Safa Febin translates for Rahul Gandhi in Karuvarakundu on Wednesday. Ashraf Padanna

A Class XII student’s translation of Rahul Gandhi’s speech into Malayalam from English without any preparation has gone viral and earned widespread appreciation.

Before addressing students of Government Higher Secondary School in Karuvarakundu village in Malappuram district, he asked them if anyone could translate him.

After a little hesitation, Safa Febin, daughter of a teacher at the local Madrasa came on stage and expressed her willingness.

She also did her job brilliantly, and after completing his speech, Gandhi called her near him, shook hands and presented a bar of chocolate. She also received huge claps from the audience at the end of each sentence.

He was at the school to inaugurate a science lab, built using the money allotted by the local legislator and Congress leader AP Anil Kumar from his constituency development fund.

“Most of us senior students understand English, but several smaller ones do not. Maybe realising that he asked us if there was anyone who would be willing to translate,” the 11-year-old later told a television channel.

“He had not come with a translator. He said that he would like it if any of us translated his speech. My friends and teachers encouraged me. The decision was in the spur of the moment, and I went up on the stage.”

She found him extremely considerate, and he slowed down and made it easier for her to translate. The most crucial point about Gandhi’s speech, she felt, was that he asked students to remain curious all their lives. “He said children have this trait to be curious, they ask questions, but as we grow up, we all lose this trait as we grow older. It is the essence of being a human. A child is always looking to understand the world around them,” she says.

“He said every child has a scientific temper in them. We need to cultivate that. No child has hatred in them. Hatred and anger are the two components which destroy scientific temper. This is important.”

Gandhi encouraged the students to use the lab to their benefit and wished several of them would hopefully run companies, join politics and become lawyers or doctors. He asked them never to lose their scientific temper.

Citing the death of a schoolgirl in a classroom from snakebites in his Wayanad constituency, Gandhi said the conditions of schools in Kerala “is the best in the country but still not good enough.”