I came to stir the pot, it was by design: Thampu

New Delhi: “What am I to say to you? Eight years have gone by. I am glad if I still remain a riddle,” said Valson Thampu, the principal of St Stephen’s College as he took to the podium to deliver his farewell speech on Monday. John Varghese,a professor from Hyderabad’s English and Foreign Languages University, will take charge as the new principal on Tuesday.
In his tenure of eight years, Thampu became controversy’s favourite child as he got embroiled in numerous wrangles, be it for allegedly protecting a professor accused of sexual harassment to accusations of forced conversion of an administrative officer. His polemic attitude further subjected him to public scrutiny.
A mixed audience of faculty members, students, non-teaching staff and former colleagues assembled to bid farewell to the 12th principal of the institution. As acquaintances and students came forward to share their tryst with the principal, Thampu called the ceremony a “ retirement festival”.
His take on the controversies that surrounded him featured strongly in his farewell speech. He said “manufacturers of controversies” were unknowingly doing him a service by being “the thorn in his skin” and keeping him from “dying over complacency”.
“Yes my tenure was punctuated with controversies, but you must also ask what these controversies were. And you should give full credit to those who manufactured these controversies. I have accepted these things as necessary stimulations that a person like me should have,” he said.
He said he came back to Stephen’s because it was becoming a “cesspool of complacency” and the “pot needed to be stirred”. He claimed that all he did was well thought out. “Nothing happened by accident. If you think anything happened by accident, it would be completely wrong. Everything was by design. I came back to the college to stir this pool of complacency because I knew if I don’t do it, this college would die. Of course, I knew there would be a cost to pay. I knew the cost could be my life. I did not expect to survive. I thought my wife would become a war widow because of the kind of circumstances we had gone through,” he said.
While former colleagues remembered him as an exceptional orator and a “romantic youngster”, staffers credited him with the infrastructural reforms in the college.
The farewell concluded with a ‘celebratory walk’ with misty-eyed students, teachers and Thampu’s family members around the campus. He was joined by Swami Agnivesh, his “saffron friend”.