4 Muslim students among 116 winners of Vivekanand quiz

“I like his character. He is a man of strong resolve who taught on how to get ahead in life without fear,” she said. As many as 75,000 students from across 1,000 schools participated in the quiz competition. District education officers from Surat, Vadodara and Ahmedabad were also felicitated by the CM for “successfully” conducting the quiz.

“Swami Vivekanand was one who was full of positive thinking, something that I like most about him. I knew about him partly from textbooks but not as much as I knew about him after reading the booklet given to me by my school teacher,” Master, who was a state board topper with 99.67% marks, said.

Speaking at the event, Anandiben Patel talked about the drawing competition held across schools on January 30 on the theme of Gandhi on cleanliness in which 1.05 crore students participated. She said that exhibitions of best pictures at taluka-, district- and state-levels will be held to encourage students and top-rankers will be felicitated.

Patel also exhorted students to stay away from street food as she said they were source of diseases, and instead save money to build a mini library at home. “We’ll have exhibitions of the best pictures to let the world know what they can do. It is not necessary that a school needs an art teacher for students to paint well. Some of the pictures are simply beyond our imagination,” she told a gathering of students and parents.

Patel also asked teachers to share as much information as possible on diverse subjects with their students, ruing about lack of awareness among students about the state’s geography. “A group of students and their teachers drew blank when I asked them how many districts they crossed between Morbi and Pavagadh. They were out on trip and dropped by to meet me. Similarly, a group of students could not tell me about the height of the Narmada dam. Teachers should try to share these knowledge with their students,” she said.