Most trusted Name in the NRI media
Serving over 22 millions NRIs worldwide

NRI Rina's extraordinary journey- Interesting Story

NRI, Rina Rescued by makes film-maker, chancellor of
Sunderland University Puttnam proud
Rina became a qualified pharmacist at one of Britain's finest public schools


LORD Puttnam yesterday handed a degree to the adopted daughter he and his wife rescued from an Indian leper colony 12 years ago.The film-maker, who is chancellor of Sunderland University, presented Rina Kumari Puttnam with a 2:1 masters degree in pharmacy.

The Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Local Hero, The Killing Fields and The Mission, and his wife Lady Puttnam, adopted 26-year-old Rina when she was just 14.

NRI, "non-resident indian" Rina, who Lady Puttnam describes as a "shining star", won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Gordonstoun School in Scotland and came to live in the UK with her newly-adoptive parents.
After achieving A-Levels in chemistry, physics and mathematics, Rina enrolled at the University of Sunderland in 2001 on the Masters of Pharmacy degree course.

NRI Rina, who was born in India, came to live with Lord Puttnam and his wife after the two women met in 1994 when Lady Puttnam visited the Little Flower Leprosy Association in India.

The association had been established 10 years earlier by Catholic priest, Brother Christdas, who had worked with Mother Teresa in Bihar, to support leprosy patients and their families by developing education and employment opportunities.
Rina's natural father had been one of his earliest patients.

Lady Puttnam said the association enabled young girls like Rina to get into further education. She added: "Rina's parents were very courageous – they allowed her to go to the local college. It was breaking with tradition and many in the village would no longer talk to them or her." Rina's family in India are proud of their daughter's achievements.

"My family are very happy with me and now all four of my sisters have been properly educated," said Rina.
"My dream is to go on to do medicine so I can go back to India and work there."

Lord Puttnam added: "We could not be more proud of Rina – it's a wonderful achievement and she has thoroughly enjoyed her time as a student in Sunderland.
"She came here and immediately fell in love with the place and it fell in love with her.



Leper colony girl graduates


London, July 12, 2005
Christopher Middleton

The Chancellor of the University of Sunderland, Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, had a special reason to be proud yesterday as he congratulated this year's crop of 3,000 graduates.

The award-winning film producer paused during the ceremony at the city's Stadium of Light to whisper a few words of praise to one particular student - his adopted daughter Rina.

She has graduated with a 2:1 in pharmacy at the university's School of Health, Natural and Social Sciences. Lord Puttnam said he "couldn't be more proud".

"It's a wonderful achievement," he added. "She has an extraordinary combination of vision and determination."

It has been a long journey for Rina, who grew up in a remote leper colony in one of the poorest states in India, before being educated at one of Britain's finest public schools, Gordonstoun in Morayshire, north-east Scotland - alma mater to several members of the Royal Family, including Prince Charles.

Now that she has her degree, she hopes to return to India to help fight the disease that devastated her family.

NRI Rina's extraordinary journey began in 1994, when Lord Puttnam's wife Patsy visited India with Daphne Rae, the wife of the former Westminster School headmaster John Rae.

"I'd been asked by Daphne to be her eyes and ears on a tour of community projects that were being funded by a Laura Ashley charity," said Lady Puttnam.

"One of those projects was the Little Flower Leprosy Mission. I was given the specific task of helping this lovely little girl called Rina to improve her English. To be honest, I've never really encountered anyone like her before; she was like a mini-Concorde, absolutely jet-propelled in the intensity with which she did things.

"She was so keen to learn, she never left my side; she stuck to me like velcro."

For her part, Rina remembers everything about that first meeting.

"It was a very hot sunny day and in front of me was this lady wearing a lovely white blouse - very clean and tidy," she said. "I thought she looked so strict, so forbidding; but when I got close to her, I found she was nothing like that at all."

NRI Rina Kumari was seven when she arrived at the colony with her four sisters and their parents. They had been driven out of their village after her father developed leprosy in his fingers and toes. For Rina, it was a frightening experience.

"We were not used to all the deformity," she says. "We found it very hard to see people not having a nose or feet. My older sister, Mina, was very scared; she didn't want to live alongside all that suffering, so she ran away and found her way back to the village where our grandma lived."

For Rina's father, taking his family to the Little Flower Leprosy Mission at Sunderpore was a last resort; before that, he had been reduced to begging on the streets of Raxaul, a down-at-heel railway town on the Nepalese border.

"Rina is our blossom in the dust," said Father Christdas, an Indian-born Catholic priest who came to help the lepers in Sunderpore 25 years ago, after spending 13 years working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

In that quarter of a century, he has treated some 50,000 leprosy sufferers and built a permanent, self-sufficient community, whose 400 residents no longer have to depend on charity.

After learning to read and write at the little mission school (something neither of her parents can do), Rina was encouraged by Father Christdas to go to boarding school in a nearby town, at the age of eight. Rina and Lady Puttnam quickly struck up a rapport, but after a few days, it was time to bid each other a sad farewell. However, at the last moment, Lady Puttnam got an inkling that the separation might not be permanent.

"I was sitting around waiting for the flight home when I realised Christdas and Daphne were hovering over me and clearly wanting to say something," she said. "They told me that Daphne had been talking to Gordonstoun about a free scholarship place that they were prepared to offer Rina and, that being the case, would I be her mother while she was in the UK?

"I didn't really think about it, to be honest. I just said yes, straight away. That was in February 1994. In May, I was picking her up from Heathrow". For Rina what followed was not so much a crash course in British culture as a head-on collision.

"It wasn't so much the obvious things, like teaching her to use a knife and fork instead of her hands," said Lady Puttnam. "It was her attitudes and instincts that were harder to change.

"For example, we went to the John Lewis children's department to get her some clothes (at 15, Rina was about the same size as a typical English 12-year-old), and when I tried to come in the changing room and see if the vests fitted, she was horrified.

"I said to her: 'Look, darling, you're going to the north of Scotland and you'll need a good vest, so just shut your eyes and let me have a little look'."

Gordonstoun is known as much for its philosophy of a cold bath before breakfast as for its famous former pupils. But Rina was not intimidated by the traditions, said Lady Puttnam. "As for the idea of putting on a swimsuit and jumping into cold water, she just kept saying: 'Why? What is the reason for doing that?'"

Rina said that everything was so strange. "Yet at the same time it was so wonderful. I found myself going on expeditions to the mountains; I found myself on a sailing boat feeling seasick; and playing hockey in the snow."

Before long, her cheerful acceptance of soakings and sub-zero temperatures began to win respect throughout the school.

"No question about it, Rina was a hit right from the start," said Gordonstoun's headmaster, Mark Pyper, who offered her the scholarship, which was donated anonymously.

"As I recall, she was out playing hockey before she had even got used to wearing shoes. And when she went off on an expedition to the Cairngorms, her rucksack was bigger than she was."

Despite being several clothes sizes smaller than her contemporaries, and despite the difference in her economic circumstances (the school fees are £21,000 per year), Rina said she never felt left out.

"With 35 different nationalities here, people are expected to have a fairly broad outlook," says Mr Pyper. "From our point of view, one of the most fascinating things to see was how Rina, who is from what's perceived to be the lowest level of the Indian social system, became great friends with a couple of Indian girls from a very high-caste background.

"Back home, they probably couldn't have shared the same street - yet here they shared the same corridor."

It wasn't all plain sailing, though. Early on, it became clear that Rina's English wasn't strong enough to get her through her science A-levels. Her scholarship was duly extended from two years to three.

"Right from the start, Rina brought something special to this school," said Jenny Pyper, the head's wife. "She has this incredibly open, charming quality to her. She just says the loveliest things out loud. I remember one evening we were all dressed up for the Leavers' Ball, and she turned to me and said: 'You are so beautiful'.

"At the same time, there's no flannel with her. She has a certain toughness that goes hand in hand with her honesty. Throughout her time here, I never once heard her talk about her past - she was much more interested in the future."

NRI Rina agreed. "Ever since I was eight, I've been away at school," she said. "As a result, my concept of home and family is perhaps a little more vague than other people's. But I call Patsy and David 'mother' and 'father' when I am with them, and I know they will keep me close to them forever. I feel so fortunate that they found me.

"At the same time, of course, I have my own mother and father back in India, and I know they love me, too. That - and all the help that my teachers have given me - gives me the faith to keep straight on the track."

There's no question in Lord Puttnam's mind about the unswerving strength of Rina's determination.

"She's an unstoppable force of nature", he said with a laugh. "I remember saying to her once that she should learn to use a computer keyboard. We bought her a teach-yourself tuition programme, and six weeks later she could touch-type."

So how did Rina end up studying at the university where Lord Puttnam happens to be Chancellor?

"It sounds like nepotism, doesn't it?" he said. "Actually, it was a bit of an accident. Patsy was sitting at a Sunderland home match next to our vice-chancellor, and she asked him if he knew of somewhere that Rina could study pharmacy. To which he replied: 'You know we've got one of the best pharmacy departments in the country, don't you?' "

And that was that. After four (Puttnam-funded) years at Sunderland, Rina, now 26, received her degree from her "father". It was a great moment for Lord Puttnam, in more ways than one.

"I'm incredibly proud of what Rina's achieved - both personally, as a sort of surrogate dad, and in a broader political context with my president-of-Unicef-UK hat on. The great thing about her is that she has this genuine personal ambition, but, like a lot of people in the developing world, she also understands the purpose of that ambition, which is that it should be used for the public good. It's a very Gandhi thing, that combination of self and selflessness. He didn't see the two as mutually exclusive, whereas we in the West tend to think it has to be one or the other.

"On top of all that, Rina is a triumphant example of what we are trying to promote through Unicef, which is to show that educating girls and young women is of overwhelming importance if developing countries are to make progress. In places where female education has been actively encouraged, the benefits to society as a whole have been disproportionately large."

Rina is concentrating not so much on the broader picture, but on the next immediate challenge. Far from being content with three A-Levels and a 2:1 in pharmacy, she is agitating to get into medical school. "To be a qualified pharmacist and to know about healing drugs is wonderful, but to be a doctor who can prescribe those drugs would be the perfect combination," she said.

"So many people in India do not understand that leprosy can be simply cured with drugs - that if you catch the disease early it can take only three months to heal the skin.

"Unfortunately, people are afraid and ashamed. They get patches on their skin and they think it might be something less serious. Or else they hide it under their clothes, and the bacteria might be spreading and starting to damage their nerves, so that if they burn their hand or leg on a fire, they won't feel it.

"That same ignorance was the reason we had to leave our village. People thought my father's leprosy was incurable; to them, it was the same as Aids."

According to Lady Puttnam, now a regular visitor to the Little Flower, Father Christdas has greatly reduced the stigma of leprosy in Bihar - not least through the way in which he successfully treated himself after contracting it. Nevertheless, the disease is still a long way from disappearing in the region.

"The bacteria thrive in the kind of dung-walled houses that people build in northern Bihar," said Lady Puttnam.

"That's why Father Christdas has built these little concrete houses at the mission. His whole approach is a positive one - he insists that people don't allow themselves to be defeated by leprosy, and that even if they do suffer from the disease, they all still contribute to the running of the mission.

"The children do an hour of weaving every day before school, and even the old lady with no hands still makes the chapattis with her stumps."

What's more, some of the Little Flower residents are starting to see a future beyond mere self-sufficiency - if not for themselves, at least for their children (leprosy is not hereditary). And that future - thanks in large part to Rina - is education.

"When Rina's mother and father first sent her away to school, they were rather ostracised by other parents at the mission," said Lady Puttnam.

"It just wasn't the traditional thing, especially for a girl. Now, though, everyone has seen what Rina has accomplished and they want the same for their children."

It is exactly what Father Christdas hoped for when he sent his little "blossom in the dust" across the sea to Scotland.

"I think Rina has a very big role to play in this world of ours," he said. "In time to come, she will make the lives of the broken a little more livable."

If you would like to make a donation to the work of the Little Flower Leprosy Mission, Sunderpore, please send a cheque (made payable to the Little Flower Leprosy Association) to 15 Queensgate Place Mews, London SW7 5BG

Any comments on this article or you have any news: Click here

Disclaimer
NRIinternet.com will put up as many of your comments as possible but we cannot guarantee that all e-mails will be published. We reserve the right to edit comments that are published.


NRI Rina Kumari adopted by film-maker, chancellor of
Sunderland University

LORD Puttnam and his wife rescued from an Indian leper colony 12 years ago.-Rina became a qualified pharmacist