It is not easy to kill a teacher. It takes time, effort and a lot of planning. When you set out to kill a teacher, be clear about what is that you want i.e. to kill the spirit of the teacher, his/her love for teaching, the creativity or the person itself.

The options are many and varied, but each option needs to be studied well, methods need to be chosen with care and then applied systematically.

Now teachers are like weed, you pluck the life of them, they still survive and sometimes even have sheer audacity to flourish and thrive but unlike weed which intoxicates others, our friends are drunk on nobility and a sense of achievement topped with a poor purse… can you beat this iron???

Funny!

Rare as the breed is getting , fewer being the takers from the new gen, they still seem to find space to grow their tribe. And I…don’t know how?

Most things that teachers do are beyond my understanding, now who goes home from to work for work!

I mean just work for school or college or whatever.

There is not an iota of respect nor material goods to bank on, if you don’t believe me, think of how the poor Ashwadhatma, son of the venerable Dhronacharya was ridiculed by the veryKouravas and Pandavas,all for a glass of milk!!!

Or maybe Chanakya whose poverty was a cause of worry for his family. The tribe today is at the mercy of the institutions who might just shut off a branch or roll back a programme or ask a person to take the walk out citing poor student feedback.

Well, sometime back , a long time back rather, a particular kinder garten teacher introduced herself to my naive , newly commissioned teacher self at Holy Cross Byron Bazar, Raipur, saying, ‘I have 53 children’, talking about her beloved kindergartners and I looked at her in awe and disbelief.

Sooner though, I heard it all the time, ‘my child’, ‘my children’, ‘that brat of mine’, ‘woh, bacha mera’ and so on that sometimes I felt the parents would file a court case against these teachers for owning up on ‘what is not theirs truly’!

My first hand experience of this attitude came when I would rush to Daly College, Junior School and ‘Rani Bhaskar mam’ and others would literally ‘shoo’ me off saying, ‘Woh to hameri beti hai, why are you here? We know to take care of her. You think you will get complaints, no madam, not from us!!!, while giggling and laughing aloud together.

In fact, the years my daughter studied at Daly College, I was instructed not to waste my energy walking from the Senior School to the Junior School, in between my classes because’ we are there for her, aren’t we?’ and a stricter’ nahi, don’t even turn up here with the loving authority of an elder!’ How can I forget , Madam Ragini Makhar, the exceptionally talented and devoted dance teacher, who extracted a promise from me to ensure that my daughter learns classical dance from a guru, before allowing me to take her from Indore to Bangalore.

Or Ms.Charu Agarwarl among others who always called my daughter, ‘meri bitiya’.

Now, this courtesy was not reserved for me alone, the teachers happily and possessively owned any child, and went on bragging about ‘my class’, ‘my child’, ‘my children’ and seriously were offended if someone talked ill of ‘her’ class.

Then said someone again at Holy Cross, Byron Bazar, ‘ Teachers’ children, you know, will receive all the ‘dua’ or goodwill of their beneficiaries, that is why we should continue in this profession.’

Seriously, given the challenges a normal teacher faces on a day to day basis, it is impossible to not conclude that she/ he might be deriving a peculiar sort of a ‘high’ in teaching , what else can justify their interest in this profession, I would not know.

Anyways, they continue to flourish in the true joy of giving, most do, atleast, yeah almost…..