Nihar Samantra
Software entrepreneur, Bangalore
With hard work, innovative acumen and farsightedness, Dr Jagannath Patnaik has transformed many institutions, universities and schools into epitomes of nation building and character building, a beacon amidst an ocean of backwardness. He has been the driving force behind many a move. For the last twenty-five years, and indeed his whole life, the benefits that he has brought to, and the social and economic changes that he has wrought in certain parts of country have been stupendous.
Dr Patnaaik is spearheading a movement of sorts to weed out the age-old social stigmas of illiteracy, untouchability, castes, communalism, and above all, the wide-spread and deeprooted poverty. He knows for sure, the key to all this is education; the education, which is in consonance with the needs and the aspirations of India’s large rurality; the education, which acts as a catalyst to an all-out human development. A quintessence of altruism and an amalgam of many rare qualities, Dr Patnaaik is a poet, writer and motivator of substance, and his communicative skill makes him a vanguard of rural masses among whom he has been assiduously working. An essential element in Dr Patnaaik’s personal magnetism is his consummate sincerity and singleness of purpose, which has earned him internal satisfaction and external success. He also has inveterate and indomitable respect for India’s great culture and ethos, with no less discernment for the demands of the modern times, thus a meaningful and pragmatic matrix in the contemporary milieu. He has always held service to humanity to be his primary creed, no matter what the other’s position or religions.
