In a rather unusual turn of events, a private school management in Kerala’s Kottayam district asked the guardian of a kindergarten student to take down the video of their ward’s fancy dress performance from their personal social media accounts. The reason? The child took part in a school fancy dress event dressed as a police officer, who stole mangoes. This performance was inspired by a real life event which took place in August, where a police official was found to have stolen about 10 kg of mangoes from a shop in Kanjirappally in Kottayam district.
In a statement put out by the St Antony’s Public School (SAPS) in Kanjirappally, the school management claimed that the video of the said performance was an insult to the school as well as to the police force. The claim made by the school comes across as a bit strange if one were to watch the video of the child’s fancy dress performance, which went viral on Facebook.
In the video, all that the child, dressed as a police official can be seen doing is to wait for a couple of seconds on stage before he leaves the stage carrying a bunch of mangoes which were kept in a box in front of him. As the child exits the stage, the audience applauds. Though the SAPS school management has not mentioned whether the police force complained about the child's performance, their statement says that it was ‘a grave insult to the school and the state police force’.
Stating that the video doing the rounds on social media was not captured by the official videographers of the school, but by the guardian of the student, the school statement says, “The moment the news of the video reached us, we had contacted the guardian and informed them that the video has made several people uncomfortable and therefore he should take it down. We also instructed the school staff to not forward the video if they get it”.
“St Antony’s Public School has always maintained a cordial relationship with the police officials and we regret the difficulties that the police were put through because of the actions of a single guardian,” read the school statement.
It is, however, not yet clear as to what prompted the school management to come up with such a statement for a harmless fancy dress performance. When TNM contacted the police officials in Kanjirappally, they claimed that the police had nothing to do with this.
Earlier this month, PV Shihab, a civil police officer was suspended after CCTV footage from August showed him stealing mangoes from a shop on the Kanjirappally- Mundakayam road, while he was returning from duty one night. The CCTV footage shows Shihab stopping outside a fruit shop where a few boxes of mangoes were kept. After waiting for a while, he then takes a few mangoes from the box and drives off while no one is watching.