Skip to main content

The gentle kiss of Appreciation

Maggie and I with a student - all smiles


I am a loyal critic of Modi. Hence those people who don’t know me personally tend to see me as a disgruntled citizen, a grumpy old man always finding fault with his government. Those who know me personally will laugh merrily at that virtual image of mine. Especially my students.

I am a merry person in the classroom. A friend more than a teacher. I smile most of the time. I laugh whenever there is an opportunity. I encourage my students to create occasions for smiles and laughs. I appreciate even the smallest achievements of theirs in the most generous terms possible so much so once a student asked me why I think everything they do is “very good” or “excellent”. I answered her with the wisdom borrowed from Marcus Aurelius that I wanted them to look at the stars so that one day they would be running with them.

Appreciation is a miracle-worker especially with youngsters. How many thousands of times have I seen faces blossoming like fragrant flowers merely because I said something like ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’? Appreciation does far more than that. It makes the student strive for greater achievements the next time and still greater the next time. I keep getting better and better results as time moves. I keep seeing miracles unfolding. All because I say ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ or their equivalents when required.

It was Lewis Carroll who imagined the snow as a lover of the trees and fields. The snow kisses them gently. And then it covers them up snug with a white quilt. Does it tell them, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again’? Does it tell them in soothing words that they need this rest?

Appreciation is something like that. A gentle kiss, a snug cover, the caress of a whisper.

Let me return from this poetry to the prose that I began with. I would like to appreciate my government too. I am not a grumpy old man inspecting the sewers of my country. I would love to say ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ to my Prime Minister too. Give me a chance, please.

PS. Prompted by Indispire Edition 415: Can you share unselfishly, genuine appreciation of someone's accomplishment? #firgun

Comments

  1. A beautiful post that's put a warm smile in me. So glad to read that you are the way you are with your students. I'm a firm believer of the 'art of appreciation.' Even as a ripe old adult, I respond better to 'very good' than 'could've done better;)'.
    I especially like your appeal to the Govt. Made me smile even more widely.

    ReplyDelete

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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation