31st October is almost here, and I’ll be honest, for most of us Rashtriya Ekta Diwas is a pledge, a few photos and a quick scroll through WhatsApp status updates. Fair enough. But this year is the 151st birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and I think it deserves a bit more of our attention than usual.
What the day is actually about
The government started observing it in 2014. The reason is simple: Patel is the man who got over 500 princely states to join India after 1947, which is why people call him the Iron Man of India. This year the main programme is at the Statue of Unity in Ekta Nagar, Gujarat, with a Run for Unity and cultural performances. Campuses across the country do their own version too, usually a pledge and some speeches.
He wasn’t a topper to begin with
What I like most about Patel is something we rarely hear. He cleared his matriculation at 22. In those days that was considered quite late, and people around him didn’t expect much. He had no college degree and not much money, but he still wanted to be a barrister. So he studied law at home from books borrowed from other lawyers, started practising in small towns like Godhra, Borsad and Anand, and kept saving. At 36 he finally went to London for the Middle Temple. The course was 36 months long and he finished in 30, ranking first.
Honestly, that’s the kind of story I wish someone had told me in first year.
Why education kept coming back in his work
Patel cared a lot about learning in villages. He worked with Gandhi on the Gujarat Vidyapith, and he was the one who nudged Bhailalbhai Patel, known as Bhaikaka, towards rural education. Farmers in Charotar gave land, around 500 acres at first, and a township slowly came up there. It was named Vallabh Vidyanagar. Sardar Vallabhbhai Vidyapith began in 1955, and it later became Sardar Patel University. So a university exists today because a leader kept telling people that villages needed colleges too.
Our campus is a small India already
Look around People’s University for a minute. Medical and nursing students go to the hospital, engineering students are stuck in labs, and law, pharmacy and management students are somewhere in between. A lot of us stay in hostels, sharing rooms with people from other cities whose food, language and habits are different from ours. Our university’s own mission line talks about nurturing humanity, which sounds heavy, but a hostel corridor at 11 pm teaches it better than any speech.
The Garba nights during Navratri are another example. Nobody asks your course or your hometown there, you just join the circle and dance.
Small things count more than big speeches
Unity isn’t only a big word for a stage. It’s whether you talk to the quiet kid in the back row, or lend your notes to someone who missed three lectures, or manage to argue with a friend without turning it into a fight. Patel did his work through patience and plain hard effort, and that’s something we can copy in a very ordinary way.
This 31st October
Take the pledge, join the run if you can, and post the photo too, no problem. Then do one small thing after that. Sit with someone new in the canteen. If your semester is going badly, think of that man who started late, studied on his own and still came first.
Happy Rashtriya Ekta Diwas from People’s University.
