Tomichan Matheikal's blog

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

From NIM, Uttarkashi “I’M IN MY PRIME, THERE’S NO GOAL TOO FAR / NO MOUNTAIN TOO HIGH,” says a quote from Wilma Rudolf, displayed on the campus of the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM) at Uttarkashi in the Uttarakhand state of India.      Uttarkashi was the base camp of our Himalayan trekking simply because our tour manager has a resort in that place.   The resort consists of permanent tents which look like temporary ones.   The look is important.   We live in a world that gives much importance to looks.   The hospitality, however, was of 5-star standard.   The resort can indeed boast of a high standard.   My students were happy with the facilities provided there.   They love appearances.   Illusions are real at the age of 16 or 17. Our bus backtracked from here What I wanted, however, was the rough trekking and the challenge it would provide to my aging body.   We started our journey from the star-class resort in Uttarkashi toward Gangotri by the two buses that we

“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

When I took up my present job in Delhi at the age of 41, leaving my previous job in a romantic place like Shillong, what I really wanted was a nice place to live and enough money too.   It didn’t take me much time to find the present place and job which fulfilled both conditions.   An excellent campus (a school) with more greenery than most schools in Delhi can afford.   What Providence (I am an agnostic, please) gave me was better than what I had expected.   A green campus, enough place to move around even in the kitchen of the accommodation that was provided, and – best of all – a cool environment all along the scooter ride from where the city ends (Chattarpur).   I used to love those scooter rides.   Even my wife did! That was 11 years ago.   Today, I wouldn’t like to go out of the campus.   The moment I step out it’s the devil of a dust that greets me anywhere.   Gone are the days of a nice environment.   The environment has been killed.   The marble industry took over the

The wicked grow like the palm tree.   Grow taller and higher and mightier.   The Bible says that, though not in the same words.   Reliance Communications has been awarded the ‘Best Quality of Service Award’ for the 2 nd consecutive year at ET Telecom Awards 2012.   Thank you . The above message landed in the Inbox of my Reliance mobile phone which connection I’ve been sticking to out of necessity for eleven years.   I added a line to that message and sent it as many friends as possible.   The line I added is: Not much money was reqd to buy d award! Reliance must have bought the award.   Capitalism is about buying and selling, and not quality of service or professional ethics, let alone moral values. While I cannot complain about the services of Reliance mobile phone, I have a whole lot of complaints about the company’s internet services.   I wrote earlier too about it.   For example, Corporate Greed – Reliance Style .   I have a Reliance 3G net connection.   This co

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

In 1978, the Catholic theologian Hans Kung raised a few pertinent questions in his book, Does God Exist?   “Has religion any future?   Can we not have morality even without religion?   Is not science sufficient?   Has not religion developed out of magic?   Will it not perish in the process of evolution?   Is not God from the outset a projection of man (Feuerbach), opium of the people (Marx), resentment of those who have fallen short (Nietzsche), illusion of those who have remained infantile (Freud)? …” The decades that followed proved that the theologian’s anxieties were ill-founded.   Religious fundamentalism of all sorts flourished in the 1990s all over the world.   The communist USSR collapsed politically as well as ideologically, and people began to flock toward religions perhaps in order to fill the vacuum left by the Marxist ideology that had vanished.   Samuel P Huntington says in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of world order , “In 1994, 30 percent