Lapierre opens school for children

Bishnupur, West Bengal, Mar 1 (UNI) The power of an altruist French author and the spirit of a Holywood diva blended together to kindle the flames of knowledge in rural Bengal.

Dominique Lapierre opened a new school--'Bodhadaya Vidhya Mandir'--at Lakshmikantapur under Bishnupur Block-I after another one he helped construct was swept away in floods last month.

''I was in Paris when I got a call from here. 'Dominique Dada the school is gone'. Somebody had opened the dykes in Bihar and water had swept away the school I had opened a few months back,'' the author of 'City of Joy' told UNI yesterday.

''I was distraught. There was mud upto five metres high. Only the school board was visible. I did not know how to get money to reconstruct the school and shared my pain with my designer friend Hubert de Givenchy. He offered me a black dress Audrey Hepburn had worn and the rest is history,'' the celebrated author recounts.

The black dress that she wore as the naive, eccentric socialite Holly Golightly in the masterpiece 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' is now the foundation of the future of hundreds of children in rural Bengal. One school was inaugurated yesterday and 14 more will follow across the state.

When Lapierre reached the village he was greeted by hundreds of children shouting 'Dominique Dada' even as 'Tazz Band Party' churned out patriotic songs and a lone village microphone blurted out a welcome message in broken English and Bengali dialect. It was like a village fair in motion as the man and his wife along with an entourage of 20 odd French and German friends and a host of mediamen came down the village path.

People lined the narrow mud-mortar path decorated with lifesize cutouts of Audrey Hepburn. He posed in front of a few and the village girls stood thronging other posters and cutouts making the iconic actress come alive as one of the faces in the crowd.

''What is very special about this education centre is that I have financed its construction thanks to the sale of the iconic evening gown,'' said Lapierre.

Givenchy thought the dress would fetch about 10,000 US dollars.

Lapierre took the dress to Christies' Auction House in London and sold it for 825,000 US Dollars last December. The money was enough to repair the old schools and build several others.

''At first I was thinking of one village school, maybe two and now I am thinking of 15,'' he said paying homage to Hepburn.

There could not have been a more befitting tribute for the actress who dedicated the later part of her life as UNICEF ambassador to helping destitute children in Africa, South America and Bangladesh.

Soon after he headed for Keoradanga village in the same block where he inaugurated the Lapierre Centre of Excellence for the Disabled, Asha Bhavan Centre. While inaugurating it he lauded the government and the people for auguring remarkable growth in West Bengal.

''The future of Bengal and India as it is with anywhere else in the world is in education. I will help you in the small way I can,'' he promised.

''Unless they are educated they cannot come out of the hands of the local mafia who often rule them,'' he said in his speech in Bengali.

He was presented a citation by Keoradanga Gram Panchayat Pradhan Ranjan Mondal.

''I am anguished to see the handicapped people left out of the development process. I urge the government for a more proactive role in this regard,'' Lapierre said.

Lapierre's other projects include Community Based rehabilitation centres and four medical boats SISH that run in Sunderbans areas.

Since 1982, Lapierre has shared his royalties with the on-profit City of Joy Foundation, which provides aid to slum children in Kolkata and other parts of West Bengal.

The royalties from his book 'Five Past Midnight in Bhopal' went to the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal which provides free medical treatment to the victims of the 1984 Union Carbide Bhopal disaster.

The Lapierres have been working in rural Bengal for 25 years funding treatment for leprosy, cholera and tuberculosis. They have set up four hospital boats to provide medical care to 54 remote islands of the Sundarbans.

UNI