Ground Report

I don’t recollect when was the first day I started the act of teaching in my life. Maybe, as the vague memories lead me to, I started to teach when I was barely over with my tables to ten. Ah! Tables what vivid scenes pop up before my eyes of those rhythmic and sonorous repetitions of tables, line by line from two to ten, day after day, week after week till every single repeater became well versed in repeating the lines. My students were from amongst the house-maids in the colony: well grown women old enough to be my aunty. And, I with all the dignity of a mature teacher would, with best of my efforts (whatever a child like me could), lead them in the recitals, teach them to write and give them home-works. I have seen my father doing it, my mother doing it and my grandfather, who was though a civil engineer, was a better teacher, doing it; so imitating them was not a big deal. Yes! We had teaching sessions amidst the siblings too, but this was a real teaching act then a make-up teaching act which is twice removed from reality.

In the colony everyone regarded me as a teacher’s son, so I had a lot of privilege amongst those who were taught by my parents earlier. This colony had a slum in its backyard which in due course of time converted to a colony (with brick-cement houses) of slum-dwellers. These dwellers from the slums got attracted towards the education-stuff and got entangled in our life. The backyard entry was via the lane in front of our house, so every morning or evening I could see scores of men and women moving out and coming in with their cleaning-paraphernalia. No, no, don’t overestimate the word ‘paraphernalia’; it was just a broom with a long stick to clean the road, a piece of board, a sickle-shaped picker and an iron wheel carrier to carry the filth collected to a place for disposal. This carrier, sans the rubber tyre, made a thundering sound as it moved on the concrete roads. One could hear these men coming and going sitting anywhere in the house. My going to school was mocked at, as I perceived, by the children from that backyard as freedom vis a vis fetters. Mixing up with them was out of question in the family of teachers because every reason in the family comes from books and books’ say – ‘bad company spoils character’.  So the intriguing ‘they’ were always ‘they’ and never ‘us’.

If bad character has to improve then it must come into the company of good, but then again the company will become bad with the advent of bad. This dispute of reformation is always there with us, with no clue to going from bad to good. But there are ways that can be explored, because bad people do turn to be good or very good. We live with a bias of being good and keeping away from bad, sans this bias we will tumble down to what is bad. Because, good is very hard to retain and bad easy to imbibe. From this point begins the job of a teacher!

The story telling will continue…