Skip to main content

I’m learning



‘Can you teach a 55-year-old man to drive a car?’ I asked the woman who sat in the driving school’s office. That was four years ago. I had quit Delhi and taken up job in Kerala. Since Maggie and I worked in a residential school in Delhi which provided us with staff quarters on the campus, we had never thought of buying a car. For emergency, there was my ancient Bajaj Chetak.  

‘Why not?’ The woman gave me a broad smile. She was nearly as old as I was. ‘Recently a 60-year-old man got his license through us.’ Her son was the instructor and he succeeded in teaching me driving in a few weeks. I wasn’t quite confident in the beginning and even thought of giving up more than once.  My nights were haunted by spectres in the shapes of gear lever and other car parts. But learn I did. Eventually I bought a car and drove through the rugged terrains of surrounding villages just to reinforce the confidence that had found its way into my being.

I am not a reluctant learner, however. On the contrary, my WhatsApp status has always been ‘At school – always learning.’ I learn something new every day. It may be from the books I read [and I read a lot], from my students [and they are excellent teachers], or from the society around [at the workplace, especially].

My recent book, Autumn Shadows, is the story of my constant learning. Life has been an inexorable teacher for me. Even the publication of the book taught me a profound lesson: hardly anyone is interested in my life story. It taught me some minor lessons too. For example, a blogger friend of mine wrote the following review:


I learnt that people can lose their patience for very frivolous reasons. I messaged that friend on how to solve the problem the final solution being to return the book to Amazon and receive a refund of her money. That friend chose to ignore every message of mine! Friendships can be as brittle as that. But resilience is one of the many virtues that life has taught me.

I keep learning. Life is nothing but a series of lessons. And learning has no age limit. It should not have, at any rate.

PS. Written for




Another review at Amazon

xZx

Comments

  1. Vartika GoyalJuly 27, 2019 at 9:50 AM

    It is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it. Your book is on my reading list :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 27, 2019 at 10:24 AM

      Thanks, Vartika. I'd love to hear your views on the book.

      Delete
  2. Durga Prasad DashJuly 27, 2019 at 9:53 AM

    Your own life is a great example of how learning is a life long process.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 27, 2019 at 10:27 AM

      The tragedy is that a lot of people stop learning too soon.

      Delete
  3. Arvind PasseyJuly 27, 2019 at 11:06 AM

    Loved this: 'At school - always learning!' :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more