Staged in grand style on October 13-14 in New Delhi’s J.W. Marriott Hotel, the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2023-24 Awards Nite — proclaimed as the greatest education felicitation and celebrations show on earth — has come and gone. The two-day event attracted over 2,000 leaders (and their uninvited guests who blew the budget) from 1,200 schools across the country. It required unprecedented logistics, hotel bookings, trophy design and certificates printing, provision of free-of-charge meals and beverages on an enormous scale. And although the great majority of award winners complimented your editors for the conduct of a smooth and time-bound event, along with the bouquets there were some brickbats.

For one, given the logistics of transporting and arranging an estimated 1,400 trophies, certificates and other encomiums from Mumbai to Delhi, and lining up trophies backstage to align with the order in which they were announced on stage, required high order event management skills. This delicate synchronization was often disturbed by several awardees whose nears and dears suddenly suffered near-fatal heart-attacks and other illnesses which necessitated out-of-turn awards presentation causing disruption. As a result some school leaders were not awarded their trophies in time and went away sorrowful, although they were presented interim facsimile/dummy trophies and certificates for all-important photo-ops. To those who went away sorrowful, mea culpa.

Moreover for your editors the pain of being on-stage to present over 1400 awards was compounded by a lecture delivered by a autocrat grey eminence who chose the occasion to sermonise at length that one of our several associates is not PLU (people like us) and this pioneer publication is insufficiently “transformative”. He was backed up by a shrill chorister who opined that EW had become “too commercial”. Such are the crosses that one has to bear even when we felicitate, celebrate and award the country’s best school leaders.

Also read: EW India School Rankings 2022-23 Awards