An Ode To My Teachers

  I am glad that I was a student of the literature of some very well known veritable masters of the subject who orated and quoted eloquently and elaborately to put across a point. They helped me fall in love irreversibly with the world of literature.

I took up teaching and writing for I thought that it would be the best way to keep up the rendezvous with my love interest. I would often be disillusioned in the class when I found that my undergraduate students were hardly well-read and could rarely connect to the allusions. I had to explain them with reference to the context.

Though this turned out to be a tedious exercise, I decided to stick to it because I was seized by a passion to share the thought. Over the years I found myself illustrating words like lyres, gyres, crypts, rapiers, oboes, apparitions among others and even had to narrate the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to make a point because eighty percent of the class had no clue as to who Jack was or what he did! Nevertheless, the diehard optimist in me never let an opportunity to showcase the wisdom of litterateurs and their universality.

Recently I happened to be conversing with my erstwhile professor and recollected her characteristic detailed analyses of literature and she said that had drifted away from her style. The reason she assigned to her decision was even more baffling. Decades of delving into reams of literature and music had humbled her into a state where she no longer wanted to compare, classify or even comment on the classics. Instead, she preferred to absorb the contents as it were. She took to this recourse because she didn’t know anymore!

I was astonished, momentarily. Then I remembered what one of my music teachers’ had told me long ago. “Learning is a process which begins with the innocence of I don’t know and culminates with the humility of I don’t know.”

My teacher had reached her destination; I don’t know when I will.