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Old Elizabethan and City lawyer Dhruv Chhatralia has been giving his reaction after receiving a British Empire Medal in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours.

An international mergers and acquisitions lawyer with global law firm Gowling WLG, Dhruv (OE 1996-2003) is also a regular speaker on the benefits of yoga and the importance of strong mental health. He is the author of 21 books on Hinduism and has given more than 325 public talks totalling over 350 hours on spirituality.

After receiving the BEM ‘for services to Hinduism and to developing young people’, he has spoken  of his surprise at being nominated for the award and of the importance of maintaining mental wellness in order to successfully manage the challenges of the modern world.

In a statement published by his firm, Dhruv said: “I was honoured to find out that I had been nominated for this award; it was completely unexpected.

“The importance of wellbeing and taking care of your mental health can’t be underestimated, and it’s a privilege to work with young people and professionals, many in high-pressure roles, to help them find practical solutions for mental wellness. It’s certainly helped me in my own role as a lawyer.”

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “My warm congratulations go to Dhruv on this notable achievement. We try to inspire in our boys the value of working for the good of others and are always keen to celebrate those in the School community who embody this. It is therefore a great pleasure to hear about Dhruv’s own very telling contribution.”

After leaving QE, Dhruv went to Kings College London to read Law and then trained at the BPP Law School.

His achievements include:

• Writing the longest-ever English commentaries on the great Indian works, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hanuman Chalisa and the Shree Suktam, between them comprising more than 3,467 pages. All the proceeds from these books went to charity.
• Creating a programme of more than 180 Bhagavad Gita, Hanuman Chalisa and Shree Suktam classes in English to educate young people about the Indian scriptures.
• Speaking on Hinduism to the British Army and at the House of Commons, House of Lords, Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Metropolitan Police, as well as at many major companies and at community halls around the UK.
• Conducting a live yoga session in the City of London that was televised nationally by the BBC.

“I am honoured and humbled to receive this recognition from the Queen,” he said. “My dream has been to make these enriching Dharmic teachings available to everyone in English without any costs, travel, commitments or other obstacles. I hope that this recognition inspires many young Indians to take up volunteering service to the community in order to preserve, protect and promote this beautiful wisdom.

“I bow down to Shree Krishna for blessing me on this wonderful journey and for moulding my character through His teachings in the Bhagavad Gita. I would like to thank my parents for bringing me up with Dharmic values and for instilling in me the qualities of hard work, selflessness and service towards other people. I also offer my obediences to my Gurus and the entire Indian Guru tradition for inspiring me with the teachings of the great Indian scriptures.”

BBC presenter Mishal Husain explained to QE’s Lower School boys how following her own ambitions and focusing on excelling at every stage of her career had brought her success as one of the UK’s best-known and most-respected journalists.

A news presenter for BBC Television and BBC Radio, Mishal is a host on Radio 4’s influential Today programme and is a familiar face around the world thanks to her work on BBC World News’s Impact programme.

She has a number of ‘firsts’ to her name. She was Today’s first Muslim presenter and the BBC’s first Washington news anchor. When she met Aung San Suu Kyi in 2013, she asked the Burmese politician – a Nobel Peace Prize laureate now widely considered to have fallen from grace – about the plight of the Rohingyas. She believes she was the first journalist to have done so.

In her talk to Years 7–9, she spoke about how, in the face of her parents’ wishes that she become a doctor, she had instead pursued a path as a journalist.

She recounted highlights of a career that has taken her to places – including many dangerous locations – all over the world.

Mishal, the author of two books on achieving career success, also devoted considerable time to answering the boys’ questions, having first stressed to them the importance of maintaining a questioning approach in life – an attitude that was, of course, critical to her career as a journalist and interviewer, but was also important more generally, she said.

If there was one message she could impart to the boys, it would be: “Keep your minds as curious as they are now.”

While acknowledging that “we are all a product of our own bubbles” – affected by social influences, families, our education and so on – she urged boys to push against this as much as possible.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am sure the boys will have taken away from her talk a great insight into the world of broadcast journalism, as well as much good advice, applicable to them whatever their individual ambitions and aspirations may be.”

“We constantly seek to raise awareness among our boys and their families of the enormous range of opportunities that are open to Elizabethans. Mishal showed our Lower School boys what success can be achieved by following your interests and playing to your strengths – a message that reinforces what they hear from their teachers and one that I hope they found inspiring.”

Born in Northampton to parents originally from Lucknow in India who later migrated to Pakistan, Mishal moved to the UAE at the age of two, where her father worked as a doctor. She was brought up in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, before she was sent to Cobham Hall boarding school in Kent.

She studied law at Cambridge and then went on to take a Master’s degree in the discipline at the European University Institute in Florence, having settled on Law as a good ‘in between’ subject – one that was respected, even if it was not Medicine.

Yet after university, she sought out opportunities in the media. After starting at Bloomberg Television, she joined the BBC as a junior producer in 1998.

It was, she said, almost the case that she had to appear on national and international television as a broadcast journalist before her parents would accept her not having followed in her father’s footsteps.

She told the boys how difficult it is to become a presenter – an aspiration held by many, but realised by few. “You may start off doing something far from your dream job… but those willing to give everything on a menial job are those that get noticed, and good things come to them: you’ve got to excel at what you are doing today.” Thus, while she harboured ambitions to present on the Today programme – recognising it as the pinnacle of its kind – she focused in the meantime on being the best journalist she could be, before eventually achieving this aim in 2015.

Being on the programme had taught her resilience: “You do an interview, come off-air and then get torn to pieces online.” But she is now better able to take the peaks and the troughs. When things go wrong, she takes from it the lessons that need to be learned, but then turns the page, not dwelling on her mistakes.

Through it all, her passion for the importance of impartial journalism in the 21st century remains not only undimmed, but, if anything, strengthened. In an interview this month for The Sunday Times Magazine, she told interviewer Donna Ferguson: “The purpose of news, I think, is to search for the truth without fear or favour. To do my job well, I need to be able to put my own opinions aside and be open to arguments of different kinds, and to treat them fairly. This era where established news organisations have been attacked and come under unprecedented pressure has reaffirmed why I wanted to go into journalism in the first place.”

Married with three sons, Mishal lives in north London. She is the author of two books – The skills: from first job to dream job – what every woman needs to know and the recently published The skills: how to win at work (copies of which she donated to the School).

After her visit, she posted a message on social media praising the boys for “listening intently” to her talk.

Forty boys have been offered places at Oxford or Cambridge this year – a new record high for Queen Elizabeth’s School.

The figure surpasses the previous QE record of 37 set in 2008 and repeated in 2014. Twenty-seven of this year’s 40 offers are for places at Cambridge and the remaining 13 are for Oxford.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “This is a remarkable achievement, both individually for each of the boys and collectively for the School.”

“It reflects, on the one hand, the hard work and consistent application of these pupils, certainly in their academic studies, but also in the extra-curricular and voluntary pursuits by which they showed themselves to be, in the words of our School mission, ‘confident, able and responsible’ candidates of the calibre sought by our leading universities.

“And, on the other, their success is evidence of the meticulous work undertaken at the School to assist pupils as they move into higher education, much of it delivered through our QE University admissions Support Programme (or USP), which is supported by many Old Elizabethans. This work includes a great deal of focus on UCAS statements, as well as expert preparation for the various Oxbridge admissions tests and interview practice.

“We are a state school like no other; fiercely ambitious in nurturing high levels of aspiration among our pupils and their families, and then in helping them fulfil these aspirations. The fact that a good proportion of our boys are the first in their families to go to university is a compelling example of QE’s success in advancing social mobility.”

The Oxbridge places offered span the arts and the sciences, from Modern Languages to Medicine, and Natural Sciences at Cambridge to Politics, Philosophy & Economics at Oxford. One feature of this year’s offers is that there are a number for degrees in a combination of subjects, such as History & German.

The offers come from a wide range of colleges, from the 13th-century University College Oxford to Cambridge’s Girton, which gained full university college status in 1948.

Mr Enright added: “We do, of course, have many other very able boys – including strong Oxbridge candidates who nevertheless did not receive offers. Whilst they may feel some disappointment now, a large majority of Year 13 are in receipt of offers at other prestigious and highly competitive institutions across the Russell Group and beyond, where I am confident that they will similarly thrive and excel.”

• The photo, top, shows 32 of the 35 boys in Year 13 who have gained Oxbridge offers, together with Mr Enright. The remaining five candidates offered places are from among last year’s leavers.

Ninety-nine Year 12 boys were entertained, amazed and inspired at a special series of lectures on the application of Mathematics.

Fifty of the sixth-formers went to one set of lectures, while the remaining 49 went on a later day to hear a second set. The Maths in Action lectures were organised by The Training Partnership (the UK’s leading provider of educational study days) at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster.

Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “Each lecture was inspiring in its own way and has encouraged the boys to delve deeper into the topics they found most engaging. These lectures are a very good way of introducing branches of Mathematics and ways of mathematical thinking which are not covered as part of the A-level syllabus, and of showing the range of applications to which the subject can be applied.”

Both groups heard lectures on statistics. On the first day, Michael Blastland, creator of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme, spoke on Bad Stats: what they don’t tell you on the news. The second group heard from economist and journalist Tim Harford. He counselled that if used well, statistics can help people learn about the world and he emphasised the paramount importance of using statistics in a responsible way.

Pupil Sachin Sarin said: “Tim Harford’s thorough explanation of how statistical findings were being used by politicians and firms to manipulate the general public into believing certain ideologies allowed us to gain a deeper understanding as to how powerful statistics are when trying to persuade or argue a point. I learnt that statistics can often be cherry-picked and even distorted by these individuals to achieve their motive.”

Beker Shah enjoyed Michael Blastland’s talk, in which he similarly demonstrated “how manipulating data could serve a political agenda or purpose, as shown by the increase in cancer deaths and the increased pregnancy rate”.

Common to both days was a lecture by author and broadcaster Simon Singh on Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he began by introducing 17th century French mathematician Fermat and the concept of a mathematical proof. In Fermat’s spare time, he would find mathematical statements and see if he could prove whether they were true or not. Over time, mathematicians proved all of Fermat’s theorems except one, which hence became known as ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’. Simon took the audience through the inspiring story which culminated in its proof in 1993.

Simon Singh was, said Zidane Akbar, “a great speaker”, while Janujan Satchi added: “Learning about the story of [British mathematician] Andrew Wiles and how his perseverance led him to prove Fermat’s last theorem was really interesting.”

Cambridge mathematician Matthew Scroggs’ lecture on the Mathematics of Video Games impressed Charan Kumararuban, who said: “I was particularly amazed by his demonstration of using Mathematics in order to predict the shortest possible routes to complete a game of Pacman in the shortest possible time.”

Oxford University’s David Acheson brought some musical moments to the day with his talk, From Euclid to the Electric Guitar. Ayushman Mukherjee said: “I liked the humour, practical demonstrations and guitar solo!”

The other speakers were:

• Sara Jabbari, from the University of Birmingham, on Fighting disease with Mathematics, who looked at how differential equations are used to understand antibiotic resistance, track the dynamics of bacterial infections and even develop new drugs to tackle disease.
• Ed Southall, author of several books on geometry puzzles and a lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, who led a hands-on session on how problems could be solved in multiple ways. For example, he set students the task of cutting 2D and 3D shapes into pieces of equal area using only a set number of straight lines.
• Award-winning teacher Jamie Frost on How to prepare for exams;
• Jackie Bell, from Imperial College London on Maths in a Space Suit, in which she recounted her journey from Mathematics graduate, to particle physicist and finally to trainee astronaut.

Afterwards, pupil Manas Gaur reflected on the value of the day: “I enjoyed being able to link Mathematics to other fields and seeing how it connects with other subjects.”

Five boys have been named as winners in a national languages competition – with three of them enjoying success in the contest for the second year in a row.

The five impressed judges with their entries for the European Day of Languages Competition, to which they were asked to submit an entry based on the theme, A Magical Trip. They were selected from among many hundreds of entries nationally.

Designed to encourage creativity, the annual competition allows entrants to submit work in any format of their choice, with the only stipulations being that it include a language other than English and that it be no larger than an A4 sheet of paper.

• Year 9 pupil Darren Lee’s entry was in the form of an article for French newspaper Le Monde, complete with his own drawing.
• Shyam Jayabal, of Year 9, produced a day-by-day account of a memorable week spent on holiday with friends in a caravan in Dorset.
• Vineeth Rajan, of Year 11, wrote his submission in not one but two foreign languages – French and Hindi.
• Anik Singh, of Year 7, took a whimsical look in German at the possibilities for a holiday.
• Chakshu Chopra, of Year 10, was more abstract, writing in German about how life is the most magical of all trips.

For Chakshu, Darren and Vineeth it was a repeat performance, since they were also winners last year.

Nationally, foreign languages at school have been in decline, but QE remains committed to language-learning. All boys take at least one GCSE in French, German or Latin, and all three of these languages are available at A-level.

There are extra-curricular options in Mandarin, Spanish and Ancient Greek. Some boys also study other languages outside school and there are many QE pupils who are native speakers in languages besides English.

The QE winners’ certificates were accompanied by a letter signed by the organisers. Steve Fawkes, Chair of the Association of Language Learning North East and René Koglbauer, Executive Director of the North Leadership Centre and Director of Network for Languages North East, wrote: “Once again, judges were impressed by the creativity with which pupils and students addressed the theme, alongside the imaginative and sometimes powerful use of language, humour, thoughtfulness and accuracy.”

QE also gained its own certificate and was commended for both the number and the quality of its entries. The winning boys are pictured above, accompanied by Languages teacher Rosie Hall.