Invictus is Latin. It means unconquered. In 1991, in the town of Rishra on the western bank of the Hooghly, four people sat down together with an idea that most would have called modest. Aloke Kumar Bhaduri, Partha Sarathi Daw, Chaitali Bhaduri and Sumita Daw had noticed something the district had long been asking for: an English-medium, co-educational school where the children of ordinary families could learn to think for themselves. They had no campus to speak of, no legacy to lean on and no guarantee that any of it would work. What they had was a few classrooms, a handful of teachers and a promise carried in three words: Learn to lead. Stepping Stone School was meant to be a preparatory school and nothing more. A first step. A place where children would begin and then go elsewhere to finish. The children had other plans. Their progress was so striking that the guardians of Rishra came back, year after year, with the same request: do not let them leave. Take them further. Build the school they deserve. It would have been easy to decline. Expanding a prep school into a full secondary institution meant new classrooms, new teachers, new inspections and a level of risk the founders had never signed up for. They said yes. What followed was a climb, taken one class at a time. In 2004, the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations granted the school its ICSE affiliation, and a prep school became a secondary school. In 2016, the twenty-fifth year, the founders built the Silver Jubilee Hall, a stage that the school had once been too small to imagine. It became the first school in the district to place a smart board in every classroom. In 2023, ISC affiliation followed, and the school that had begun with Nursery now sends its students out from Class XII. Every step was earned. None was given. Today the school is carried forward by the next generation, Debdeep Bhaduri and Rudra Prosad Daw, with Ms. Tanushree Roy as Headmistress and Academic Head, on the same three-word promise the founders made thirty-five years ago. That is why the festival's emblem is a phoenix rising through the letter I. It is the story of a school that was never meant to grow this far, and grew anyway. INVICTUS, because thirty-five years of challenges never conquered it. SSS, Stepping Stone School, because every stone laid became a step for someone else to stand on. In our thirty-fifth year, we open our gates for the first time to the schools of Bengal, so that every young competitor who walks in may feel what our students have felt since 1991. Unconquered. INVICTUSSS 2026 - The Legacy of the Unconquered