The Interview

One interview didn't go very well. It happens sometimes.I learnt that I don't know certain things and I know certain things. And I can learn the things I don't know provided that my children need those things and I have the capability and the drive to learn and relearn. But in my mind there were questions.Does memorizing poems makes a good teacher? I can love and remember Frost's lines in a serious poem and can recite it, but I may not like an humble poem by Wordsworth. We don't live in the romantic era anymore. Our life is diversified. We can't cram our mind with not so necessary information. English has become functional. Our children need to know how to write a job application, how to dominate a group discussion, how to write compositions and e-mails. They can read and read and write and write and can become Arundhati Roys and Bikram Seths. They can get a Man-Booker prize some day. We need originality, we need expression, we need crisp and correct English. We don't need to know what is "mood". We need to know our moods and transform them into authentic writing and speaking. The world and our lives are changing. While retaining the value system, we need to move ahead. Rote learning has given place to comprehension and understanding. We cannot remain stagnant in nineteenth century.

Interviews are great teachers and eye openers. They teach us great spiritual lessons. If they make us feel disappointed, they teach us that expectations beget disappointments. We feel bad because we have nurtured a seed of EGO within us. And when this ego is hurt, we feel angry, shaken and frustrated with others. But the fault doesn't lie with others. It lies within our self. We have created a self image of ours and if this image is tarnished in any way, we are hurt. It tells that we have allowed our happiness and peace to be dependent upon others. This way we become slaves of outside agencies and allow them to hurt us.

The setbacks also tell us that life is a journey with ups and downs. It cannot always be a straight line. When we get happiness, we don't think how they came our way. Rather we smugly think that we are worth it. But when we meet failures on the way, we question, 'Why us?'Thus failures propel us to meditate on the truths of life and to learn to accept life both way.But we are so attached to our comforts, joys and successes that we cry havoc when we face defeat at times. We are unable to accept things and feel frustrated.

The solution lies within ourselves. We should make ourselves so strong that no external power can hurt us. We should be humble and should keep our expectations low. Besides, we should know what we really are and should not depend upon the opinions of other people to know what we are. When we have shed this dependency on external factors, we will be immune to pain and hurt. And we will be humble enough to forgive people and love everybody from our pure centre.

The world of knowledge is vast. We have so much to learn from others. I am happy that I could understand my problem immediately and purge my mind of negative thoughts so as to be humble and establish my faith in the almighty as I always do. I have learnt to be grateful to the people who let me know my weaknesses and my strengths. This understanding becomes our source of peace and contentment and our ultimate salvation.

Reminiscing

It's a cobweb or a jigsaw puzzle?
Or it's just time streaming forward?
Moments and faces lose their shape and fade out,
People you have allowed to shear your heart
walk past you nonchalant
with a new song in their heart,
You fall apart,despite yourself,
and dwell upon your rights,
the pluses and minuses that tell you
that may be you never deserved love.
But you gave away unreserved
without thinking,
what darkness and deceit awaited you.

Your violated self doesn't revolt, but questions only,
because love still lives, for its own,
like a cloudless sky changing its colours softly,
evanescent and lingering sometimes.

The beloved that was born of love,
lost itself somewhere,
but your widowed self turns
the yellow pages sometimes,
in tender melancholic moments,
and holds the dead to the heart.

Another eventful weary day ends ,
without intimate conversations between
lonely souls,
and without the maddening touch of love.

A Day Named after Teachers

Gone are the days when the teachers used to be revered as Gods. In today's times the teachers and the students are equal partners in the process of teaching and learning. Thanks to the knowledge explosion because of advanced technologies, teachers of today are not a group of professionals who know everything. Children of today are exposed to a lot more things than they used to do earlier and they know things even teachers don't know. So, a teacher has become a facilitator, a guide and a friend who not only teaches but also learns from the students. The teacher also grows in all directions because of the curiosity and the inquisitive attitude of the students.

A teacher's life is full of activity if she or he thinks that it is a great responsibility that God almighty has bestowed on him or her. She has to be loving, just, impartial, fair and compassionate. She has to be strict lest her students go astray and don't grow in a balanced way. She has to listen to a hundred complains each day and act as a psychologist and a counsellor pacifying them , understanding their sentiments and healing their wounds. Her heart shifts in its place seeing any one of her children sick, pale-faced or bleeding.She has to inspire her children each and every day to study, to behave, to be disciplined and good. She has to deal with hundreds of restless, impulsive, talkative and fickle young minds. She has to stand for hours at a stretch and strain her voice to disburse knowledge. She has to find ways to mould the character of a pampered and arrogant child who errs continuously. She has to handle the children who are disabled, shy and subdued. She has to make them laugh, make them study and make them write their lessons.

A teacher is a professional, yes. She works for a salary. But a teacher is also somebody who has unfathomable love for her children that she gives out every day, every minute, from a pure centre, from a pure heart and that love has no price. It is very easy to be a jobholder but it is very difficult to be a teacher, especially in the changing world scenario where every day is a new revolution.

Education has been transformed into a commodity now and the parents are like customers.Educational institutions are mushrooming everyday and there is cut throat competition to market education. Old values and notions are dying and man has become prosaic and materialistic. The teachers fraternity is not held with reverence anymore. The definition of success is being counted in terms of marks. In these difficult times, working under a lot of pressure every moment and trying to strike a balance between delivering the goods and maintaining a value system and a proper standard, the teacher is often sandwiched. Engaged in teaching and evaluation, besides a hundred other related tasks, the life of a teacher is hardly easy. But it is a teacher who is busy grooming our young generation and shaping the future of a country every day.

On the occasion of this teacher's day, let's raise a toast to teachers. Let's wish them good luck. May God help them in sustaining their energy so that they never cease to be what they are; the builders of a generation and the architects of generations to come.

Night, Rain, Music and the gifts of God

There is a time when the mind is just an empty slate. Each day, some activities and some problems would occupy the mind space, and the mind would struggle to solve them and again become clean. They are blissful times, without any much expectation from life.And whenever something surprisingly good happens, the heart acknowledges it with gratitude and humility.

Sometimes, the same mind has something written onto its surface, the slate exhibits a cobweb of lines that don't get erased quickly, and surprisingly enough, they give as much pleasure as pain. There seems to be no way out because the 'within and the without', both pose a threatening situation. And then the cobwebs of lines lose their original direction, get torn, and the torn bits stay long enough to produce great pain and unhappiness. When we are unaware of something, we are blissful,but knowledge of something and the joy associated with it, if unattainable, produces pain. Complete realization is possible only when we have experienced something to the fullest and have grown beyond it, to higher realms of love where it exists only for its own sake.

Rain is an inconvenience to the doers who bustle about restlessly like bees and consider it a nuisance because they see only the gross world with their eyes. But it is a bliss of nature to the people who see it as one of the subtlest and most beautiful creation of God. There is a strange sense of security associated with it that comes to the surface whenever it rains. If you are in a crowd, you look upon it as some temporary break in a dry life and view as something that unites people and binds them in a strange togetherness. The inconvenience turns into something that everybody in the crowd shares. If you are alone, you can enjoy it in anyway you like.

Night and rain have a different connection altogether. It turns into an experience of temporary salvation, a lullaby that rocks you into sleep with its inherent music. Thinking at a higher level, it feels like something very subtle and very mysterious. Aren't all the creations of nature, mysteries, as they are.We become so used to life and so occupied with the gross life that the deeper and the subtler truths completely go unattended.

At one point or the other, we come across situations and people in life, that we consider as gifts of God. Afterwards, life turns out to be very disastrous, utterly painful and disturbing so as to threaten our confidence in goodness. We sulk about the injustice and the unfairness of life. That is when God sends rains in the night. I am not lying. Lift your head from the work at hand and detach yourself from some shady business that keeps you occupied. Pull away from your physical world into the world of silence and listen intently to the ethereal music of the rain. What more you can do is, switch off the light, click on an old song in your music system and close your eyes to lie down. You can unmistakably feel God's touch and with the pouring rain drops , your heart will melt and start flowing. Feel the gratefulness, the bliss and God's presence.

Beauty of rain is not all about the indulgence of an elite mind. If you have to know it, you will have to watch the farmer taking a break under the tree and watching the rain filling his land, and the joy of estimating his harvest and profit. Rain is not about profit and gains, loss and pain. It's God's way of communicating with us. It's a beautiful phenomenon that again and again draws our attention to the mysteries of the universe and our existence in it, as a drop in huge ocean, the beauty of being born in the earth by chance, to get the opportunity of experiencing life and watching its elegance from a distance.

Encounter: Rain

The clouds sped past in the sky

Rolling out their grey pall from north to south,

A sudden breeze started from nowhere and

Chilled your skin to the bones,

like a peak winter morning,

The coconut and neem trees shook their head

In sad understanding,

Still you wanted to dance in abandon,

Your heart going da…cha…cha…cha…

But you didn’t,

You only clutched at your umbrella, your clothes

And handbag

and tried to

Save your present world,

Which was getting a good many drops.

After the shower,

You traced a zigzagged path,

Carefully avoiding stray pools of water,

Hurrying vehicles

and the muddy, swampy tracks.

The day’s fever had gone down,

And the streets wore a wet and desolate look

You unfolded a sheet in your

Room, fed the sole fish,

And lay down,

With misty rain in your eyes and

In your soul.

On Being an Witness

From the day we are born in this world, we undertake so many journeys. Recently, when I was on a journey from Bhubaneswar to Dhenkanal by train I was thinking about it. Trains are good places for contemplation. You are alone yet you feel like being in a family, in a family of unknown people who seem very known, just because life follows almost same pattern for humans in general. Seasons are beautiful. But rainy seasons are special. Wherever your eyes go, that is, through the windows of a train, you see intermittent patches of water, seasonal pools caused by rain water and the rivers pregnant roaring. If it rains, it’s a cozy and secure feeling being with people who keep chitchatting on politics, family matters,the degradation of so many things, sports and career.

In the recent past I had undergone a different journey in the form of a personal crisis and suffered from acute depression for which I am still under medication. Gradually I am coming back to my normal state and my thoughts are a little clearer now as the clouds are moving away. I sat and looked at the beautiful view outside; the hills, the greenery, the water-filled paddy fields,the swamps, the long patches of water caused by rain. The thought just came to my mind that how fortunate we are to have been given a human body and a human intellect. We can perceive the gifts of God and can slide through life watching the world scene like a witness. Standing at a distance we can observe this beautiful creation with its varieties of living and non living forms. Of late , as I am emerging from a traumatic phase with countless thoughts tearing my being into shreds, I have started felling a greater oneness with this creation, without getting too involved. It is a truth that when we remain occupied with our interests, ambitions and desires, we become limited, worrying about only a few people, a few interests, our own egos, our own ups and downs. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t act at all and pursue our heart’s desires, personal or spiritual. But they are all temporary, or we would not have been unhappy after attaining one goal and had started looking for another. I don’t think so by observing human beings only, I am observing myself too. As I have started emerging from my clouded self that pulled me downwards and defeated all my efforts to rise up to the moment, I feel a greater love. I feel as if I have become a mother of hundreds of children I come into contact daily. And this feeling is completely devoid of any possessiveness. It’s not that I had or have no desire for personal or professional happiness, but fate didn’t put that kind of happiness in my lap and I think my conscious has started to accept it. Certain pains follow us to our grave, but with right understanding and complete lack of expectation we can sail in turbulent waters with calmness.

Acceptance is what brings us peace, because till the day we try to change others, we suffer, because we should never try to change people we love. And once the mind stops expecting and turns humble, the whole existence and its positive forces rush in to do things we cannot do. I have felt it many times in my life which has been full of struggle to find a foothold, a sense of dignity and self respect and have suffered despite innocence. Anger is our worst enemy because it makes us blind in the moment and that moment is crucial as it doesn’t relent without damaging our self unless we are very alert and are watching our mind from a distance. I have, many times in life, felt terrible helplessness, yet no anger towards a person who is the source of my suffering. And when the tears of helplessness have come, and have defeated me. I have felt God’s touch.

Recently, a younger brother, known to me, shared his wisdom with me. He advised me not to get involved and to watch everything inside and outside us dispassionately even while doing our duty sincerely. I already knew it, but when I lost something intangible yet immensely valuable to me, I broke down. I know I may go back to my witness self, though it will take quite some time. It also doesn’t mean that I will stop living a vibrant life, but I have an inkling that it will be different. Once we learn to surrender to the existence, it starts taking care of us. I had felt it once in the past. Sometimes we fail to understand why the universe puts us through the same kind of tests and also takes away the opportunity of happiness. Because inner happiness shines up our external world and we just want to give, give and give. When givers meet, love becomes a prayer. The existence has its own ways to deal with our frailty, our quality of being human. WE have to deal with our frailty and our pain. When we learn to surrender, the lotus of love blooms, and it’s a different state altogether where the ‘I’ dies and ‘we’ emerges. That experience no book can give us, it comes to us once we surrender the ‘ego’, the ‘I’ and recognize ourselves as the travelers spending a night in the ‘inn’ of the world. At that point life becomes a celebration, a celebration in which one can listen to the silent music of the cosmos and lives in abandon, in immense freedom and immense love. But we will have to drop everything we have accumulated inside, and to purge our mind of the dust and dirt of egocentric existence.

These are reflections and understanding only. Even that is not enough. We have to live it and breathe it. Then only whatever we do will flower into something or all our efforts will end up in nothing despite our good purpose. And to do it, we have to be tremendously courageous to stand alone and choose. This world is an illusion, yet we will have to stay in it to perceive the witness self and to do whatever possible .

Teachers and angels

Playing the role of a teacher can be very tiring sometimes. It’s just not teaching pupils, it demands a lot of energy to keep the children disciplined and create an ambiance in the classroom to make them take interest in the topic at hand, make them respond both orally and in writing, convince them that whatever you are teaching is worth learning and earn their trust. It’s really important for a teacher to earn the trust of the students. It not only puts a lot of pressure on your vocal cord, it requires a lot of tact and thinking to save the teaching process from sinking into monotony. Sometimes children don’t listen, they remain lost in their own world and it happens so that you are seventy five percent in to your lesson and a child doesn’t open the book. Either he or she is talking to her friend or playing some prank while you are engaged in blackboard work. At the end of a working day full of seven or eight periods the teacher is left tired, exhausted, and fatigued. But a teacher’s life is not always full of din and hard work. It does have its moments of joy.

One particular day when I entered the class, the children were in their usual state. Some promptly got up and shouted ‘good morning’, some rose reluctantly as if they didn’t want to come out of their indolence. As I started to speak on that day’s topic, a girl, who always wants to dominate the proceedings in the class came up to me and pointing to a boy, told loudly, 'Ma’am, that Asambhab ( name changed) entered the girls’ toilet today, opened each cubicle and peeped into it'. I made the boy stand and started to ask why he thought of doing such an insane thing. The girl came closer to me and told in aloud,’ Ma’am, he also tries to hold girls.’ The children were of sixth standard only, so I couldn’t believe that the boy had the awareness of some boy-girl thing. Besides, the boy who was the target of this complaint was a clumsy boy, always fumbling with his books and note-books and never regular in his class work or home work. He would never sit steadily in his class and was often reprimanded for that. Students always dismissed him as a dull boy. The whole class heard the complaint and four, five girls shouted in support. I couldn’t contain my laughter looking at the bespectacled, guilty-looking Asambhab who, visibly embarrassed, refused to admit the charge and started to explain. If it had been another day, I would have shouted at him because he was already in my bad book. But, just the day before, while teaching, I was checking out if all the children were writing or not and I found a very accurate drawing of our solar system under Asambhab’s language note-book. I was quite surprised. On being asked about the drawing, he told that, Ma’am, I want to be a space scientist. At that very moment something stirred within me and I understood how wrong we are in understanding our children. He never did language work in the class properly, because his interest lay in space science! I felt terribly guilty and thanked God for teaching me a lesson. I understood what goodness lay hidden within the boy who seemed so clumsy.

I asked Asambhav why he went to the girls’ toilet and opened the door of each cubicle. He, still embarrassed and red-face, told that another Boyd had told him to chase that particular girl and he was just doing that. I had a good laugh and I told the girls to excuse him because he was just an innocent boy following another’s command and young scientists are generally mad. The whole class, including me was in splits. It was a moment we all enjoyed together. I told the boy not to worry and asked him to sit. He looked grateful and tears welled up in my eyes thinking how innocent young children can be. They don’t understand the critical world of the grown ups.

Very small moments teach us so many things! That day I understood that we teachers would have to be very careful and loving in our dealings with young minds. They are immensely talented citizens in the making and one wrong deed can affect them in a big way. Yes, we teach almost seven to eight periods each day and it saps our energy, we tend to get irritable if children don’t listen to us or don’t do class work, but we have to listen to both sides with patience when we deal with a complaint. We cannot afford to take decisions just on the basis of hearsay. A teacher’s role is very important in a student’s life, so we must give a chance to each child to express him or her and narrate their stories. Otherwise, we will, without our knowledge, be committing the sin of being unfair and unjust. We have to treat them all equally or we will not be able to stand with our head erect, in God’s court.