life beyond money.
After quitting his job in 1979, he moved to Arunachal Pradesh and began his selfless mission of providing education to those who were unable to access it. North eastern regions in India had been kept from accession of quality education since quite a long . This gravely concerned him and he wanted to enlighten those children with knowledge.
He joined the Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalaya school movement as an educational officer , where he inspired many young minds with his ideas and vision. He found lack of creativity in the Indian educational system and took it upon himself to break through these conventional barriers in order to provide a deeper insight of knowledge to students.
In 2007, in collaboration with the Association of Writers and Illustrators for Children (AWIC) and the Vivekananda Trust, he founded the first library for children under the Lohit Youth library act in the town of Tezu called the Bambosara library, named after the Bamboo plant as uncle Moosa was a nature lover too. Over the never four decades, he established 13 such libraries across the north east, in the remotest places such as Wakro , Anjaw and Chongkham. The bigger ones among them have over 10,000 books. In order to develop imagination and creativity in children , the libraries were turned into a hub of activities such as theatre, story telling , skits , and various others campaigns and workshops. It’s now been about 33 years that this legendary person has been devoting his life to improve the reading habits and to promote education in tribal children.
In a interview, Uncle Moosa said , “During my years of close associations with the young students it became very very clear to me that unless there is a positive way of introducing better environments for reading, there will not be educational advancement for these young people”. He has been a great inspiration to the nation and has been awarded the Padhmashree award by the government for his ground-breaking efforts of advancing education in the north east India. Not everyone can be Uncle Moosa , but each one us can seek inspiration from him and try to promote education, particularly among those who are unable to access it. Even a small deed of kindness by you can do miracles in the lives of someone else .
“I hope that this idea of mine will be worked upon by others too who Instead of waiting to visit Bamboosa library, would form their own libraries in their areas , homes, balcony and narrate stories to children of their locality and spend a good time with them” says Uncle Moosa.
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