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Gold Medal for a Sikkim Girl at Christ College, Bangalore

GANGTOK, June 8: An average girl from TNA who passed out with 63 percent to join Mount Carmel College in Bangalore finally crowned her academic pursuit with a gold medal from Christ College (now Christ University), Bangalore.
Tilotama Pradhan, a Sikkim girl, topped the university in the Master of Arts in Sociology programme. She has now come home at Tadong to stay with her family and reflect on her future plan.
Tilotama, brimming with unmistakable passion for studies hopes to join a good university to do an M.Sc. in sociological research for a year before pursuing a full-fledged Ph. D. “I have applied in some universities abroad and Southampton University and Leicester University, both in the UK, have sent me an invitation to join” she says. However, the huge financial constraints hover over the biggest dream of her life. “I have all my hopes pinned on the state government” she says with a serious look on her face, “Since our Chief Minister himself is a great education enthusiast and has a visionary approach, I kind of rationalize my otherwise high hopes of making my dream come true.”
Till she completed her graduation, Tilotama was not sure about her goal. She felt torn between her divided interests in Sociology and Psychology. “My mom helped me finally deicide what I should do in my Masters” she said as she recalled that significant moment of her life, “I chose Sociology”. All of sudden, she kind of fell in love with the subject and her ideas about society began to undergo a radical shift. “I tell you there is so much more to Sociology than what people generally perceive” she says, “I began to enjoy studying every aspect of it, be it Medicinal Sociology, Political Sociology, Methodology of Social Sciences, Diaspora, Demography Sociology of Education…the fascination about sociology only grew bigger”
As an avid student of sociology, Tilotama learnt to ask “why” about any issue she faced and to keenly examine it until she found a satisfactory answer. “It helped me improve my critical thinking by several notches”. She then hastily adds, “Having said that, I have to be careful not to be too judgmental about people”. She believes that we must learn to take our thinking to a logical conclusion.
Her celebratory experience with Sociology was not without initial hiccups though. Reading the original texts of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault and Levi-Strauss was never fun. If it were not for the hearty support of her professors, she would have quit reading them and thus missed out on the invaluable lessons from the originality of the theory. “I knew it is pointless to do a Masters without reading the original text of the theory we learn” she says.
She wants to dedicate her gold medal to her mother. What better gift for a mother who herself dedicated her entire life to the cause of education. Her mother Mrs. M.R. Mukhia is the principal at Tadong Sr. Sec. School.
She feels proud to be a Sikkimese and desires to contribute to her state in the future. She also aspires to work for the UN one day. She feels there is a media activist developing in her. As well, she plans to involve herself in making a film at some stage of her life on a Sikkim specific native and indigenous theme.
She feels moved by the paradoxical laid back attitude of the Sikkimese youth who have stiff competition against their vibrant and proactive counterparts in the rest of India. For now, she sees studying as the easiest way to tackle the problems ahead of all of us.
Passionate about reading books, she is reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri presently. She banks on her determination and her mother. She is pretty unpredictable but she thinks it is fine to be “mysterious” at times.

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