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The other day I was saying that father is the natural teacher of his son.
But fathers can also learn a lot from their sons, if they wish to. For this, however, the father should be friends with his son.
There are many tales of father-son duels like 'Jakkanna & Dankanna', the famed sculptors of the Chennakeswara temple in Karnataka; and the fighters 'Rustum & Sohrab'.
Incidentally, the English version of the story rendered in the epic poem, 'Sohrab and Rustum', was written by Matthew Arnold whose father,Thomas Arnold, was the famed HM of the Rugby School and so happened to be his teacher. Both of them have memorials in the Westminster Abbey.
Unfortunately my Father and I don't share memorials in the Westminster Abbey although I happen to be his student in his famed high school at Muthukur. I left home at 13 and so was never friends with my Father. As a consequence, he never learned anything from me, not even smoking...he was a pious man unlike me and was rather aloof. Indeed in later life whenever I felt rather close to him I used to address him as 'Sir' and he never objected...maybe he was pleased with it.
But he used to tell me with a twinkle in his eye the story of one of his senior colleagues who had to sit in the Eng Lit class taught by his own son.
It so happened that towards their retirement many HMs of Government schools in AP had to undergo a 3-month Refresher Course in their chosen subjects at the Andhra University at Vizagh. Father also came down to Vizagh for his summer Refresher Course in 1960 and so landed up as my junior there...I guided him on the whereabouts of his department and canteen and bus stop.
And that was when this gray-haired colleague of his had to sit down in their class and take his son's exam and pass (with grace marks).
I watched a curious incident of a father-son medico duo a couple of decades back. They came down to Madras to look up a patient who was their very close relative and had just then undergone a heart bypass surgery and developed post-operative complications in his ICCU. And the nurses and docs monitoring him were rushing in and out declaring that their patient had developed the unfortunate ARDS and was very critical...he recovered alright after a couple of days on tenterhooks.
The father-doc was asked by crowding laymen like me what this ARDS thing was. And he said it was short for:
'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome'
His son, who was in his twenties and just out of his medical college, corrected his dad at once saying:
"NO! It stands for Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome"
I was afraid there would be an ugly spat in public but the father-doc simply smiled and said:
"Is that so?"
and left it at that. I felt relieved thinking what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice...
Just now I Googled for ARDS and was tickled to know that both were right. During the father-doc's time it had meant: 'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome', but a generation later it stood for the son-doc's: 'Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome' since by then the medical science (if it is really a science and not witchcraft) tried to distinguish it from IRDS which required a different style of management...'I' stands, as you guessed it right, for 'Infant'.
I have always been friends with my only son although I didn't teach him how to smoke or drink and so he never learned them. But I learned and continue to learn a lot from him all the time.
You see, unlike Thomas Arnold and Matthew Arnold's times, I belong to a generation where there has been a tech revolution every decade or so. You learn with difficulty the Morse Code and they come up with teleprinters. You learn with equal difficulty how to tune a pocket transistor-radio and they come up with a wall-mounted HD TV.
And so on and so forth. It is not possible to expose your stark ignorance every time to the street-corner technician who arrives with his bulky kit and changes a blown cartridge fuse but charges you ten times the cost of that saying he had hell of a trouble 'troubleshooting'.
I managed to learn typing on a Remington RKN typewriter but when I had to compose my 300-page 'book' with Prof RSS, I had acquired a free IBM PC that came with Windows 98 (a failure) and a built-in Word 6.0. And time was running out and I wanted a teacher with whom I suffered no sense of shame.
And so I called up my son for help...he was just out of his Class X at the KV, IIT KGP and had composed and printed a rather good-looking Project Report on the PC of my friend NP in his home.
My son didn't turn out to be a very patient teacher...he is into project management as you know. So I had to face lots of rebukes from him for my slow-learning, but it was all in the family, so it didn't matter much.
A few months later I taught him how to manage Word 6.0's ugly Equation Editor which I learned all by myself, and so retrieved some of my lost glory.
Let me conclude this with a charming shlok which I often recall, particularly when Ishani chides me for my slow-learning of how to correctly pronounce: 'girl':
Meaning roughly:
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The other day I was saying that father is the natural teacher of his son.
But fathers can also learn a lot from their sons, if they wish to. For this, however, the father should be friends with his son.
There are many tales of father-son duels like 'Jakkanna & Dankanna', the famed sculptors of the Chennakeswara temple in Karnataka; and the fighters 'Rustum & Sohrab'.
Incidentally, the English version of the story rendered in the epic poem, 'Sohrab and Rustum', was written by Matthew Arnold whose father,Thomas Arnold, was the famed HM of the Rugby School and so happened to be his teacher. Both of them have memorials in the Westminster Abbey.
Unfortunately my Father and I don't share memorials in the Westminster Abbey although I happen to be his student in his famed high school at Muthukur. I left home at 13 and so was never friends with my Father. As a consequence, he never learned anything from me, not even smoking...he was a pious man unlike me and was rather aloof. Indeed in later life whenever I felt rather close to him I used to address him as 'Sir' and he never objected...maybe he was pleased with it.
But he used to tell me with a twinkle in his eye the story of one of his senior colleagues who had to sit in the Eng Lit class taught by his own son.
It so happened that towards their retirement many HMs of Government schools in AP had to undergo a 3-month Refresher Course in their chosen subjects at the Andhra University at Vizagh. Father also came down to Vizagh for his summer Refresher Course in 1960 and so landed up as my junior there...I guided him on the whereabouts of his department and canteen and bus stop.
And that was when this gray-haired colleague of his had to sit down in their class and take his son's exam and pass (with grace marks).
I watched a curious incident of a father-son medico duo a couple of decades back. They came down to Madras to look up a patient who was their very close relative and had just then undergone a heart bypass surgery and developed post-operative complications in his ICCU. And the nurses and docs monitoring him were rushing in and out declaring that their patient had developed the unfortunate ARDS and was very critical...he recovered alright after a couple of days on tenterhooks.
The father-doc was asked by crowding laymen like me what this ARDS thing was. And he said it was short for:
'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome'
His son, who was in his twenties and just out of his medical college, corrected his dad at once saying:
"NO! It stands for Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome"
I was afraid there would be an ugly spat in public but the father-doc simply smiled and said:
"Is that so?"
and left it at that. I felt relieved thinking what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice...
Just now I Googled for ARDS and was tickled to know that both were right. During the father-doc's time it had meant: 'Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome', but a generation later it stood for the son-doc's: 'Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome' since by then the medical science (if it is really a science and not witchcraft) tried to distinguish it from IRDS which required a different style of management...'I' stands, as you guessed it right, for 'Infant'.
I have always been friends with my only son although I didn't teach him how to smoke or drink and so he never learned them. But I learned and continue to learn a lot from him all the time.
You see, unlike Thomas Arnold and Matthew Arnold's times, I belong to a generation where there has been a tech revolution every decade or so. You learn with difficulty the Morse Code and they come up with teleprinters. You learn with equal difficulty how to tune a pocket transistor-radio and they come up with a wall-mounted HD TV.
And so on and so forth. It is not possible to expose your stark ignorance every time to the street-corner technician who arrives with his bulky kit and changes a blown cartridge fuse but charges you ten times the cost of that saying he had hell of a trouble 'troubleshooting'.
I managed to learn typing on a Remington RKN typewriter but when I had to compose my 300-page 'book' with Prof RSS, I had acquired a free IBM PC that came with Windows 98 (a failure) and a built-in Word 6.0. And time was running out and I wanted a teacher with whom I suffered no sense of shame.
And so I called up my son for help...he was just out of his Class X at the KV, IIT KGP and had composed and printed a rather good-looking Project Report on the PC of my friend NP in his home.
My son didn't turn out to be a very patient teacher...he is into project management as you know. So I had to face lots of rebukes from him for my slow-learning, but it was all in the family, so it didn't matter much.
A few months later I taught him how to manage Word 6.0's ugly Equation Editor which I learned all by myself, and so retrieved some of my lost glory.
Let me conclude this with a charming shlok which I often recall, particularly when Ishani chides me for my slow-learning of how to correctly pronounce: 'girl':
Yukti yuktam upadeyam vachanam balakaadapi
Anyad trinamiva tyajyam api yuktam padmajaananaa
The word of a child, if reasonable, should be accepted. All else should be rejected like a blade of grass even if it comes from the mouth of Brahma, the Creator.
..Posted by Ishani
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