Far from the madding crowd

In West Bengal's Birbhum district, 500 children stand out for their 'unconventional' education

He was all of 33 when his friends, acquaintances, colleagues and the wider circle of people around him thought he’d taken leave of his senses. And who really could blame them ?

The year was 2009. An IIT-Kharagpur engineer and IIM-Ahmedabad MBA, Arghya Banerjee lived in Chennai with his wife and four-year-old daughter, worked at Irevna — a Standard and Poor’s equity research outsourcing company that later got acquired by Crisil — had built a career and reputation in his chosen field and had some savings to get by. 

That’s when Banerjee decided to chuck it all, return to his