Your Excellency the Governor of Tamilnadu, Shri Bhishma Narayan Singh, Respected Chancellor and senior statesman of India, Shri C.  Subramaniam, Hon'ble Union Minister, Shri Arunachalam, Hon'ble Minister of Education of Tamilnadu, Shri Aranganayagam, Hon'ble Minister Thiru Mira and Swamiji, distinguished Vice-Chancellor, Dr.  Rajammal Devadas, and Vice-Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi Open University, Shri Kulandaiswamy Swamy, Hon'ble Members of the Parliament, Legislatures, members of the faculty and thankamana students,  

I am very much happy and honoured to be here today and I want to thank you for the very warm reception you have extended to my wife and myself.  

This Institution is a famous one established by one of the extraordinary personalities of modern time, Thiru Avinashalingam.  His story is a uplifting and inspiring one.  He has set up this Institution, inspired by Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Swami Vivkananda.  Inspired by their teachings, he went into public life, spiritualising it as Shri C.  Subramaniam has just mentioned.  He established various educational institutions and reformed the entire educational system of Tamilnadu as the first Minister of Education of Madras after independence.  As has been said he has been a great freedom fighter. 

The phrase freedom fighter has become so common so that one does not understand what is behind this act of being a freedom fighter.  It involved great courage, audacity, great sacrifice of ones personal interest and service to the nation.  It is this great man who is the presiding deity of this great institution.  I must also mention your Vice-Chancellor, Dr.  Rajammal Devadas who has built up this institution with the heart and touch of a woman and the strength of a man.  It is she, who has raised this institution to be a Deemed University.  Some deemed universities are often more real universities.  I must congratulate on this occasion her not just for the various awards she has received and she is going to receive for her educational contribution, social work and the literacy work.  I think this University can be proud of such a Vice-Chancellor.  

I must also mention the inspiration that Shri C.  Subramaniam has constantly given to this institution carrying out the dream of its founder. Standing before this audience.  I cannot but say a few words about our education, particularly about the education of a woman.  Dr.  Kulandai Swamy mentioned in his address that how the modern concept is that of taking literacy to the people rather than the people coming to the schools for learning.  It is astounding.  This is almost a century old concept because Swami Vivekananada had said this nearly 100 years ago.  He once said that in India people are so poor that boys would not go to schools even if you set up schools in every corner of India. 

Then he also said that if the mountain should not come to the Mohammed, the Mohammed should go to the mountain, that literacy should be taken to poor students all over India.  I was astounded when I read this in his writings because this is what our enlightened educationists and our Education Ministries have been saying and trying to do recently.  I have seen it practised in a country I visited some years ago, in Cuba where they had a crash programme for literacy.  They managed to make literate the entire nation, may be a small nation, within one year.  What they did is that they closed schools and colleges for a year and sent every student and teacher to factories, fields even to the fishing tawlers on the sea and on the rivers to teach students literacy.  This is a new concept.  As I said it is not so new because such a modern mind as that of Swami Vivekananda had seen this method as the only practical one for India.  Swamiji as has been said attached great importance to education. 

One of the reasons, he said, for the downfall of India was the monopolising of education in the hands of a few people and denying it to the descendants of Gods and sages of this country. He placed particular emphasis for women's education.  We have had this emphasis being placed constantly on women's education by our leaders.  You are aware that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had attached immense importance to this. He went to the extent of saying that the status of the society is dependent on the status of the women in that society.  He also said that the future of India will depend more on women than its men.  He remarked that whenever he entrusted a job to be done to a woman whether it is in India or abroad, she did it more efficiently and more gracefully than the menfolk did.

  I think this is becoming very obvious today.  In the educational institutions, we find that first classes are often won by girl students.  Even yesterday I was at the new university at Tirunveli and I found that the majority of people who got degrees were actually girl studnets.  This is a new revolution that is taking place in our country.  But this revolution is taking place not in an explosive or in an ungainly manner.  It is taking place as it should be a revolution conerning women, in a very graceful and yet in a very effective manner.  

You are probably all aware of a study which was made nearly 20 years ago by the Centre of Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram by Dr.  K.N. Raj and Dr.  T.N.  Krishnan.  This study came to the conclusion that the main reason for the social development of Kerala, for the control of the population growth in Kerala, for the reduction of infantile mortality in Kerala and for the improvement in the general health of the people was due to the education of women.  It established the point that if in two families of same income level, in one family the mother or wife is educated and in another was not the educated mother gave the more balanced food to the family with the same income and how she have the aspiration to control population and to look after the children better so that you had both infantile mortality and the birth rate reduced.

  Thus the potentiality of women's education is so limitless.  Though this fact was recognised in the Trivandrum study nearly twenty years ago, it has today gone into international usage.  You must have read the human development report of the United Nations Development Agency and also now of the World Bank which has emphasised this point not only of primary education but of primary education of girls being the crucial factor in the welfare of a society.  Therefore, an institution like this is one to be encouraged, to be admired.  

Attended upon all these things are larger problems, the problems of social ills, of social values.  I shall today within the limits of time available to me like to mention only two things.  One is that of the social ills disastrously affecting women the dowry system in this country.  May be it is not sucn an enormous evil in Tamilnadu and the South as it is in the North. May I should talk about it more in the other place, in the boys institution when I go there rather than here.  But women are also responsible sometimes. We know that it is often the mother in law who is a woman who is responsible for a considerable amount of suffering of wives due to dowry or the follow up after the dowry system. 

A hundred years ago, the leaders of our renaissance movement, Rajaram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda and so many great men had worked and thundered against this system.  But is it not ironic that when India is more advanced, more educated we have more of this evil than even at that time.  We have got to consider this matter very seriously indeed.  Somehow we have been romanticising women rather than giving them opportunities or treating them well.  One can quote any amount of Indian literature if one has to prove the very high pedestal on which India had always put their women folk.  I have always been astounding one sanskrit sloka which may be familiar with all of you, idealising women, and it says "................ ............................................"  

Thus nothing would be a more glorious description of a perfect women.  This is so perfect that I feel that there cannot be a women who can combine all these qualities except when she is a brilliant slave.  If one can combine all these qualities in one I think she becomes a very intelligent, lively, perfect slave.  Here is the trick behind the Indian idealism.  It was not only in India.  The Westerns had also glorified women in this way.  There is a very fine saying by a French philosopher and poet Didero who once said that when you write about a women you must dip your pen in the colours of the rainbow, spread the dust on the butterflies wings and with every movement of the pen a pearl should drop.  This is really a wonderful description.  But the actuality of the treatment of women is very different indeed.  

Now, in a educational institution like this and in all educational institutions today we have to face a much larger problem.  That is the problem of tolerance in this country.  Education is for gathering knowledge, for creating a scientific temper, for taking a tolerant compassionate attitude to ones fellow beings.  Today India is almost bloodshot, the eyes of the Indian, to use Gandhiji's phrase used in a different context, are bloodshot with intolerance.  It is here in this field that an educational institution has to work hard in a atmosphere like this to keep the lamp of tolerance alight and to resist the dark forces which are threatening our country.  

Religion is being interpretted in the narrowest way possible.  We know the Hindu religion.  Its distinctive quality has been its universalism, its cosmopolitanism and its tolerance.  Now we talk about blind faith.  You do not have to argue, prove something is right.  Great leaders are telling that it is enough if you believe it is so.  What is important is faith.  This is not what neither our Upanishads nor Swami Vivekananda, nor Gandhiji, nor all our leaders, all our sages have said.  It is not that we should accept anything in faith but try to subject it to reason and combine reason in faith. 

The important mission of education is this in our own time.  The best way to accomplish this mission is through service.  The work of this University relates a great deal, almost exclusively apart from its general education, to rural upliftment, to extension work and service to the people.  I think it is by holding on to this concept of education and of an educational institution not as an isolated ivory tower but an institution which is immersed in the problems and in the needs of the people that we can really divert the fanatical madness that is abroad in India to a constructive channel.  As Vivekananda, Gandhiji, all have tried to do.  You reach a goal, may be a political goal by serving the people, by concentrating the energies of the people for alleviating poverty, for ministering to the needs of the masses of this country.  I am happy that this University is involved in this larger role of education.  

I want to congratulate you all and wish you all success in this noble work in which you are involved.  Thank you very much.

Thank you