Teachers Day

September 5, 2019

Inspiration for this post is a school friend who pinged me this morning and told that she was waiting to see an article on Teachers’ day :)

What makes one guru? 

गुकारस्त्वन्धकारस्तु रुकार स्तेज उच्यते |

अन्धकार निरोधत्वात् गुरुरित्यभिधीयते ||

(‘Gu’ means darkness or ignorance, ‘Ru’ means light or the essence. Guru is the one who removes the darkness of ignorance with the light of knowledge)

I have been fortunate (like most of us) to have found wonderful gurus in my school teachers all my life, even while studying in a government college where you really don’t pay to get an education. I was remembering all those dedicated teachers who gave me that much attention and brought out the good in me. Each one of them was an epitome of knowledge. May be they were the reason that becoming a teacher has always been a hidden dream somewhere. 

My teacher in 1st grade was the one who asked my parents to get my eyesight tested. I must say she really took me from darkness to light. I won’t have been able to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics without the middle school teacher who made them so easy to understand. They still make every single day bright with their good morning wishes. That foundation likely prepared me to support our intermediate maths teacher by being her writing hands when she could not see. Should I really say she could not see? don’t think so, given that her mind was so sharp to see everything. All I had to do was quote the problem and she would start telling me what and how to do. I couldn’t have understood what force means without the गुरुत्व of the physics गुरु who taught बल and गुरुत्वाकर्षन. I couldn’t have learnt to avoid the common english grammar mistakes without our wonderful english teacher. There were teachers who called us to their homes when the school was shut down due to protests. The teacher who encouraged me to try to maintain the good handwriting that even today when I write in cursive, it reminds me of her every single time. 

The expenditure on my education may have been लघु but what I got from all these teachers is really गुरु. On this teachers’ day, quoting the first verse of the guru paduka stotram by Adi Shankaracharya: 

अनंत संसार समुद्र तार नौकायिताभ्यां गुरुभक्तिदाभ्यां |

वैराग्य साम्राज्यद पूजनाभ्यां नमो नमः श्री गुरु पादुकाभ्यां ||

(I prostrate to those padukas of my guru, which are a boat helping cross the ocean of samsara, providing with the sense of devotion towards the guru and by worship of which I gain the empire of vairagya)