It's the people who can make a difference and succeed if they are provided right environment. It's good to see refugees from East Pakistan and Bangladesh leading successful, peaceful and integrated life in their adopted land. Here is some excerpts but feel free to read at the link below.
About 2 km away, in RH2, a Hindi teacher at Ravindra Memorial School, 55-year-old Nirmal Talukdar, is seen conversing in Bengali with a young fellow teacher Sangeetha Mondal. Talukdar came as an 11-year old boy from Bangladesh in 1970; he corrects himself immediately, ``No, it was East Pakistan, not Bangladesh.''
It is 4 pm and Ravindra Memorial School's final bell has tolled. ``Dada dadaon (wait, brother),'' shouts out a kid as he rushes out of the school compound. Behind him is a group of teachers conversing in Bengali. As they come to the school gate, they wish their colleagues bye for the day in the heavy-accented Raichur Kannada.
The school headmaster, Khokan Halder, lives in RH3, which is on the other side of the Tungabhadra canal. Born in Sindhanur, Halder, in his mid-40s, is one of the well-educated Bengalis in the camp, ventured out to other places to work, but returned to his roots to teach the community children. "My ancestors came from Bangladesh as refugees and now I am a part of this region. I studied in Kannada-medium up to SSLC and went to the city to pursue higher studies. My wife is from Kolkata and she had a problem settling in here,'' says Halder, walking me through the bylanes of the camp.
Unlike the Tamil camp, the Bangla camps are vibrant and wear the West Bengal countryside look seen in movies from Tollygunge; throw in sandesh and rassagollas, women sporting bright pink sindoor on their forehead, Rabindra sangeet, Durga temple and it dawns on you that Sindhanur could be Siliguri. Halder conducts spoken English classes for the adults in the camps in the evenings. A kitchen garden with the quintessential brinjal, beans, pumpkin, lauki, several meat markets, and several private fish ponds, cattle and wild ducks rearing - all make this camp a picture postcard village.
Nihar Mondal, who originally hailed from Khulna district in Bangladesh, is counted among the well-to-do in RH3. He has the luxury of half an acre fresh water pond at his backyard for fish farming - two years ago, nearly 40,000 fishes were brought and left into the water body. Mondal and a few other families use the pond for fishing. His wife Manimala is from RH 4 and is married into RH3.
Durga Pujo is celebrated in the camps with fervour while Pongal is a major festival in the Tamil camp. By dusk, the camp children gather in the frontyard of a house where an elderly person is teaching them Bengali language. ``Our children study in Kannada medium where the first and second languages are English and Hindi. They do not get to learn their mother tongue. So a class is held every evening to teach the language,'' says Halder.
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