One of the greatest challenges that the Covid posed was with respect to online education. Not just poverty, but wider became the digital divide during the pandemic. At a time when we are reading new stories about governments’ failure in ensuring access to e-learning, and about the distress and the depression of the affected students, Manju Edachira and Dickens Leonard came forward to donate their own laptop to their juniors at their alma mater. Concerned about the hardships of MA students pursuing their dissertation, Dr. Manju and Dr. Dickens donated their laptops to the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL), University of Hyderabad wishing that the needy students could borrow it and use it to complete their research work.
Dr. Dickens Leonard
Both Dr. Manju and Dr. Dickens are alumni from CCL and worked in UoH for a while. Grateful and glad for their gesture, Prof. Sowmya Dechamma, Head of the Department said that: “This might be a small act of kindness but many might be inspired and many students might benefit from such gestures as that of Manju’s and Lenny’s (that’s how we call him).”
In January 2021, Dr. Leonard joined the ICSSR Research Institute called the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS), Kolkata as an Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies. Both Manju and Lenny are largely interested and motivated by research in anti-caste intellectual thought and comparative culture studies in India.
Contributed by Nimisha S Pradeep, Department of Communication, UoH.