Skip to main content

Staying Young



A WhatsApp message beeped a few minutes back as I logged on to the Net. Write something in the blog; don't disappoint your readers, said the message with a couple of emoticons.  The message was from a student of mine.



Yesterday my school officially bid farewell to the class 12 students. One of the students mentioned that I helped her discover the poet in her and also that she was a regular reader of my blog.  Namrin, that student, is an amazing poet. I’m happy to present her blog here.  A class 12 student who can write lines such as:
I was the one you were afraid to have and lose.
Twisted, so is fate.
I want to own this record,
I want myself.
is not just an ordinary student.  Students like her are a blessing to a teacher like me.  They keep me young.

The other day a colleague of mine remarked that I belonged to New Gen though I was the oldest in the staffroom.  I said, “When I was about 20 years, I stopped growing.”  One of the reasons why I love teaching is that the profession keeps me always twenty-some.  Being with young people is the best way to keep you young.  Of course, you should learn to manoeuvre through the interplay of a wide variety of emotions. 

Sometimes the love of a student can become uncomfortably intense.  I once suggested a healthy distance to a student.  Her response dismayed me, “I won’t keep a distance as long as you keep leaving footprints for me to follow.”  Her response made me feel proud of her more than myself.

Not so long ago, a student wrote about the two drops of tears that fell from her eyes on to her English notebook after the class 12 English exam was over.  “I realise,” she wrote, “that in life, some things are like that. We don't know why or how, but we feel strangely connected to it. Be it a book, a smile or a person. These are real, but every connection gets broken at some point. It's like the golden rule of connections.”

One of my Delhi students of yesteryears warned me recently not to be too articulate with my political views.  When I said I’m living in Kerala which is quite safe, his instant response was: “We live in a connected world.” 

We are connected.

Relationships need not end, as I replied to one of them.  They don’t, in fact.  Not because I leave footprints, but because the tear drops and the smiles endure.  My students mean the world to me.  They keep me young.





Comments

  1. This is a wonderful post. As far as connection is from both ends it is a healthy relationship but sometimes when the relationship is one sided it is painful.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The connection between teacher and students is generally simple and innocuous. So it is mutual too.

      Delete
  2. Thank you so much sir. For such encouragement and believing in me.. I'll never forget this.. And I'm sure I'll be grateful to you for all the good things that come out of this for the rest of my life. Really proud and blessed to have such a mentor in my life.
    Namrin.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You deserved more, Namrin. In given situations our options are often limited.

      Delete
    2. But you've opened me up to something that will keep me striving for more than just limited and that's more than I could have asked for from the past two years.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...