By Dilip Mukerjea (Best-Selling Author and Innovation Consultant)
Tyrone D’Brass, on Saturday 12th October 2024, was lauded and applauded, with special distinction, by The All-India Anglo-Indian Association, the Stracey “Reach for the Stars” award in recognition of his sterling contributions towards excellence in education, spanning four decades! This is reflective of Tyrone’s indwelling commitment to thinking freely about how to improve the world, in service of the future of humankind, through the hearts and minds of children.
His exemplary leadership in the domain of Education has been impelled by a spiritual appetite directed at meeting the demands of humanity¾undisputed, unparalleled, unbounded, and still being indefatigably explored by him. The award epitomises Tyrone’s irrepressible qualities of thought-leadership, with focus on concepts never before envisioned, engendered, or encountered. His ventures and adventures in service of helping to architect a fully literate world have given birth to titanic transformations in the lives and livelihoods of numerous students. Beyond such immersions, his dedication to helping the disabled, the impoverished, the marginalised, and other afflicted sections of society, with quiet commitment, are evidence of undiminished actions of servant-leadership.
Tyrone’s achievement has made the Past come alive, to serve our Future. His evolution has been sparked by a zealously conceived initial vision to sow seeds of aspiration and inspiration in communities expressing a desperate need for education. And thus, within a crucible accommodating a sparse contingent of children in a rudimentary ambience, a makeshift classroom became the genesis of genius. The initial spark soon became a firebrand in the cause of spreading literacy across Tura, the Garo Hills, and beyond. He operated within a transforming horizon that contoured the possibilities of the day, to bridge the gap between damnation and salvation … advancing lives from one of mere existence, to that of substance.
The preceding decades featured Tyrone’s initial, solitary classroom, metamorphosing, with positive reinforcement, into Sherwood School (Tura), an institution that has kept being swept into a spiral of achievements, a vertical rise to sustaining success.
Having observed Tyrone’s deep dedication to education since first meeting him over a decade ago, I have seen him stand tall, a guardian, an emblem, a nucleus of a statewide efflorescence in this domain. Having met some of his students and teachers, I have recognised in each of them, a wider mind in scope and scale, an alert curiosity, and a keener understanding of the unequalled worth and value of a sterling education.
A salient aspect of Tyrone’s founding consciousness is his belief that actions, not excuses, must be valued, to turn conflicts into cooperation, by moving from apathy into empathy. He sensed early in life that you can hurl all the money you have at a bad idea, but all you will have is a really expensive bad idea. Thus, with the tightest of budgets, complemented by perfect perseverance and indefatigable determination, Tyrone turned mortality into motivation, and architected a school of consistently recognised distinction.
Tyrone’s modus operandi for soul-conscious service in the cause of reaping the full benefits of serving the needs of human literacy, comprise being aware of:
- The quality of our experiences while being immersed in them
- What we are learning in this process
- How close we are advancing towards achieving our goals
These three issues are closely interrelated: when we pay more attention to how we feel as we are doing something, it heightens our sensitivity to the feedback we are receiving. This increased sensitivity helps us to learn more rapidly, with accelerated outcomes, and allows us to adjust our performance to help us achieve our goals. Thus, the more successful we are at achieving what we venture out to achieve, the more we will enjoy what we are doing.
I look forward to being audience to Tyrone’s further successes in the years ahead, to the formative powers of his mind, their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities, for Meghalaya to evolve, through a Learning Revolution, into The Learning Capital of India. I know that whatever Tyrone seeks to give of himself is a part of a much greater power from which he is just a conduit, but one graced by undiminished gifts from Providence.
