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. Alka SaklaniFebruary 19, 2018 at 5:59 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 19, 2018 at 7:25 PM

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

      Delete
    2. Alka SaklaniFebruary 28, 2018 at 3:53 PM

      Yeah. Well said :)

      Delete
  2. realitieswithdelusionFebruary 19, 2018 at 10:04 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 19, 2018 at 10:09 PM

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

      Delete
    2. realitieswithdelusionFebruary 19, 2018 at 10:15 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more