hero. The frail, down-to-earth geo-scientist-turned-social worker and
educator wants to ensure that children in his backwater Uttar Pradesh
village have easy access to higher education.
Misra, however, is a name to reckon with in the global community of
geologists for having discovered 565-million-year-old fossils, the
Ediacaran Fauna, off the Canadian coast - one of the oldest records of
multi-cellular life on earth
belonging to the pre-Cambrian geological period.
As a boy, Misra had to walk 24 km every day to school and back to his
village Deora, 40 km from Lucknow in central Uttar Pradesh. The memory
lingered throughout his years abroad till one day he decided to give
up his flourishing career as a geologist in the US to build a school
for children in his village, which had not changed much since he left.
There was no school in Deora till he decided to build one.
A book "Dream Chasing" (Roli Book) that he narrated to son Neelesh
Misra, tells the story of the Geo-scientist's journey to recognition
in the US from the remote village in Uttar Pradesh, his struggle to
find space in the American scientific community and his return to the
roots to serve his "underprivileged village".
"For me primary education was a problem. My school was 12 km from home
and I had to walk 24 km every day to the school and back. I could not
think of geology or any kind of higher education while in the village
school. Once I completed my senior primary education, I moved to
Lucknow with great difficulty," Misra said.
"Geology was accidental. After I completed Class 12, geology was one
of the options in my bachelor's degree as most of my friends opted for
the subject. I took up physics, math and geology," he said.
It was after graduation that Misra discovered his liking for geology
and that was the subject he chose for his master's.
"I got a job in ONGC and was posted in Gujarat and Assam. My friends
were applying for scholarship in foreign universities and I too
applied. I was accepted by the Memorial University in Newfoundland,"
the former Geo-scientist said.
"But I always wanted to be a teacher," he recalled. He taught briefly
at the Kanyakubj Degree College in Lucknow. But that part of his
ambition had to wait.
Misra went to Newfoundland in 1964.
He was assigned to work in the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland by his
Swiss professor W.D. Brueckner.
"It was a remote area in the southern part of Newfoundland. No
Canadian student would go there," Misra remembered.
The scientist began to map the coast - a 25 km of rocky landscape.
Misra recalled: "It was in June 1967. One afternoon, while mapping the
area, I was sitting on a rock on the west Atlantic coast. I noticed
some ancient impressions on the rock surface.
"There could be no fossils in the area, so I looked closely. It was
baffling. The impressions were of plants and leaves. The rocks were
once in deep ocean."
The scientist knew he was on to something big.
Misra guessed they were more than 500 million years old, caused by
years of deposition of sediments.
Next morning, he was back to the spot armed with a camera.
"There were hundreds and thousands of big and small impressions of
leaf life. I sketched them as meticulously as I could, took several
photographs and collected four specimens," he said.
The area was declared an ecological park after Misra's discovery.
But credit for the discovery of the only "Ediacaran fauna" in north
America eluded him when his senior (who had replaced W.D. Brueckner at
the department) published a paper claiming that it was a joint find by
the Memorial University students and teachers".
"Some of the facts in the paper were wrong," Misra insisted.
He had to set the story right. Soon after, he went to Ottawa for a
doctorate "and re-connected with 10 Indian friends, who were thinking
of India".
"I was restless. I wanted to build a school in my village in India all
my life," he said.
In 1972, Misra returned to India to build the Bharatiya Gramin
Vidayalya from class 1 to Class 8 with wife Nirmala by his side.
The school with 757 students in a village without internet connection,
surrounded by paddy fields, is the lone symbol of hope for the future.
"It is a centre for socio-economic change," Misra said. IANS
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