From Award Winner to Prize-Giver: Victoria Isaac Closes Esperanza 2026 at Hindustan International School, Karapakkam

Seven weeks after the Hindustan Group of Institutions gave her an award, one of its schools handed her the microphone, the stage and the prize table.

Chennai: A prize-giving is one of the oldest rituals in school life, and the shape of it almost never changes. A child walks up. An adult, usually a distinguished one, hands over the trophy, shakes the hand, and says something encouraging. The adult is the authority. The child is the recipient. Everybody knows their part.

At Buckingham Hall in Karapakkam on Saturday 8 August, the person handing over the trophies was nine years old.

Victoria Isaac, who performs as Victoriastic, was chief guest at the closing ceremony of Esperanza 2026, the inter-school culturals and sports festival hosted by Hindustan International School. The day had opened at nine in the morning with the Tamizh Thaai Vaazhthu and the school anthem, and ran through a full programme of cultural and sporting events involving teams from several schools across the city. By the valedictory session the winners had been decided. What remained was the address, the performance and the prizes, and all three belonged to the chief guest.

Seven weeks earlier

The booking has a short history worth setting out, because it is unusual.

On 23 June, at Hotel Hilton in Chennai, the Hindustan Group of Institutions held the Dr. K.C.G. Verghese Excellence Awards 2026 as part of its sixtieth-anniversary year. Among the honorees, alongside industrialists, academics and a judge of the Madras High Court, was Victoria Isaac, named Child Prodigy of the Year.

Seven weeks later the same group invited her back, not to be recognised, but to run the closing ceremony of its school’s biggest event of the year.

That is a different kind of endorsement from an award. An institution can give a citation to almost anyone on the strength of a file. Putting the same person in front of several hundred students and their teachers, and trusting her with the last hour of a day the school has spent months building, requires having watched her work and concluded she can carry a room.

The Chairman’s vision for the school

Dr. Anand Jacob Verghese is Chairman of the Hindustan Group of Institutions and Chancellor of Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science. Under his leadership the group secured university status for its engineering college, formed academic partnerships with institutions abroad, and now teaches more than twenty-three thousand students across engineering, aviation, management, law, health sciences and the liberal arts. Its guiding line, stamped on everything it does, is to make every man a success and no man a failure.

Speaking at the group’s Excellence Awards in June, he set out education as one of the most powerful instruments of transformation and nation-building, and described six decades of the group’s work as a record of nurturing talent and creating room for young people to find what they are capable of. His own working background spans close to three decades across education and aviation.

Esperanza is what that reads like when it is applied to schoolchildren rather than to a university prospectus. A school that measures its students only by examination results has a narrow definition of success and a large number of children who fall outside it. An inter-school festival widens the field. It creates categories in which a child who is not first in class can be first at something, and it does so in front of visiting schools rather than only their own. It costs the host school money, staff time and a full Saturday, which is the point: the commitment is what makes it more than a sentiment.

The choice of chief guest follows the same logic. Victoria’s record is not academic. It is made almost entirely of things she taught herself to do, which is precisely the kind of achievement a school built on that motto ought to be putting in front of its students.

The people who actually run it

Hosting an inter-school event is a logistics exercise disguised as a celebration. Visiting teams have to be received, registered, fed and kept to a timetable.

Judges must be briefed and results collated fast enough for the prizes to be ready when the valedictory begins. Parents arrive. Nothing is allowed to overrun.

That work fell to Principal Ms. Bharathi Lakshmi and her staff, supported by the school’s leadership including Executive Director Lt. Gen. Bobby Mathews (Retd.) and Dean of Academics Mr. Johnson Mathew, with Dr. Annie Jacob, Director of KCG College of Technology, among those present.

The measure of it is that visiting schools noticed the organisation rather than the gaps. Very little of that work is visible in a photograph, and all of it is the reason the day worked.

The last hour

Victoria’s slot ran in three parts: an address, a violin performance, and the prize distribution.

She spoke first, briefly, to a hall of students. Then she played, which is what the room had been waiting for since her name went on the invitation. The reaction was what it usually is when she performs for an audience of children: a hall that had been managing its attention for several hours stopped managing it.

Then she gave out the prizes.

That last part is worth pausing over, because it does something a school cannot buy. A trophy handed to a child by a dignitary confirms the existing order: adults decide, children receive. A trophy handed over by someone the same age says something else entirely. It says the person who has done remarkable things is not from a separate category of human being. She is from your category. She is standing where you are standing, holding out your medal.

Every winner at Esperanza 2026 walked back to their seat having shaken hands with what is possible before eighteen.

What another school would be booking

For schools weighing up a chief guest for their own annual day or festival, the Esperanza booking is instructive on two counts.

The first is that the Hindustan Group did not take a chance on an unknown. They had already assessed her, honoured her in June, and then chose to put her in front of their students in August. Repeat business from a serious institution is a better reference than any citation.

The second is what she is actually asked to do. Most chief guests deliver a speech and leave. Victoria delivers a speech, a performance and a prize distribution, and the performance is the part the students will describe at home that evening. A school gets an address, a concert and a ceremony from a single invitation.

She is nine, home-schooled, a student of the KM Music Conservatory in Chennai, and has spent the past year moving between award stages, care homes, corporate halls and now school festivals. The school festivals appear to be the ones she likes best. The audience is closest to her own age, and it is the only audience that reliably asks her questions afterwards.