Real life 'Rancho' screens cult films for his school students

In a real life portrayal of Ranchoddas 'Rancho' Shamaldas Chanchad of '3 Idiots', a former Co-Head of a leading CRISIL-affiliated equity research outsourcing house, affliated to CRISIL has quit his cushy job to set up his own educational institute without subject boundaries.
"The job at Irevna, the CRISIL affiliate, was challenging enough and I was enjoying it but in the back of mind I dreamt of an institution where story books, newspapers, magazines, friends and educational tour will be the primary sources of acquiring knowledge for the children," Arghya Banerjee, founder of Levelfield told PTI here.
Aimed at devising the module of 'learning with understanding', the Suri-based schoool has 300 students from LKG to Class VI where 'Richard Attenborough's 'Gandhi' and Roman Polanski's 'The Pianist' are screened besides 'Goopey Gyne Bagha Byne' and '3 Idiots' to expose the children to the rich cinematic tradition of the world and inculcate sense of aesthetics among them.

While Rancho started his initiative in the verdant Ladakh away from the fictional Imperial College, Banerjee decided to head back to a rural pocket known for its ethnicity.
While they read 20-25 story books to learn language, there is also an emphasis on strategy games like chess and Japanese strategy games of Go and Gomoku and our faculty do not emphasis on homework, Banerjee said.
"Me and my wife had spent the last three years to create a huge library of problems that test application orientation and higher-order thinking and and the case study modules are used to address a child's problems and writing is an obsolete skill," he said.

The school, set up in 2010 pouring his own life's savings and a bit of bank finance, won the prestigious Sankalp Awards, for impact enterprise in education.