Skip to main content

Roles I live



A husband at home, a teacher at school and a writer at the hobby desk: these are the major roles I play in my life.  Switching from one to another is a seamless task for me.  The easiest and the most interesting among them is being a writer.  That’s a role which doesn’t involve any other individual.

Being a husband is pretty easy too since only one other individual is involved and she understands my eccentricities and insanities too well.  The other day a colleague of mine mentioned to me rather facetiously the counsel she gave to another person.  If a couple can’t get along happily together they should either separate or accept the destiny stoically.  I think Maggie possesses enough stoicism to make the getting along as happy as humanly possible.     

Image from wallbee
At school, I am a professional performer.  A couple of weeks back, a student asked me in the class why I never smile outside the class though I do it all the time inside.  That was an epiphany for me.  I used to think that I smiled a lot outside the class too.  “You look too serious outside,” the boy insisted on butting it in. 

I imagined myself looking like the biblical Yahweh with a grey head and a grey beard rounded off with an executioner’s demeanour, outside the class.  The thought amused me enough to smile at the student who brought home an epiphany for me. 

“Maybe the smile is part of my job here,” I said to the class.  “Professional smile.”  I grinned.  “A year more and we will say goodbye to each other.  You will go your way and forget me.  I will carry on smiling at the new faces that will come in.”

I ignored the murmurs that rose in a corner like the sound of the dry leaves falling from the teak tree on to the gravelled yard of my home in the dead of the night.  The real epiphany came the next morning.  A student confronted me with the question, “How could you make such a statement?”

“Which statement?”

“That you will forget us after we leave school.” 

“Isn’t that the natural course?” I smiled.  “We all get on with our lives shelving the past into some cosy recess of our memory.”

“There was a big argument after school yesterday.  Some students were upset to think that you are a mere professional.  Your smile is a pretension, they said.  You love teaching but not the students, they argued.”

I smiled again.  Am I merely playing a role in the class?  I put the question to the student. 

“I think you didn’t mean what you said,” the student looked into my eyes probingly.

“I remember a lot of students whom I taught in 1980s, the beginning of my career as a teacher,” I said. “Can we really forget people?  Don’t they leave indelible marks in our being?”

The student’s eyes sparkled.  “I knew it,” she said as she turned to the door like a child who had got a new gift.

I was left feeling staggered.  No, I’m not playing a role, I realised.





Comments

  1. Excellent observation but do we really forget, I think we never also pupils also remember us to tell their stories to their next generations...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. A lot of students linger on in memory for years and years. I'm sure we remain in their memories too similarly. I hope their memories are pleasant enough 😀

      Delete
    2. Hope it should continue otherwise we will also become robots..

      Delete
    3. The world is making robots of a lot of people. I hope it won't make one out of me too. :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to