How do you expect the director or coordinator of a premier business school to be? In the initial thought the image which we draw would be a person clad in business suit, travelling in chauffeur driven car, mostly seen working with high tech gadgets and speaking about things which a normal B-grad could hardly conceive.

But then comes the second thought. A Belgian man who wore nothing more than what we call a decent dressing, a man whose fitness, energy & regime at the age of 75 would give any youth run for his money. A man who is seen walking most often and even cycling at times. A man who rarely carried a cell phone and used to talk about only one thing, “without vision man perish

If we have to name five persons apart from our founding fathers, who have left the greatest imprint on India’s development sector since independence, this Belgian man would definitely be among them whom we popularly called Fr. Bogaert. Fr. Michael Van den Bogaert S.J. whose service of six decades in India since 1951 not only brought visible and significant changes in the lives of the rural poor but also redefined the development as well developers all together. A prolific writer and avid reader, he dreamt of creating facilitators when rest of the B-schools produced managers and when his dream was realized, it contributed three premier institutions to the nation in form of XISS-Ranchi, XIM-Bhubaneswar and XIM-Jabalpur. Rest is history. When being asked about the reason why any guy joined XIMJ, the answer most of the time was obvious, “coz father was there”. But then no guy ever had any regret over his/her answer or decision, thanks to the zeal, commitment, optimism and passion of this one man.- whom we very proudly called ‘OUR HERO’.

He brought us out of our cocoons of comfort and taught us the lesson of ‘hands on culture’ which not only helped us to be the finest rural managers but also to be better human beings. The best of his teachings were not imparted to us in the classrooms but at the field, villages, playground, cafeteria, gardens where he used to work, play, had food with us or did gardening with us and also at the notice board where he used to put articles and paper cuttings to inform and enlighten us continuously

He could disarm the most hostile crowd with a smile, forthright style and wit. It is said that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. We are sure that father won’t. He will continue to inspire us with his persona and rekindling hope. He will remain the epitome of a father and a gentleman carrying the spirit of soldiering from the past, reliving it in the present and preserving it for the future

He is not with us physically, but his legacy will never fade away as ‘we’ the torch bearers of his legacy…will carry it to even greater heights