Friday 14 February 2014

St. Mary's School (ICSE) hosts Sports Extravaganza 2014




St. Mary’s School (ICSE), Mazagaon

proudly hosts

SPORTS EXTRAVAGANZA 2014

to Celebrate the 150th Year of its Founding

on Saturday, February 15, 2014



Chief Guest for the Event:            Adille J. Sumariwalla
                                                  - Arjuna Award Winner (from President of India)

                                                  - Represented India in Olympics
                                                  - Winner 22 National Gold Medals in Athletics
                                                  


Guests of Honour for the Event:   Ajay Apte 

                                                   - Represented India in Water Polo in Asian Games
                                                   - International Water Polo Refree
                                                   - Asst. Sports Officer of WR

                                                 Sajid Dar

                                                 - Head Coach Under 17 Indian Football Team
                                                 - Head Coach AIFF Regional Academy in Mumbai

                                                 Noel Pinto

                                                 - Representing India in World Junior Table Tennis                                                                Tournament to be held in Russia
                                                 - Winner of Gold Medal at National Championship                                                                Table Tennis Tournament

TENTATIVE DAY’S SCHEDULE:

Registrations for Football:            08:30 a.m.
First Football Match:                  09:00 a.m.
Registrations for Table Chess:       09:15 a. m.
Registrations for Table Tennis:     10:30 a. m.
Prize Distribution:                        04:30 p.m.


EVENT DETAILS:


FIRST EVENT:

FOOTBALL FIESTA

Basic Guidelines:

· 7 a side on Knock Out Basis but the team will comprise a maximum of 10 Students
· 3 Categories U-10, U-12, U-14 years
· Rules" NO offside and no Throw in allowed when ball goes outside, it will be a Kick in
· Players will wear their respective School Uniforms
· Duration of the Match will be 20 Minutes and a Halftime of 3 Minutes



SECOND EVENT:

ST. MARY’S INVITATIONAL CHESS TOURNAMENT

Basic Guidelines:

· Tournament is open to all students from Classes 4 to 9
· Students will participate in 3 age groups
         o U-10 [born on or after 1.10.2004]
         o U-12 [born on or after 1.10.2002]
         o U-14 [born on or after 1.10.2000]
· The Tournament will be played on a SWISS LEAGUE basis.
· A School can enter a Minimum of 2 students per age group.
· 2 Championship trophies, 3 Merit certificates and Medals is each group with a Participation Certificate.



THIRD EVENT:

ST. MARY’S INVITATIONAL TABLE TENNIS TOURNAMENT

Basic Guidelines:

· Each School will send a maximum of 2 entries in each of the categories; Sub Juniors, Juniors and Midgets Categories. [U10-, U-12, U-14]
· Each Match up to the Quarter Final will be best of 5, 11 Points each and from QF onwards a Best of 7 games, 11 points each.
· Seedings to be given by the Technical Committee

Friday 7 February 2014

St. Mary's School (ICSE) - 150 Year Book, Limited Edition


The ‘150 Year Book’ – A Collectors Edition will be PRE-SOLD at the Alumni Conclave on Saturday, February 8, 2014. Chronicling history, sports, academics, teachers, Jesuits and trivia since 1864, Limited Edition. Book your copy in advance for Rs.3000. Proceeds from the sale will go to school. Card swipe machines available.



Tuesday 28 January 2014

Art Workshop for the Underprivileged Children on Saturday, Feb 1st, 2014
















St. Mary's School (ICSE) influences futures through Education with Art
Makes education fun for underprivileged children by organizing an ART WORKSHOP
 Saturday, February 1st, 2014

Mumbai, January 28, 2013: Mumbai's distinguished St. Mary’s School (ICSE), Mazagaon, will host an Art Workshop for underprivileged kids on Saturday, February 1st, 2014 at its Senior Assembly Hall. The motto of the event is "Influencing Futures...through Art & Education".

Renowned celebrity artist, Arzan Khambatta will kick start the workshop. He is looking forward to enthrall the audience wielding his paintbrush with the usual mastery that is his wont and in the process and infusing into the participating kids the “Joy of Art”. This event will be organized in partnership with the VAMA Foundation, a premier social welfare group focused on providing education, developing skills and empowering children for life. The foundation works closely with schools in the slum areas. The workshop will host around 90 kids gathered from multiple catchment areas in the city extending from Byculla to Chembur to Kurla to Ghatkopar and including the kids of the Class IV employees of the school. The selection of these kids from varied catchment areas and broad geographical dispersion is done in such a way as to maximize the impact of this social initiative.

This full-day workshop will involve the kids by having them paint umbrellas with fluorescent colors. These umbrellas would carry the logos of the School and the sponsor and will belong to the participants along with the "art gift hamper" that the kids can carry back with them, to their homes. St Mary's School and the VAMA Foundation believe that these kids would transmit the joy and educational impact of this workshop. The attendee children will also be served breakfast and lunch during this workshop.

Such Social Outreach programs are part of the School’s endeavor to make education more inclusive and participative in society. Over the course of the year, the school would consciously reach out and meaningfully influence the lives of as many underprivileged kids as possible. Our dear Principal, Rev. Fr. Kenneth Misquitta is committed to do the fullest to  meaningfully impact as many futures as possible. Providing underprivileged kids the perspective and opportunities to aspire for and experience  a “well rounded” education is the focus of the School's 150th year commemoration.

This event promises to be a spectacle with the umbrellas assembled in various patterns. St. Mary's School's students, staff and parents will truly witness these kids take center-stage and add color to its 150th year celebration.


Friday 24 January 2014

Alumni Conclave 2014 Saturday, February 8, 2014

#smsac2014
On this historic 150th year of your school's founding and as part of the 150th year initiatives, St. Mary's School (ICSE) & St. Mary's Alumni Association invites all you Marians to the Annual Dinner on Saturday, February 8, 2014. Please find below details on the Conclave and details on locations for getting your passes. Look forward to seeing you'll there....MARY, MARY, MARY....ISC!!



Tuesday 14 January 2014

EVENT: SONGS FOR ALL AGES on Sunday, February 9, 2014 #smsac2014

#smsac2014 The February month is round the corner and it's time for two events that you Marians can participate. This one is open for all, Alumni, Marians, parents of Marians and their friends. So go and book your passes as there is a limited seating available. Alumnus Alfred promises to enthrall the audience along with his popular band, The Stop-Gaps. Nostalgia will fill the air with popular western and Indian songs from 1950's to the present times. This is part of the 150th Year Celebration initiatives of the school. Hope to see you'll in big numbers.

Places and people from where/whom you can pick up the passes: 

1. St. Mary's School from 9 am to 4 pm Contact No.: 2377-8264
2. Rhythm House (Kala Ghoda) from 10 am to 6:30 pm Contact No.: 4322-2701
3. Robert Lawrence, for Bandra area, call 9821214141 or 9892904040
4. Eugene Peres: call 9892592458
5. Shalimar Hotel (Kemps Corner)
6. Indigo Deli outlets at Colaba, Palladium Mall & Bandra




Poster courtesy: Alumni Alfred J. D'Souza & Eugene Peres

Wednesday 8 January 2014

THE STELLER FAMILY – STORIES FROM 1930’s & 1940’s #smsac2014

CHAPTER 1: Maxine Iona Taylor Steller (Married to St. Mary's oldest Alumnus around, Fred Steller) #smsac2014


Maxine & Fred Steller in 1990's
With this post we start a series of blog posts on the Steller family. The Steller family has a long connection of over 112 years with St. Mary’s School. Mr. Charles Steller was admitted to St. Mary’s School sometime in 1900. During his schooling years he joined the school band and later was part of a popular band in Bombay called the ‘Karl Starr and his band’ which also performed at various school functions on the school grounds (There is a mention of the same in an article in the 1938 school magazine). All his four sons (Anthony (deceased), Frederick, John and Wilfrid also attended St. Mary’s School at Mazagaon, Mumbai. Fred, John & Wilfrid Steller and Fred’s classmate Rev. Fr. Richard Lane-Smith (you can read more about Father Lane-Smith from our previous Blog of October 1st, 2013 (Blog post link: http://bit.ly/1aFjEc9); all were part of St. Mary’s School’s famous band.

St. Mary's School Band Pic from 1946-47

John later migrated to Australia like his brothers and went on to become a world renowned performer in the music industry, but more on all that in our later chapters on the Steller Family.

Through this series, we not only try to bring alive the nostalgia of an era of Bombay life long gone by, but also of life at St. Mary’s during the 1930’s and 1940’s, a time that arguably formed the golden years of St. Mary’s School.

We start this series with Maxine Iona Taylor Steller, the person who not only, so kindly, has been a liaison between Fred and his brothers and us but who also put us in touch with their batch mate Rev. Father Lane-Smith who currently resides in Mumbai. Maxine is 83 and currently resides in Sydney, Australia with her husband Fred Steller (Fred, who is possibly our oldest Marian Alumnus out of India or within India for that matter. He is 88 years old and studied at St. Mary’s during 1933-44, which makes him the oldest Alumni around. Read more about his life at the school in the 1930’s and 1940’s in the next chapter of this blog post series).
What follows is an excerpt from ‘Maxine Steller’s Bombay’ a post from Naresh Fernandes’ brilliant, nostalgic, evocative and must read Blog ‘TajMahal Foxtrot’ http://www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com/?p=1672  which beautifully recaptures the magical era of Jazz Music in Bombay. The passage reproduced below are Maxine’s own words.



Maxine Iona Taylor Steller in 1946
 Maxine Steller’s Bombay

I was born in the Motlibhai Hospital in Bombay, India on the 23rd October 1930 and baptised Maxine Iona Taylor at St.Anne’s Catholic Church, Mazagaon (In whose compound resides the St. Mary’s School).
In 1938, I joined my brothers at Christ Church High School and was placed in Standard 2 with Miss Penner as my class teacher.  Previously, I had attended a private kindergarten and to have so many teachers and children milling around was very exciting.
The dining room attached to our school was huge and the tables very large.  There would be a table reserved for each family and the family ‘bearer’ would serve a hot meal every lunchtime, set out on a clean tablecloth with cutlery from home.  Chemun would carry the meal in a ‘tiffin carrier’ and lunchtimes would always be noisy and fun.  When one thinks back, we really used to eat far too much considering the heat and our sedentary lives.  Most people would have porridge, eggs and toast for breakfast, then morning tea (elevenses), then a hot lunch of curry, dhal and rice, then afternoon tea, then dinner at about 8.30pm which was an English meal of soup, main course and pudding.
Wages were paid once a month in India, and my Mother would go monthly to Crawford Market to buy sugar, flour, rice and all the other ingredients that didn’t need to be fresh.   She’d hire a coolie with a huge basket on his head to carry her purchases back to the gharry (horse and carriage). It was most important to bargain for everything as the shopkeepers added extra on to the price and expected it.  If you didn’t, you were considered ‘weak’ and lost face.  Crawford Market is in the centre of the city. There are beautiful carvings over the doors of the massive stone building which were done by Rudyard Kipling’s father, who was a famous architect.


Maxine & Fred Steller in 1970's
I remember when we were on the netball field at school one afternoon, there was a huge boom, and window panes were shattered.  It was April 14th 1944 and the SS Fort Stikine carrying tons of explosives, gold bars, bales of cotton, drums of oil, scrap iron, rice and resin blew up in Bombay Docks.  Her berth in Victoria Dock was ringed by 24 other vessels and when she blew up she devastated 300 acres of Bombay Docks and reduced twelve ships to scrap iron.  White-hot metal from the ship’s plates fell on Bombay a mile from the ship and a million pounds of gold disintegrated. 
During the war an English entertainment group called ENSA started visiting hospitals and giving concerts for the troops and they asked me to join them.  They’d seat me on a piano and tell me to sing. From 1938, I sang regularly for Aunty Hilda’s Children’s Hour on All India Radio, and I can remember singing Over The Rainbow at the Bombay Town Hall when the movie Wizard of Oz first came out.  I must have been about ten years old.


Maxine Steller singing with Fred and Larry Steller of the 
Broadway Boys band..................Picture from 1940's
In 1945 the campaign for Independence had been stepped up and Anglo-Indians (born of British or European parents in India) started thinking of where to go when they were asked to quit India.  A Catholic priest (Father Dalton of St Mary’s School, Mazagaon) lobbied for the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.  He started the Britasian Club and put on shows encouraging young people to attend.  He hired a band called the Broadway Boys, seven talented young musicians led by Fred Steller, who were very popular.  One day Father Dalton got in touch with my father and asked him if I would sing at the next show.  I said I would but needed a rehearsal with the pianist.  Shortly afterwards, Fred Steller and his pianist, Billy Cooper, turned up at our house and my association with the Broadway Boys and the Steller family began. 

Friday 27 December 2013

First Christmas Celebration of St. Marys' School in 1886!

It was towards the end of December 1886. Rev. Father Fisher, Rector of St. Mary's School then known as St. Mary's College graced with his presence the first family Christmas celebration in St. Mary's. It has been recorded in the House diary as follows:

 "This evening our boys had a regular Christmas Tree. Father Schafer had made the whole arrangement. A regular tree had been erected in the orphanage refectory. It was most beautifully decorated with many sweets and toys and lights. The boys first got a splendid supper (tea, cakes, fruits, sweets without stint, etc.). Then a raffle was arranged, and all the nice things were impartially distributed as drawn by lot. Christmas hymns were sung. All the Fathers were present, and young and old, Fathers and boys, were highly pleased."

The Diarist further adds: "This should be done every year. The house supplied the cakes and most of the fruit, and should continue to do the same in the future."