Teaching is an act of Superstition
A friend asked me the other day, “Why do we celebrate Teachers Day when we’ve had Guru Purnima for aeons?”
“When Dr. Radhakrishnan became the President of India in 1962, some of his students and friends requested permission to celebrate his birthday. Dr. Radhakrishnan responded by saying that instead of celebrating his birthday, it would be his proud privilege if September 5th was observed as Teachers' Day. He believed that teachers should be recognized and honored for their contributions to society."
I was born into an extended family of school teachers. My mother and one aunt of mine taught mathematics. Another aunt taught Tamil literature, while another taught Social Studies and Hindi Literature.
"A doctor's son will be unhealthy. A teacher's son will be dumb"
So goes a commonly spouted, colloquial saying in Tamil, scathingly attempting to point out the pithy ironies of life.
To hell with it.
All I remember of my childhood days was slogging my ass off to prove this quote wrong.
Fantasies fueled my middle-class dreams.
"I want to be a business tycoon". I remember the stranger of my childhood showing off my ambition to hapless friends around me. My mother took three batches of tuition classes for students, one in the morning, and two in the evening, along with her school commitments to her employer.
As far as remember, my living room always had a whiteboard. When it was not used for the instruction classes, some times, it had chores written down for me to finish. Other times, it had my favourite thoughts. Regurgitated thoughts.
And so you can imagine the earthquake that must have happened when I met the most influential teacher of my life. He taught me the most powerful lesson of my life: Teaching is an act of superstition.
I wouldn't be working in agriculture today in a bespoke career design, if not for a teacher who stepped into my B-School many moons ago to take a course called "B2B Marketing"
It was my first day in the B2B Marketing Class.
He walked inside, carrying two glasses of hot water, bringing in an air of intrigue to the noisy classroom we were seated within the precincts of my B-School, far away in the Sahyadri mountains, well suited for steamy romantic episodes of Mills and Boons.
With his ponytail and a salt-and-pepper French beard, he was the last person you could imagine reviving the Gods of Marketing from the dead, long after rigour mortis had set in.
He paused for a while to register the curious bunch of puckered faces who did not know what to expect. "Whom do you think is the world's greatest strategist?".
When he spoke, his words were suffused with a rare effulgence that ordered us to sip them slowly. As slowly as you would sip hot water. It took the question a while to pierce through the placid air of silence.
We warmed up by naming our favourite heroes in the management pantheon- Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Lao Tzu, Lee Iacocca et al. I remember shouting 'Gengis Khan' that day. I somehow liked the sound of his name.
After patiently listening to all of us, he spoke in a self-assuring voice, a steady sound wave curve arising from the bottomless depth of his ocean, "Isn't nature the greatest of all? After all, it never hurries. Yet everything gets accomplished"
The response was expected from a farmer, the last brave man on Earth to pursue a life-long, intimate romance with the most mysterious woman ever known, yet, it stumped us completely, as we suddenly came to close terms with our limited world-views, tunnelled after decades of playing by the rules of the middle-class life-script our parents had imposed on us.
Throughout my childhood, my education was limited to downloading stuff available from others' minds. What a chaotic, swirling whirlpool of information my mind must have been, full of stuff, downloaded unhealthily without an iota of context!!
Naturally, it was discomforting, to say the least, when a professor came in and said, "In my class, you can't download stuff. We'll discover things together"
To participate in his class was to join the ceremonious act of inquiry, conducted religiously without the wiles of any agenda. Every view was welcome. Sacred to profane. The thrill of being a part of such an inquiry for the first time in my sixteen years of schooling was something ineffable. It was the first rush of bliss the mind felt when it realized, "Holy F****. I too have wings to fly".
I learned a fascinating insight that radically changed how I approached learning: I had confused teaching with learning.
Teaching is superstition. Learning is real.