Teacher as Laundress

Teachers have to play multiple roles. When the school’s annual day comes, they become musical directors, choreographers, script writers, cosmeticians, and so on. This is the first time, however, I saw a teacher doing laundry too. This teacher is in charge of an item which has 20 artistes. A day before the programme she gets the required 20 costumes, all taken on rent from a professional renter of costumes. The rent per costume is a staggering Rs700. When the teacher checks the costumes, she finds them all soiled. A few of them have bloodstains too, menstrual blood presumably. She points it out but the school tells her to ignore it. She finds it insulting to hand over such costumes to her students and so takes the costumes home to launder them.

The first question that comes to my mind is about the professional ethics of the costume renter who charges exorbitant rents for costumes used many times by different performers without laundering. I learn that this keeps happening year after year and nobody bothers – not the school, nor the artistes who wear them. I also learn that there are quite a few conscientious teachers who take the trouble of getting the costumes laundered before handing them over to the artistes under their charge.

Why doesn’t the school check the costumes before ordering them? This is the next question. The answer is quite plain: there is no time. If you want it clean, you won’t get it. As simple as that. There are others waiting to take them. The ball goes back to the court of professional ethics. And there’s no such thing as ethics anymore in business. Ask Nirav Modi or his uncle Mehul Choksi.

There’s one more question I would like to ask. Aren’t entertainment programmes that stretch to 4 or 5 hours outdated? Five hours is the length of the annual day programmes of most schools I know in my neighbourhood. We live in a time when people have begun to abandon even movie halls (which used to be houseful at any time for any show) because all the entertainment they need comes home through various channels such as the TV or umpteen streaming services. Shouldn’t schools cut down their entertainment to an hour or so with just a few remarkable items?

I am told that students feel happy to be on the stage even for a brief while and so getting as many students as possible there is a kind of service to them. I doubt that. The more students you get on the stage, the more CDs you sell of the programme. This is business too. With as much ethics as the costume lender’s. This is selling bubble reputation to tender minds. There is more than business involved here. You are giving the tender minds wrong notions about life and achievement.

When the schools liberate themselves from crass commercialism, the teacher will be relieved from the laundry too.