The sparkle in her eyes and her infectious energy belie her age. That, and the silver strands on her crown, signs of wisdom, only hint at the powerhouse that she is. Bengaluru-based Padmaja Ramamurthy has the perfect disposition to be a teacher. The 65 year-old is also an innovator and visionary educator who changes the lives of every child whose life is touched by her work.

On International Women’s Day this year, Ramamurthy was honoured by a Kochi-based company, Eastern Condiments, with the ‘Eastern-Bhoomika Iconic Woman of the Year’ award. The award was instituted by the founder M E Meeran in 2015 to acknowledge women across cities for their service to society.

Ramamurthy is known for her unorthodox and innovative teaching methods, a talent that syncs perfectly with her current calling: she is a teacher at Dream School, run by the Bengaluru-based Association for Promoting Social Action (APSA), an organisation that focuses on educating trafficked and abandoned children, child labourers and children of construction workers.

It was nothing like what she had done before but Ramamurthy was up to the challenge. In 2008, she began working as an English teacher for Class X. “Since most of the students were from Kannada-medium schools, I knew it would be a challenge to help them clear their exams in English.” But Ramamurthy’s resilience and multilingual abilities enabled her to converse in English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada and put her students at ease. The first year was tough but slowly things changed for the better, and her innovative teaching methods helped her students to get a good grasp on all the subjects. Her efforts paid off and slowly absenteeism levels fell, confidence levels rose and a positive outlook settled in.

In subsequent years, the number of students graduating from Dream School rose. “In 2009, 20 students passed the English exam, a first for the institution. The turning point came when four street urchins from Dream School found jobs in BPOs by virtue of their English language skills, and started drawing salaries of ₹ 10,000 to ₹ 15,000. This made a great impact on the students,” she says.

Despite her almost innate ability to teach, Ramamurthy became an educator quite by accident. One day, at their home in Bengaluru, her chartered accountant husband flippantly remarked that he would love to trade places with her and spend more time at home. It was all she needed to leave the cosy confines of her home to kick-start a career. “I told my husband that I would take up a job on the condition that there would be no turning back. I said he would not have a wife waiting with coffee and tiffin when he returned from work, and that he would have to be an equal party in doing the household chores!”

A native of Karnataka, Ramamurthy grew up in Chennai and Kolkata and earned a home science degree in Coimbatore. Armed with this degree, she landed up at Kamala Garden Nursery School in Jayanagar, Bengaluru, and filled in for the UKG teacher who was on leave. Thus began her tryst with teaching, a profession that became her lifelong passion. Even when her husband’s transfers took her to various Indian cities, she pursued her career with the same gusto. In Chennai, the Padma Seshadri Bal Bhavan (PSBB) was a great learning experience for her. In her words, “The school was very appreciative of my teaching methodology and encouraged me.”

Ramamurthy’s out-of-the-box teaching methods were a welcome change from traditional classroom teaching. “In the setting sun, the beams of which filtered through to my classroom, I found the opportunity to teach the concept of concave and convex mirrors. My classes soon became a model for the rest of the school to emulate,” she smiles.

The family’s move to Kolkata took her to National High School in Lansdowne Road, where she had once been a student. She joined as assistant professor for nutrition and child psychology for Class XI and XII. Her husband’s ill health took the family back to Chennai, where Ramamurthy did a second stint with PSBB. She simultaneously pursued a B Ed degree, took a computer education course from Intel and equipped herself with a master’s degree in education management from Karaikkudi University. After her husband passed away in 2003, she moved to Bengaluru to be with her sons.

She continued to work in the field of education, doing stints with the education wing of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services, which created content for schools under Technology-Aided Lessons (TAL). Her job as a consultant required her to initiate schools into the use of TAL, to make education more interactive. Then, she joined as coordinator of the Presidency Group of Schools, where she had to make sure the syllabus and curriculum were organised uniformly within the group. She also did a stint with the Concern for Working Children, an NGO working towards eradication of child labour.

Working with APSA was a huge change from the elite schools she had earlier worked in. She realised that there was a need to give an opportunity to the most marginalised and underprivileged children of society. And education is the most integral part of helping children lead their lives as sensitive, caring and successful individuals. “I want to see education being wholesome in moulding the personality of students and not restricted to bookish knowledge,” she says. “We don’t want toppers with great scores; we want students to feel connected with the real world, with empathy for fellow beings.” Right now, working with Dream School, it doesn’t get more real than this.

—Chitra Ramaswamy

Photos: J Ramaswamy
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
June 2018