Tomichan Matheikal's blog

I am very wary of people who are religious by profession.  My experience is that they are more eager to receive than give.  They look for donations, offerings, and other means of accumulating wealth without doing any creative or productive work.  So it did not come as a surprise to me when a friend of mine narrated his experience. His school was taken over recently from a Trust by a religious cult.  One of the first things the cultists did was to curtail the rights and privileges of the staff.  Given below is an extract from a letter issued by them to some of the staff members, most of whom have been working in the institution for about ten years. Name of school and designation of staff blacked out The Trust which was running the school formerly was paying the staff according to recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission, though a few allowances were not given due to financial constraints.  Had it not been for the financial constraints, the Trust would have paid th

Teaching extends far beyond the classroom A few of my students on the bank of the Ganga The above ad appeared in today’s [10 Sep] Times of India ( Ascent , the job vacancies supplement).   The school wants both teachers and “coaching experts.”   While the teachers will be paid a salary of Rs 22,000 per month, the coaching experts will be paid from “Rs 9 Lac to 12 Lac” annually.   Moreover, “Higher start can be considered for highly deserving candidates” in the case of coaching experts – but apparently not in the case of teachers.   As a teacher I was amused by the discrepancy between the remunerations of a tutor and a teacher.   The job of the tutor (or coaching expert, as the ad calls him/her) is to prepare “students competing for Board Exams & for IIT, AIEEE, PMT, NDA etc.” Why is there so much discrepancy between the remunerations, I wondered naturally.   Is it tougher to prepare students for competitive exams than teach them the subject, instil values in them

“Welcome to the Land of Gods” is a signboard that will greet you the moment you reach the Garhwal Himalayas.   What Arun Kolatkar wrote about Jejuri is quite true about the Garhwal Himalayas too: “what is god / and what is stone / the dividing line / if it exists / is very thin / at jejuri / and every other stone / is god or his cousin” (in the poem, A Scratch ). On my way to Gomukh from Gangotri My recent trekking to Gomukh with a group of 35 students taught me quite many a lesson about gods of all hues including wealth. We started our trekking from Gangotri soon after breakfast.   Gangotri, as the name implies, is (supposed to be) the origin of the holy river Ganga.   We had reached Gangotri a day before our trekking with enough time left for a wandering in the holy mount.   One of the places that caught our fancy during our wandering was the wooden cabin of a Baba (sage) who lives very close to the place where the Ganga spouted forth lustily through the gap between two r

I am a teacher in an exclusively residential boy’s public school in Delhi.   The parents of each of my students pay an annual fee of about Rs 200,000.   That’s nothing much compared to the fees charged by international schools in Delhi. Yet that’s quite a lot compared to the annual per capita income of an Indian.   So I, as a teacher in such a school, would expect certain standard of behaviour from my students.   For example, I would expect that the students want value for the money that their parents are paying ( paisa wasool , is that the right phrase?)   I would expect my students to gain as much as they can from the classes, from the sprawling playgrounds (which most Delhi schools cannot afford), and from the very routine of a residential school. What do I, as a teacher, actually see?   I see my students trying to bunk off from classes.   Ok, you can blame the teacher for not trying to make the classes as interesting as Kapil Sibal’s CCE envisages them to be.   I see my stud