High School teachers: Torchbearers of my life

Last month I had to fly to North Carolina for a weeklong training bootcamp.  I knew that the wait time at the San Francisco Airport would be a couple of hours so I prepared myself for the long haul by carrying along with me a book that would help me improve my knowledge on Virtualization and Networking.   One of the TSA officers who saw me reading the book was curious to know why I was doing this instead of spending my time browsing through social media sites on my mobile phone.  This made me recall a small but significant lesson I had learnt from my high school teacher B.N. Shankar nearly forty years ago.  Shankar, who was teaching us History and Civics, told us something that I never realized on that day all those years ago that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.  I never imagined that what he taught us on that day would have a profound effect on me for ever.

What Shankar taught us on that occasion was pretty simple, or so it appeared on that day.  He explained a scenario where you go to a movie theater.  You stand in the queue for about 45 minutes, then you purchase the ticket and watch the movie.  When you stand in the queue, do not waste time doing nothing or staring around.  Carry a book with you.  Read the book for those 45 minutes that you are stuck in the queue.  You may not be able to absorb the material in the book to the extent you would if you were to be reading the book in the quiet surroundings of your home.  Yet, whatever you read during this period of waiting would serve you in good stead and would make the time spent in the queue more productive from a knowledge derivative than if you were to idle away your time.  Today B.N. Shankar is no more but after all these years Shankar's words of wisdom still live in me and continue to be relevant!!!!!!!

This is after all one example of how my high school teachers influenced me during those formative years that I spent in Raghavendra High School, Malleswaram, when I was a green sapling, and how whatever I learnt during that vital three-year period has served me in good stead for a lifetime.  We never knew it at that time but what all our teachers were doing was that they were making us street smart, not just book smart.  Their thoughts, words and actions were making their way up our nerves into our brains, all the while happening in a slow, strong, insightful manner and getting hard coded into our psychology.  Our teachers were touching our lives and nurturing us into becoming adults with the right values and more importantly incorporating in us the tact, the critical thinking, and strategies that would serve us well in the yet-to-come forebearing future of our lives.  Unknown to us, our hidden treasures were being opened for us, we were being taught to take control of our lives and to be the custodians and torch bearers for ourselves and our near and dear ones.  Our teachers were compassionate about how they taught us and were always encouraging us to hold the candles and light the path ourselves into which we were walking.  To lead our lives with pride, dignity, integrity, determination and competitiveness.   It's amazing and mind boggling to imagine that a teacher's influence on a person is for ever and ever and not just confined to those few years when the students are learning from those teachers.

I am going to utilize this opportunity to talk about our Geometry teacher in our final year of high school.  B. Aravind Mitra was a godsend.  His name pretty much said everything about him, and his parents could not have chosen a better name for him.  For the connoisseur and the curious, Aravind means the Lotus flower and Mitra means friend.  Aravind Mitra was a once-in-a-generation kind of a teacher who knew what it meant to drill knowledge into the students's brains and who had his own, unique, innovative, unorthodox techniques to drive home the point.  To give you an illustration, before I met Aravind Mitra I always had difficulty comprehending how to express something in terms of something else, for example how do you express the volume of a 3 x 3 x 3 i.e. 27 cubic feet tank in terms of cubic metres.  This teacher knew how to break down the complex equation into a simple formula:

1 foot = 12 inches

1 inch = 2.54 cm = 0.0254 metre

Therefore 3 feet x 3 feet x 3 feet = (3 x 1 foot) x (3 x 1 foot) x (3 x 1 foot)= (3 x 12 x 0.0254) x (3 x 12 x 0.0254) x (3 x 12 x 0.0254) metre x metre x metre = 0.765 cubic metres = 1 metre breadth x 1 metre width x 0.765 metre height

Simple yet brilliant.  Plain yet meaningful.  Divide and rule.  Aravind Mitra showed that's there is no such thing as rocket science.  Nothing is impossible to understand.  Every complex problem is merely a mix and match of simple ingredients.  

No tribute written by me to our high school teachers is going to be complete without articulating on my Math teacher for three years, that is H.T. Kashi Venkatachar.  Of all the thirty or thirty five teachers during my academic run I consider HTK to be my favorite and the one teacher who influenced me the most in my life, who was a larger-than-life figure and who continues to be an inspiration to me right through my thoughts and actions.  HTK was everything that you could ask for in a teacher and much more than merely someone who taught in the class and walked away when the school bell rang.  He was a friend, philosopher, mentor and guide.  And a huge cricket fan too, something that strikes a chord in me and resonates with me.  HTK was one who went way beyond his call of duty, and like the saying goes, he was willing to bend backwards to do anything that would benefit his students.  I particularly remember HTK's efforts during the holidays just before our final year in high school started.  It so happened that our syllabus changed that year, and it was essentially back to the drawing board not only for the students but for the teachers too.  New concepts were introduced and they were intimidating enough to drive us scared.  We were lucky we had an exceptionallly brilliant student in our class by name Madhukar.  So while all of us, say 120 of us were on the streets playing cricket and enjoying our holidays, our Math teacher HTK and this bright bulb Madhukar used to meet every day, spend some eight hours together, resolving the puzzles in the Math, and bringing a method to the madness in those cryptic Algebra, Quadratic equations, Permutations and Combinations, nPr and nCr  --- enough to drive the brain go dizzy.  But for their efforts we, or speaking for myself, I would not have got through successfuly in high school and stepped into PUC and to Engineering down the road.  I am indebted to HTK and Madhukar for whatever they did, thinking beyond the horizon and outside the box to do whatever it took to get us over the line.  If there is one person on this planet that I would like to dedicate my lateral thinking skills to, I would give it to HTK.

When we were in high school we often used to take our teachers for granted but only when you look at them in retrospection way down the years do you realize how much of an influence they brought upon us.  The teachers were very empathetic, putting themselves in our shoes, looking at things and aspects from our individual perspectives, and rendering a powerful impact on us.  I left high school some 37 years ago but in a way I have never really left that school, and I still carry it with me in my mind, head, heart and soul.  The teachers did not merely teach.  They built friendships, they nurtured our childhood lives, they planted in us the seeds of curiosity, inquisitiveness, thirst for knowledge, and the ambition, motivation and intensity to succeed in life, and they made us better citizens.  And our teachers never expected anything in return nor did they get anything.  Other than the satisfaction of having made us better human beings amidst a collaborative community.  We owe it to our teachers.  All of us.  Every one of us.

My parents may claim that it was they who brought me to this world and that I belong to them.  However, no matter how much I owe it to my parents, a small part of me always belongs to my teachers.  And this is what makes me recall my high school teachers with pride, nostalgia and sentimentality.  For whatever they did to me and to us, we the lucky students who had the good fortune and privilege of coming under their tutelage.  It makes me emotional to talk about my high school teachers.  It's a sacred topic to me.  I remember my teachers every day.  Every single day of my life.  Without them I would not be here.