Prithwiraj Misra, 58, passed way on 25 November 2009 after suffering from brain tumor. He taught English and General Science from 1978-1979 in Prep School. Considered one of the new age teachers of his time, was very popular with the children. He went beyond teaching. Students learnt the finer thing things of life like music and films from him. An accomplished flautist and a documentary film maker who formed the Film Society in the Senior school.

Educated in Mayo, St Stephen's , followed by M Phil from JNU. He worked in an advertising agency in Bombay before joining Sanawar. He pursued a career as a documentary filmmaker and continued to write and photograph for magazines.

He is survived by his wife Mina (Chanchani) Misra (OS72) and two daughters Kadambri and Tara. He will be deeply missed by his friends and students from Sanawar.
Heartfelt condolences to the family and may the Almighty give them strength to bear the loss.

From the OS Fraternity.

An interesting excerpt from his diary about Sanawar.

"Tender mercies, all. Tender, expansive, vast and benign – these are the words that come to mind. Out there in those two pagan years in Sanawar all the glad tidings were mine, and someone was slowly keeping an eye on me, looking at me, keeping a note of my ‘eccentricities’. Even then my instinctive preference for the have-nots, the school orderlies, cooks and waiters was pronounced. I didn’t see them as material for clustering into unions which I could lead and climb on their backs to my self-serving glory. On the contrary, my radicalism made me feel one with them, that I was privileged and they needed my friendly support. I was one with them because I felt that way. Coming up from Gadkhal in my car I would offer to drive them up. I must have done this on several occasions and I got noticed for doing it. Shomi Das, the headmaster of the co-ed school where I taught those two years, had his eye on me. At the fag-end of the first year at a dinner gathering in his lovely parquet-floored house, he walked up to me with a smile on his lips and a mischievous glint in his eyes and said, “You know, Prithwiraj, you’re a radical aristocrat.”
“A.. what?”
“A radical aristocrat.” The two words juxtaposed in this way took me by surprise. It’s the finest compliment anyone could pay me for merely being the way I am.

I remember doing George Orwell’s Animal Farm with kids of the junior school. The daily evening rehearsals would have them all pepped up and then they would stream out of the auditorium shouting “Rebellion! Rebellion!” The junior school staff found this new-fangled behaviour of the kids strange and objectionable. But the play practices went on until they all donned the animal masks and dresses and appeared on stage for their Founder’s day. But somewhere before this, in the hullabaloo of the junior school, where some boys had found that the ‘dames’ had been favoured by the teachers, they decided to go on a strike.

Little strike posters written by little hands suddenly started appearing that school day. The boys refused to be coaxed into taking any lessons that day. When the teachers entered the classrooms, they found the children very recalcitrant. Someone raised a fist and cried “Strike!”, and a handful of others followed with raised fists and “Strike!”.

The news of this event filtered to me in the staff room where I sat alone at the desk looking at some of the essays the children had penned. A little girl ran into me in a breathless hurry and asked me if I could tell her what ‘strike’ meant. Even at that moment I was ignorant of the strike that was underway. I told her to look up the dictionary, and just as she was about to run away to go find the meaning of this strange new word in their lives called ‘strike’, I asked what the matter was. “Well Sir, we’re all on strike.” “What?” said I.

“Strike Sir, strike”, she said, “and that’s why I want to know its meaning.” And then she ran away. I paid no further attention to their ‘strike’, as I felt it must be some kind of a joke. But as I was to discover soon, the kids were serious. They really had gone on a strike. So what now?

By lunch that day the strike leaders were rounded up by the Headmistress and sent off to the Headmaster, Shomi Das, for reprimand. Do I still remember their names, these young rebels who had stirred up a hornet’s nest because some teachers had favoured ‘dames’. Yes, Nadir Sulaiman was one, a scion of the Daud family in Afghanistan who traced his lineage to none other than the great Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire; Shailendra Choudhuri, a superb specimen of courage and intelligence; Sanjeev Dogra (naturally defiant and no less courageous); Aftab (a very bright kid who scored cent-percent in Physics, a subject which I was given to teach them); Nitin Rai, the dreamy son of the photographer Raghu Rai, who must have just gone along with the ‘leaders’ for the fun of it, and perhaps a few others.

Confronted with the strike leaders, Shomi Das was definitely amused. What could he really do to the small kids? Beat them, no. He kept a straight face and showed that he was quite definitely angry, and with that he let them off.

Back in junior school the head mistress was genuinely upset. She felt it was all because of ME! She felt that without my presence the children would never have gone on their strike; and it was Orwell’s Animal Farm that I was rehearsing with the kids that had bred rebelliousness in them in the first place. Maybe this was not untrue, but I still felt blameless. After all, the headmistress had approved my idea of doing Orwell’s great short novel as it could accommodate lots of children. That the end result could be a little strike, was simply unheard of in the Lawrence School Sanawar. "