Skip to main content

Silence and Redemption


This is a promotional post, let me be honest. 

I've started a YouTube channel. A way to keep me busy and cheerful during the retirement that I'm opting for from March 2025. But teaching runs in my veins. So I will continue to teach for as long as I can. 

My students have stopped listening in class saying that they can learn from YouTube. So I thought of shifting myself to YouTube. Let my students and anybody's students get better interpretations of lessons than what YouTube is currently providing. That's my intention. 

Since students of today want everything in capsule form, I intend to present all the lessons in just ten minutes. My presentations are titled A Lesson In 10 Minutes. Above is my ten-minute lesson on the poem Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda. 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    Good for you... Feeling as if one is contributing even in retirement is very important. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Yam. I can't leave teaching for a while yet.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Take your time. It's meant for school students, though.

      Delete
  3. That's a great idea. They don't want to listen to you? Then can listen to you on video. Easier on you ;)

    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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let...

Yet another Christmas

  “Please, I beg you not to turn us away,” Joseph says to the innkeeper once more. He has been pleading with the innkeeper for some kind of a place where his wife Mary could give birth. Joseph, Mary, innkeeper - they were all kids from the primary school of the parish. Jenny was sitting in the audience watching the Christmas skit presented by the little children. She knew what would come: the innkeeper would shut the door saying rudely that he didn’t have any more rooms left. Especially for a couple that didn’t have anything much to give in return for all the troubles they were going to create with a delivery and what not. Then Joseph and Mary would go to a cowshed and the cows will be far more benign than humans. Cows are great creatures, Jenny learnt recently from her country’s dominant political party. If they give birth to a female calf, they are greater still. That bastard in your belly ! Her mother shouts at her a million times a day referring to the baby she is carry...