A BROMSGROVE teenager has won a prestigious national essay accolade for providing a vivid eyewitness 
account of a young girl seeing the feeding of the 5,000.
Indira Kaushal, 14, took part in the annual competition which has been running for 25 years as part of the Schools Bible Project.
That is organised by the Order of Christian Unity, a charity dedicated to fostering understanding different branches of the faith.
Indira, who has both Hindu and Christian influences on her own background, fought off hundreds of others from all over Britain as she rose to the challenge to ‘describe a biblical event as though they were actually present’.
It demonstrated the year ten pupil at King Edward’s High School for Girls in Edgbaston had read and understood the different New Testament accounts of the incident and Christ’s impact on those around him.
Indira got to travel down to the Houses of Parliament with the other winners and was presented with her prize by Baroness Cox, one of the trustees of the Schools Bible Project.
Indira, who won books for herself and a £500 cheque for the school, said she was absolutely amazed when she heard she had won and it was a great thrill to travel down to London with her family for the presentation.
“I’d enjoyed trying to put myself in the place of a child present at the feeding of the 5,000 and imagine the small details of what it must have been like to experience this miracle in the midst of a vast crowd like that.
“I feel very lucky that my account caught the judges’ eye,” she added,
Her RE teacher Alison Young said the school was so proud of Indira and added: “She produced a wonderfully lively, detailed account that fully deserved to win.
“I think it is wonderful that a girl with both Hindu and Christian influences in her family can engage so well with Biblical themes and write with such empathy.
“In the light of the Trojan Horse scandal, this is a reminder of the kind of excellent understanding across different faith traditions that can be inspired – especially in RE lessons.”
Reprinted by kind permission of The Bromsgrove Standard