Metamorphosis

Those amongst us who have not been hauled up for their indifferent, or worse, substandard performance in school life will probably not understand the psychology of a non-performer. Even if they manage to overcome their deficiencies in later life, fortuitously or otherwise, the stigma they acquired at a young age often has a propensity to affix itself to their minds, till at least that final day when the selfsame minds are forced to abdicate their proclaimed supremacy over matter.

I need to confess that I was one of those branded good for nothings in early school life. Going by the marks one is awarded in the tests which decide one's right to continue to wear a school uniform, my parents were getting increasingly apprehensive that my attendance in the school I went to was unlikely to be suffered much longer. They knew little more of course than the contents of the performance reports (or "their licences to thrash me hard") that I carried back home, to be signed by them and recycled back to school, confirming that the home-punishment awarded had been "executed" with due precision. If they did, I would have sunk deeper into the river of suffering that my school life had transformed into. Amongst other things, a ritualistic ordeal I had to suffer at school was the regularity with which I would be sent out of classrooms to stand in the open courtyard in full view of the entire school, presenting thereby for the rest of the students an example of a boy to maintain a safe distance from.

There is little point in following up these grizzly details except to note that towards the end of a particular year in the distant past, my parents had little doubt left in their minds that there was a slim chance at best that I would be promoted from the sixth to the seventh grade. Since this would have amounted to a total surrender, they opted for what might have appeared to them as a somewhat more respectable alternative, viz. retreat from the battlefield. They took me out of school to be coached at home, primarily by my mother, but occasionally also by my father and seven year older brother. The plan of action, however absurd it might have appeared to impartial observers, was to elevate my scholarly abilities to a plane that would appeal to some of the best known schools at the time and help me emerge from the garbage pile under which my potential lay buried. My flight to distinction refused to take off with dogged determination needless to say and I was accordingly admitted to the least known school in the locality, one that did not stand on ceremonies such as admission tests at all.

Not that I made much of an impression on the teachers in this new school either and my future appeared to be all but sealed, when one fine morning a neighbour approached my mother with the information that a new school had recently come up and it was being run by a gentleman who had somewhat novel ideas about teaching. It was no run of the mill school in other words, for most of the teachers it recruited had no previous experience in teaching at all. They were not eminent people either, but many of them appeared to be endowed with an aura that suggested that they could well be launched into eminence in the not too distant future. Not as teachers probably, but as ... well as people bearing the tag of eminence.

Why this dubious message impressed my parents I have little idea about, but without much hesitation at all they transferred me to the new school in the middle of the year as a student of the seventh grade. The task was relatively simple, given that a newly opened school couldn't exactly afford to turn off "learners" till its classrooms are adequately filled up.

I found myself sitting therefore in a new classroom one day, waiting along with a handful of boys and girls, all strangers to me, waiting for the teacher to arrive. The classroom looked more like a small boardroom, with a large table standing in its centre and students sitting around it in brightly painted blue and red chairs. The table itself, however, was invisible under a length of cloth that had a coarse look about it. When the teacher arrived and sat at the head of the table, the boardroom scenario was complete with a Chairman in action.

He was a large person wearing his hair longer than most school teachers normally do and carried a pile of exercise books in his arms which he promptly deposited on the table with a thud. As I later found out, they were the homework exercise books he had brought back to distribute back to the students. His voice was loud and power of observation very keen. He spotted me immediately and remarked in his immaculate English accent, "Ah! We have a new student I see. What's your name?" His personality commanded immediate reverence and I stood up and answered his question with due respect. He repeated my name and quite surprisingly he did so with a perfect Bengali intonation this time and changed gears quickly back into his British accent.

"Be seated please," he said. "Tell me now, do you know your tenses?"

"Yes Sir," said I, brimming with confidence.

"Well, how many tenses are there in the English language?" he asked.

"Three," said I, "past, present and future."

My peers began to snicker as soon as I said this, but the teacher didn't. He gazed at me for a while with infinite kindness it seemed and finally went on to say, "You are a big boy now. For big boys we don't have three tenses you know." Then he looked back at the class that was already used to his teaching and boomed out, "Well, how many tenses?" "Twelve" the entire class sang out, leaving me completely confused.

And then a game followed, as breathtaking for me at that young age as the Borg-McEnroe classics that kept me glued to the TV many years later. "Verb - to eat -- past perfect!" called out the teacher. The whole class yelled out to answer. "Verb -- to sing -- present continuous!" The students appeared to enjoy themselves immensely as they came up with the answers. Some had wrong answers too and the teacher caught them with alacrity. And then, finally, he went to the passive form and asked someone to conjugate the verb "to be". Great merriment ensued as the boy fumbled and the teacher joined the fun. I laughed too, though I had no idea why I was laughing. *

Yet my excitement grew every day as did my interest in the classroom. A dramatic change had overtaken my teenage life. I had metamorphosed. It took me a few weeks at most, with my mother's help, to learn what the twelve tenses were all about and before we had graduated out of grade seven, the teacher had made us familiar with most of the standard figures of speech in the English language. As I remember, one of his examination questions was:

Many years later, almost an eternity later, I wrote a post in IL bearing the title "Is Life Worth Living? It Depends Upon the Liver." This post, the title of which I learnt from one teacher, I had dedicated to another.

Both these teachers are now no more. The second one did get an introduction in these pages. But the glory of the first one remained unsung till today.

His name was Utpal Dutt, one of the greatest actors India has produced to my knowledge. He was less than thirty years old when I met him on that fateful day I didn't know my tenses. Neither my family nor I had any notion of where I was headed at that point of time. A porter in a railway station at best or a tea-stall owner at worst, would have been what my acquaintances might have predicted with confidence. Yet, by the time grade seven was over, I found to my utter disbelief that I stood at the top of the class! The magician had ensured that report cards had ceased to be a terror to reckon with.

By the time we left school, we were reasonably acquainted with some of the best classics in the English language. Classics that few Indian school students were lucky to come across during those faraway days. Gray's Elegy, Tennyson, Dickens, Chaucer and most important of all, Shakespeare -- in the original of course. Even if I have turned into a failure of sorts, the beauty that he brought home to us still lives inside me. It keeps reminding me that my life is not entirely wasted.

I will not write about his teaching skills. Anyone who has seen him in action on the stage or the screen will have little difficulty imagining how he would have introduced us to Shakespeare. We saw Othello or Macbeth or Hamlet right in front of our eyes. But there is one anecdote that I cannot help sharing with you even at the risk of making this composition inordinately long. As he was teaching in the class one day, a book fell from the table and landed on the shoes a boy was wearing. A book being Saraswati and the boy, having hailed from a middle-class Bengali family, picked up the book and, before replacing it on the table, touched his forehead with the book as a mark of respect for the Goddess of Learning. Mr. Dutt did not miss the boy's action and called out to him.

"Why did you do that?" he asked, frowning quite visibly.

The boy was too timid to answer. Mr. Dutt repeated the question, more loudly this time. And then he changed to his comic best. "Idiot," he howled. "Nincompoop, dummkopf! What is a book for if it turns you into a superstitious buffoon?"

He kept staring at the boy, as the rest of the class kept giggling, even though each one of us would have behaved exactly the way the boy had. But the comic element that Mr. Dutt had precipitated on us made us roar in amusement. And then the whole class began to almost choke with laughter when he suddenly noticed the book he was himself holding, doubled up with all the dramatic talent at his disposal and hit his own shoes with it a few times. Then he stood up, found back his breath and began to teach again as though nothing had happened at all. As far as I recall, it was the The Tale of Two Cities that he was teaching us on that day.

It is time that I called it a day. But before I do so, I need to tell you the secret of the boardroom table. It was indeed a large table as I found out, a table-tennis board. As soon as the lunch bell rang out, the students would remove the cover and practise playing table-tennis everyday. That's where I learnt playing the only game I have ever played seriously.
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*Years later, I found out that the Japanese language has a way of conjugating intransitive verbs in the passive voice!

 

Dear glascobaby,

Thank you for your response. I was just lucky, very lucky. But you are right, few teachers can compare with the one I described. There is so much to write about him that I have written a book (in Bengali) that introduces him to the world as a great teacher. Few know about this. People know him only as an unparalleled actor. He was not the only teacher I was lucky to study under. There were others too. I have described them in my book as well. Perhaps I will speak of them here one of these days. It was on account of these people that I knew at a very young age that I wished to go for the teaching profession. Actually, I wanted to be a school teacher, but ended up being a professor in a research institute.

There is nothing much in the quote. Just a joke from the French humorist Molière. It means that life is short, whereas death is endlessly long. Perhaps there is a moral in the quote. You have so little time given to you to achieve whatever you wish to achieve.

oj

 

You are welcome friend!

oj