Come to something.

Nagpur Unites for Blood

Round Table India and Ladies Circle India ran this drive across six cities on the same day — Mumbai, Nashik, Nagpur, Bhilai, Raipur and Bilaspur — each with one shared donation centre. The Nagpur centre was run jointly by Nagpur Round Table 83, Nagpur Arthurs Round Table 180, Nagpur Spirits Round Table 258, Nagpur Tigers Round Table 299 and Nagpur Ladies Circle 50.

Blood cannot be manufactured; it has to be given. Our thanks to everyone who turned up and rolled up a sleeve.

Azaadi ki Thaali — Purpose, Plated with Pride

A special Independence Day brunch served on banana leaves, in association with Co.So — with no bill at the end of it. Diners pay what they wish, and every rupee goes to education. This second serving fed more than 300 diners and raised ₹95,622 — ₹88,522 taken at Co.So, the rest through Ketto and gifts straight to the Trust.

The first serving, in 2025, was expected to draw 320 people and drew 540 registrations, raising ₹1.4 lakh — money that went into the Nagazari build.

40th Annual General Meeting

LMF Tr. Punan Choudhary was installed as Chairman for Tabling Year 2026–27, with the incoming Headboard invested and the year’s audited accounts presented and approved before the Floor.

The Table has taken its AGM out of the city in recent years — Pench in 2022, Goa in 2024, and Serendipity at Tamia in 2025 for the 39th.

ZP School, Nagazari — handed over

A crumbling Zilla Parishad school in the tribal belt 12 km beyond Hingna reopened as a modern campus, built with Bridge The Gap Foundation. The handover was carried nationally on the PTI wire and picked up by ThePrint, The Week and Careers360, with The Times of India running it in print the following week.

Tree planting at Gardiner High School

The 2025 Round Table India week began with breakfast at the Brick House, a decorated-car publicity drive through the city, and tree planting in the grounds of Gardiner High School. Twinklers came along — the children of the Table, learning early what the Table is for.

Two days later, Round Table India and Cinépolis put on a screening for underprivileged children that filled all 250 seats, ninety of them taken by Nagpur Spirits Round Table 258 and forty-five by Nagpur Arthurs Round Table 180.

A morning at the movies

Forty children from the Table’s Zilla Parishad school at Sukali were taken to see Yodha, arranged with Dharma Productions and IIMUN — for most of them a first visit to a cinema. Afterwards came chips and ice cream at McDonald’s, paid for by two Tablers.

It followed the national Free Cinema Day run with Cinépolis in November 2023, which reached some 10,000 children across the country.

Sukali Phase 2 opens, and the 900th Meet

Two things on one morning. The second phase of the Sukali school opened, completing a campus the Table began in 2022 — and the 900th continuous meeting was called to order on the site rather than in a banquet hall. Thirty-seven years of meeting without a break, marked where the work is.

The celebrations had opened weeks earlier with a run of medical camps, set a deliberate target: health check-ups for 900 children before the 900th meet. The fourth camp alone screened 450 children of classes 5 to 10, and across the four Freedom Through Education schools the camps finished on 1,170 students — well past the number they were named for.

Bhoomi Poojan at Nagazari

Ground was broken on what would become the Nagazari school. The old building — a leaking, crumbling ZP structure the village had made do with for decades — came down, and the children lined the ground with rangoli for the ceremony. Seventeen months later it reopened as the first modern building in the village.

A cochlear implant kept working

A boy who had received a cochlear implant in 2018 lost the use of it when the processor failed. Repair and replacement came to over ₹4 lakh, with ₹80,000 needed immediately. The three Nagpur bodies put in ₹10,000 each so his schooling would not stop while the money was found.

Pranav, run by the Chitnavis Trust, teaches hearing-impaired children free up to the age of seven and prepares them for mainstream school.

Seven days, every Table and Circle in the city

Round Table India and Ladies Circle India Week is a national week of activity run jointly across every Table and Circle. The 2023 edition centred on a blood donation camp at Gondwana Gallery, which drew a hundred donors.

The 2022 week ran a charity movie show at Cinépolis, tree planting across the city and a slot on FM 94.3 for Publicity Day; on Flora and Fauna Day the children of our schools were taken to the Transit Treatment Centre at Seminary Hills to meet the conservationists who work there. Over 400 children took part that week. The 2019 edition ran a blood donation camp at Trillium Mall, a Children’s Day outing to the Raman Science Centre, and tree planting with a drawing competition at Vinayakrao Deshmukh High School.

Taare Zameen Par Day

The Tables and Circles of Nagpur took children to the circus for the day — an annual outing built on the simple premise that a childhood needs more in it than a classroom.

Health check-up camp at Vaanprastha Aashram

A full day of consultations and screening for the residents of an old-age home — the Table’s community service work reaching the other end of the age range from its schools.

Nagpur’s first 41ers Club

Tablers retire from the Floor at forty. The 41ers Club is where they carry on — and Nagpur chartered its first, keeping four decades of experience within reach of the Table.

Skillathon

A skills marathon marking World Youth Skill Day, run with JITO’s Centre for Entrepreneurship to put practical training in front of young people in the city.

Comedy for a Cause — Jeeveshu Ahluwalia

A full-house stand-up evening with one of India’s wittiest comedians. Every rupee from donor passes went towards the education of underprivileged children under Freedom Through Education.

Comedy for a Cause is the Table’s longest-running fundraiser. Daniel Fernandes and Zakir Khan headlined the first edition in June 2015; Atul Khatri played the third edition in June 2017; Sharman Joshi brought his play Raju Raja Ram aur Main to the Suresh Bhat Auditorium in 2018 and played to a house of about a thousand, clearing some ₹2 lakh; and when the halls closed, Zakir Khan returned on 17 October 2020 for Ma-Zak, streamed to donors at home — 197 passes and ₹98,500 in a year when nobody could fill a hall. The show cancelled that March cost ₹50,000 in forfeited bookings; the members paid it themselves rather than take it out of the charity account.

Blood donation camp

Run with Jeevan Jyoti Blood Bank — the same partner the Table returns to for this September’s six-city drive. Blood cannot be manufactured; it has to be given.

Round Table India Freedom Drive — Nagpur leg

The national Freedom Drive convoy was welcomed into Nagpur and flagged off onward, drawing city-wide press coverage for the Freedom Through Education campaign.

Independence Day, with the children

The Table has spent Independence Day in a school rather than at a function for as long as anyone can remember — flag hoisting, an assembly with the children, and a donation to the school that hosts it. In 2024 the flag went up at our own Freedom Through Education school at Sukali.

The fullest of them was 2019, the 73rd Independence Day: 250 raincoats and 550 kg of rice, shared between the children of Arya Prathamik Shala in Sadar and the residents of the Shanti Bhavan old age home. The appeal that paid for them, Bring a Smile to Their Faces, asked for ₹500 a raincoat and a target of ₹65,000; it closed at ₹85,000. In 2023 the day became a health check-up and blood donation camp at Leverage Greens. The same morning is on record in 2018 and 2022, and with Round Table India in 2011 and 2012.