Tashmai Shri Gurave Namah

First the sandalwood tilak on the forehead and a single shrivelled-up rose with its aluminum foil-wrapped stem tucked into the shirt pocket. This was the pre-entry ritual. Then upon entry, the rapid switch to attention pose followed by the belting out in chorus of ‘Happy Teachers’ Day, Sir and Mam’.

This is how Teachers’ Day was celebrated in his department year after year. This year was no exception. But then this year was also different. It was the last institutional celebration Subrat was attending. He will be retiring in a few months. So it would be the last time that he would bask in the warm champagne of that student invocation: ‘Tashmai Shri Gurave Namah’.

Couched in the deba bhasa, the venerable epigram made him and others believe – at least for the short duration that the chanting lasted — that they were revelling in the dateless, ageless tradition of the shishya’s unquestioned veneration for the guru. By next September, all this will be a distant memory.

Only a few messages will streak across the screen of his mobile. With his authority gone, he would be reduced to a mere relic of the past. The messages will decrease over time, becoming at last a thin trickle, resembling the Kathjodi in dry season.

In other words, he will have been done by as he has long done unto his gurus, none of whom he has remembered on this day, let alone worshipped. As if this was not enough, he has knocked down some gurus of his adult years from their high pedestal. It has tortured his conscience no end. But the situations, he felt, justified his iconoclasm.

The mismatch between belief and behaviour was too glaring to be missed. For what did it mean to go from espousing a passion for teaching to celebrating an empty or sparsely populated classroom? What did it mean to say that intellectuals should stay away from power and then to find every opportunity of currying favour with the mandarins? And what did it mean to see yourself as a shaper of the future of your subject and then to gloat over the fact that the subject and all the privileges it confers will be in your grasp?

Subrat returned to the present.

The speeches glorifying teachers were in full flow. It was an enthusiastic batch of students this time. They really believed – bless their hearts – teachers were next to gods and deserved worship, nay adulation. They were onto something new on this Teachers’ Day.

For each of the five teachers of the department, they drafted a scroll in which they summed up the qualities of the teacher in a flowery style. (The language was so inflated that when Subrat taught three types of style in class the following day, he cited his scroll as an example of ‘grand style’.) Not only that, they had found a totemic object that would describe that teacher best. For the head of the department they had selected the ‘danda’ as the fitting symbol of the authority wielded by him. Next was Subrat’s turn.

“You’re the helios of this hallowed department ….” The seminar secretary, a really sweet and sincere girl, began and went on to read the lines. She finished what was clearly the grandest write-up, rolled up the scroll into the shape of a flute and presented it to Subrat. Now the object that would concretely define him was to be named. Everyone waited, breath abated.

“We have chosen for you a sunflower, sir.”

A thunderous applause.

Subrat got up to reply, as was the custom after the decoration.

“My dear students, I’m indeed thankful to you for this grand ceremony. I’m truly overwhelmed by this show of respect and love. This will be my treasured memory next year. I sincerely wish that you do well in life and be successful and happy.”

He should have stopped here, but went on.

“I think I ought to make a confession. I have not been an ideal shishya in my life, never wished my teachers even once since I ceased to be a student, often felt like crossing swords with some for their glaring contradictions. That’s the way it should be if education is about questioning, not swallowing what is forced down our throats. And I shouldn’t be exempt either from scrutiny. Let Teachers’ Day not come in the way of that free mind that Tagore has celebrated, a mind that is ‘without fear’. And remember that this free mind is not an unloving mind either, all full of fire and brimstone. I love you all.”

Subrat exited the classroom before the students could react. No sound of applause wafted out from the hall. And he braced himself for being knocked off his own pedestal.