Lions Council of India presents its third national awards

The Lions Council of India presented its national awards in Chennai, the third year it has done so, and the point of these honours is that they go to people who are not Lions at all. The Council uses them to thank individuals and organisations outside its own ranks who have built a record of community service, and Arvinder Pal Singh, the international first vice president of Lions Clubs International, framed the evening as the organisation returning some of the gratitude it usually receives.

This year’s list ran to fifteen names, a mix of public-service figures and industrialists from across the country:

• Kiran Karnik, a former NASSCOM president and ISRO veteran who now sits on the RBI board
• D.R. Mehta, former chairman of SEBI
• Dr P. Chandrasekhar, vice chancellor of NTR University of Health Sciences
• Ajay Patel, chairman of the Indian Red Cross Society in Gujarat
• Manisha Saboo, vice president of the Infosys Foundation
• the Seva Foundation, received by Kuldeep Singh
• Prahlad Rai Agarwal, chairman of Rupa
• Sajjan Bhajanka, Padma Shri awardee and chairman of Century Plyboards
• Vishesh Chandiok, chairman of Grant Thornton
• Sajjan Bansal, chairman of Skipper Limited
• Brijmohan Beriwal, chairman of the SRMB Group
• Deepak Goel of Lumino Industries
• M.M. Singhi, founder of Singhi and Co
• Rampal Soni, chairman of the Sangram Group in Bhilwara
• Alokananda Roy, founder of Touch World Love Therapy

Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim was the chief guest. The body behind the evening is not a small one: Lions Clubs International is the largest service-club network in the world, with more than 1.4 million members in over 200 countries, and India alone accounts for upwards of 8,500 clubs and around 290,000 members. Their work in the country adds up to 175 eye hospitals, 50 blood banks, 55 dialysis centres, more than 200 schools, daily meals, scholarships and vaccination drives, a slate the organisation values at over 400 crore rupees a year.

The most striking part of the programme was not an award at all. Alokananda Roy, the Kolkata dancer and one of the honourees, staged a dance drama titled Harmony through Diversity, performed by prison inmates. Roy has spent years using dance and what she calls love therapy with marginalised groups, prisoners among them, as a way to rebuild empathy, self-worth and a route back into ordinary life, and the performance put that work on its feet in front of the room rather than describing it from a podium.