Guest Column - Teacher Man - Aniket Basu

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Teacher Man

This post is and is not about the book of the same name by Frank McCourt. I had half a mind to gift a copy of the book to GPS on his seventieth birthday, but was cautioned by my wife, who had tried reading Angela’s Ashes by the same author and had to put it away after a few pages because she found it too morbid.

So I had to drop that idea.

I was clueless for a few weeks, and also found myself short of time to produce a write-up that GPS requested, which was not a great state of affairs, because I was not enjoying my time on my job, which happens to be trying to teach physics to some unwilling students who are more interested in grades (and girls, which is not necessarily a bad thing) than in the subject.

I had gone to the extent of throwing a student or two out of a particular class, only to be told by the authorities that (a) it doesn’t look good, and (b) the students were having even more fun outside the class, so obviously banishing them from the classroom wasn’t working. Every other trick I tried to engage the attention of my students failed. A joke would make them laugh and get them on my side, but only for a few minutes. They seemed to have a collective amnesia for all instructions, threats and jokes alike, and drove me to despair.

It was one of those days, when I suddenly saw a bit of chalk stick to the board, and slide down its side, halting now and then, until it fell off the board and onto the floor.

For a few seconds, I forgot my class and stood there watching that bit of chalk, and then SK, the worst offender in my class, also joined in, laughing, excited by what he saw. Never mind the fact that he failed the first examination and was pleading unsuccessfully for three grace marks.

For a moment, I was transported back to a sight from almost a decade and a half ago, outside the Central Library at KGP. I was coming from RP Hall, which was the nearest from the institute (and also according to HNA, the reason I was the most frequent latecomer to class). I halted for a moment in the darkness as I watched GPS watching the wind swirling around a bunch of dry leaves and twigs in the corner. He had stopped while coming out and I still remember, in my mind’s eye, the slim silhouette holding a pose for a few brief moments that felt like eternity, and were I an artist of the calibre of Satyajit Ray, I might have reproduced a sketch for you all.

But since I am not, I will have to manage with a comparison of that moment with the scene in American Beauty when a teenaged drug peddler shows off his video of a plastic packet swirling in the wind at a wall.

Coming back to that bit of chalk – for a moment, it felt it united me and my unwilling students in our momentary desire to escape from the chains of the syllabus and our wish to smell the flowers.

The woods are lovely.

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gps:

Could it be this scene?


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qssvnjj5Moo


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