Delighted and Elated

School! What do you remember when you hear this beautiful, abstract and rhetoric word? Dressing in the perfectly pressed uniform, polishing the shoe, pulling up the socks, setting your bag according to the time table, mending the pencil to have the sharpest possible tip, meeting the best people who will stay in our hearts forever, sharing the food, playing in the school ground, listing the names of the talkative pupils on the board (if you were a class monitor), home works (as we called it so then), signing the diary and marks card, projects that started lately in our school days, preparing for the much awaited school day, school band, march pasts, petty and pretty fights, rage for a silly complaint raised against you? Name them. I’m sure you will want to go to the school once again, stand in the queue and sing the national anthem in the morning assembly all over again. I immensely miss the morning assembly, I am more than sure that we all do. 

We all know and certainly agree when I say it’s in school we make the best of friends, fall, rise, learn, and what not! Precisely we get acquainted with everything is needed to live the rest of our life. The quality of our perpetual life was shaped in our school. Having said all these, I do realize that I have missed on a very important aspect of our school life. That being our teachers. Of course we all do have teachers with whom we did not manage to build a good, decent rapport that many of our classmates managed to build. Also there were a couple of them who hated us and more than that and I do take the liberty of mentioning that there were few lecturers whom we despised for various know or unknown, silly or serious reasons. However deep this feeling was, be it from one side or mutual, all vanished the very moment we walked out through the school gates.

In spite of having egregious feelings for a few of our lecturers, we all have our own favorite ones. My favorite school teacher was the one who taught me mathematics in my 7^th grade. Her words “Math needs common sense” always reverberates in my mind. She adopted simplest and scientific techniques to teach young brains a method to frame mathematical formulae without actually memorizing. I continue to remember the way she taught, along with the formulae, especially the ones which are used to find the various attributes like area, surface are, volumes etc. of solid geometrical objects. As true as none can’t teach commonsense, if I have any trace of commonsense today, it’s all because of Sister Angella, who taught me mathematics.

An amazing and idiosyncratic feeling is what we experience when happen to meet someone we have always admired and respected, remembers you over time. I had the prerogative to experience this when I met Prashanth Sir, the one who taught Physics. I believe Physics needs as much as commonsense as Mathematics demands. Prashanth Sir is the one who helped me channelize my commonsense, both innate and acquired, towards Physics.

As known we give a lot of importance to board exams in our country. One such exam is that we take at the end of +2. A mere thought of this board exam gives rise to various vivid memories, instantly, which includes the fun I had as an hostelite, panic after I lost the hall ticket just before my Kannada exam and so on. One among them is my confidence that I’ll score just once less than full marks in Physics. Yes, I knew I would score the same marks. Prashanth Sir is the one who infused this confidence in me, along with me to hundreds, perhaps thousands now, of students.

I had been for lunch with my colleagues and I suddenly saw him having lunch in the same restaurant. I initially thought of meeting him immediately. Since I was having food, I thought of meeting him after the lunch as I didn’t want to be insolent. But I couldn’t resist. I washed my hands and started walking towards him. Although, from the moment I saw him I was completely sure that it was him, I began to doubt when I was walking towards him. To avoid the embarrassment, I thought of starting the conversation confirming his identity. I was determined to accost and start the conversation, with my first question being “Excuse me Sir, do you by any chance teach physics?” but I was taken away completely when he himself started the conversation by saying “HI”, totally unexpected, I could almost say, my heart danced with joy. Indeed he remembered me.

We being Indians, render a great deal of respect to teachers for they are the ones who guide us towards our destiny. Of course now this statement can’t be generalized to all, but it can’t be completely ruled out completely. We still continue to harbor the respect for our lecturers, irrespective of how influential they are in our lives. That reflects our culture and respect for anyone who have ever taught us, be it a word. Also perhaps we know that the ones who were influential are sufficient to surmount our not-so-good opinion for others who weren’t influential. After all, nobody is perfect.