Taking stock once more

My daughter has had an interesting and (for her-) new experience. Read about it here. This is one of the reasons I have sent her off to a big city, awful as the wrench has been.

Rashmi in her latest blogpost has been reflecting upon what I have done for her over the last few years. Anyone who reads it with attention will see this relationship with me has added a major dimension to her life, something she has come to value highly, and not something that has been a cause of any kind of trouble. Vaishnavi is another girl who could tell you. This is precisely the kind of thing I try to do with all my pupils, succeed in doing with a few, and have always dreamt of doing with very large numbers, as witness what I said in the post titled ‘Last Dream’. It needs a lot of intelligent interest, attention and faith on the part of the pupil, too, of course. So I fail with most of those who pass through my tuitions for a few years; no surprises there. Also, perhaps it’s really a good thing that I don’t have to attend to too many people outside my classes – one cannot really give that kind of intense quality time to thousands, or even hundreds of people at once, they all become mere Facebook-friends. An old boy on the phone reminded me yesterday. It has been well said that ‘Not my will, O Lord, but Thy will be done’.

I have always said that these two blogs are extensions of my classes. My best readers have told me they can often actually hear my voice while they are reading. Now that there have been 200,000-plus pageviews, 300-odd members, and this blog routinely gets 800 to 1000 visits every week, I think things are working the way I wanted. They will work even better if my readers interact more, with me and with one another, using these blogs as a common platform. I assure you, nobody with a mind of his or her own ever regretted doing that with me. And the hundreds of posts on these blogs can give you all the talking points you need. Do explore them a bit more assiduously: don’t restrict yourself to the home pages…

A passing thought: while the rumour mill among the parent generation in this town (my dad’s 25 years ago, and now my own) is still almost as busy as ever gabbling away about me to glory, few parents use the internet to read my blogs. The general public opinion about what sort of man I am would have become very very different – and much closer to reality – by now if they did. But no matter. They will die being busy with inconsequential things, as Rashmi has described. So many in fact have already!

The older I grow in teaching, the more deeply I realize how awesome a job it is, and how many of us spend our whole working lives without ever guessing that! Most of us never become more than mere instructors, ‘covering the course’ for some piffling examination be it in physics or history, cooking or gymnastics, painting or music, surgery or law; and it is all so pathetic, because those who can’t learn that kind of stuff from books on their own won’t, instructor or no instructor, and those who can don’t really need instructors at all! No one except he who can show me how to live better in a non-trivial sense (meaning makeup and jewellery and decking up my rooms) qualifies to be called a teacher, and understood in that way, most of us never meet three real teachers in our whole lives, in school or in the university of life. And I also understand that I have, more and more consciously over the years, tried to be the kind of teacher who deserves the title. Much of all the trouble I have had has stemmed from that urge, all the good that has happened has derived from it too. I myself have found all my real teachers only in books… the Buddha, Socrates, Tagore, Vivekananda, Russell, Galbraith, Asimov…; not one teacher I have met in my whole life could hold a candle to these men, in the kindergarten or the university. That is one of the few regrets I shall take to my grave. And maybe the satisfaction of knowing that some people have acknowledged, at least to themselves, that I tried uncommonly hard, much harder than anyone else they have known.

To those who do have this feeling that getting to know Sir up close will make a big difference to their lives, but are still not sure how to, or think they cannot help always having more important and pressing things to do, I shall only say, seize the day. Tomorrow it might be too late.

And you had better start by admitting two things to yourself: a) you have never really made good use of your time till this day, and b) whether you are 14 or 40, there is nothing that you need less than a great number of ‘friends’. They are holding you back from finding out who you are, what you want, and where you would like to go…