Sreeleela hands out Rs 28L scholarships at Chennais Amirta

Sreeleela’s brand-ambassador stop at Chennais Amirta Aviation College on Saturday turned into a scholarship handover, with the institution’s chairman M. Boomeenaathaan distributing Rs 28,45,250 worth of grants to a hundred-plus students from the stage Sreeleela was on. The actor toured the campus’s airline gate-pass simulation areas, miniature airport mock-up and engine-training setup before the cheque ceremony, and singled out the metric that mattered most to her on the way out.

The college’s pitch to her, and to its prospective students, leans on a recent AirAsia recruitment drive that picked 170 students for international internships, and on the headline statistic that some students earn up to Rs 35,000 a month during their training period through part-time international work. Sreeleela, most recently in Sivakarthikeyan’s Parasakthi as her Tamil debut, called that earnings figure the most genuinely useful number she had heard at any campus visit.

The visit landed on the Mother’s Day weekend, and an event programme that already had a five-country food spread, a student-led art display, and an open Q&A shifted register when Sreeleela began speaking about her mother. She kept the stage soft for several minutes, recalling her mother’s role in shaping both her life and her career, before fielding the student questions that had been queued up. Most of them were about fitness, food and lifestyle, with a smaller share asking about her career trajectory. The college’s own exit line was that 31,651 students have been placed across countries to date.