Today I read here a post about a teacher who went to great lengths to help out a student of his. Brings me to what I always wanted to write about, but never quite managed it. Won’t hold longer.
The boy was a little sickly, prone to frequent attacks of cold forcing him to stay away from school. And he wasn’t any good in languages that had one too many consonants like four ‘ka’s, four cha’s… (Hindi, Marathi…). He had trouble telling one from the other. To add to his grief, the nouns in these languages had gender they had no business carrying at all. Besides these phonetically sooper-correct languages, drawing also brought him down. His rendering of objects made his teacher wonder if he (teacher) was seeing things right.
Well, suffice to say these subjects often messed up his grade and rank in exams. And there were times he couldn’t muster even pass-marks in these subjects. On those occasions the class teacher would personally plead with the Marathi/Drawing teacher taking the boy along – unbelievable? but that’s what he did. The teachers would oblige passing the boy with minimum marks. At least once it happened even when the boy had not taken the exam at all owing to sickness.
The boy never understood the gestures fully. The incidents receded in his consciousness as he moved on from sixth grade to the seventh and so on, over the many years of education and employment that followed. It wasn’t until he was into his late thirties and gotten quite worldly-wise that the memories surfaced from deep recesses of his mind and their full import struck him.
A class-teacher going out on a limb for him for no personal gain? And there were those teachers chiming in with him in his extraordinary (and irregular, of course) act.
I’ve never stopped kicking myself for not having gotten back in good time to esteemed Shri Manikkavaachakam (my class teacher), Ms Kamath (Marathi teacher), Shri Venkataramana (Drawing teacher who could draw with both hands at the same time)…to tell them what those gestures (though patently in violation of rules) meant then and mean even today, the feelings I’m awash with…While words fail me here, I do know it’s a debt that I’m incapable of ever repaying, a lapse too late to correct and a sin that’s unforgivable.
The only positive fallout – ever since it is my endeavor to express myself sooner than later to those whom I owe in life: parents, spouse and children, relatives, teachers, friends, colleagues… and often perfect strangers too.
End
Sanmargam 