A political Teacher's Day

Old hostilities were set aside, grudges buried and every one showed up with a smile and a determination to celebrate Teacher's Day, says Malavika Sangghvi

In the unprepossessing convent school that I attended, Teacher's Day was celebrated with endearing cheesiness and airy good cheer. Those of us who could afford it would bring our class-teachers a rose. Cards with smarmy messages and awkward dedications were de rigeur and an atmosphere of giddy celebration marked the day

Most of us did not understand what it was we were celebrating or why. Our teachers, in that modest Catholic institution where we spent the better part of our lives, came from backgrounds much like our own, emerging each morning and returning in the evenings to homes near the school.

Rather than being larger than life creatures, they were only too human, fallible and quotidian, differentiated by their quirks, and eccentricities, their habits and their rituals.

Those were the days when rather than being seen as precious incubators of individual genius, schools were rough and ready creches, where parents parked their children between the ages of five and 15 to keep them occupied somehow and out of the way to make them someone else's responsibility.

None of this hands-on; over-refined and, dare I say, pretentious approach to education existed back then. Almost 40 to a section, with two divisions to a class, we were expected to show up, try and stay out of trouble and pass our exams.

No one really bothered about what we were learning, why we were learning it, and what we would ultimately do with the knowledge. And yet, on Teacher's Day, we conspired to make the mostly unremarkable harried, put upon and vastly over-stretched men and women who taught us daily feel somehow special.

Old hostilities were set aside, grudges buried and every one showed up with a smile on her face and a determination to celebrate the day, come what may. I say this because today, for reasons well known to all, Teacher's Day, that most innocent and well-meaning date on a school child's calendar, has been politicised.

If a prime minister wishes to address India's huge population of school-going children, he ought to be allowed to do so without the accompanying storm of critique and bad grace.

Schoolchildren, in any case, have it bad enough with exams, homework, future prospects, ragging, bullying and peer pressure, without being turned into pawns in a political battle between the Left and the Right, fundamentalists and secularists, politicians and opinion makers.

Quite frankly, left to their own devices, schoolchildren looked upon Teacher's Day as one in which they'd get a half day off, eat some chips, cut a cake, go home, watch some TV, and then sweat for a test or exam.

But with all the brouhaha over Narendra Modi's speech, an atmosphere of unspoken fear and bitterness has been injected in to a day of harmless fun and sentimentality. Whether they listen to the address or do not, whether they regurgitate its message correctly or don't and whether they applaud or refrain has all become a matter of needless pressure.

Pressure that our country's schoolchildren can do without. Pressure that has added to their anxiety and fear and their sense of insecurity and heaviness. A day which was celebrated with a certain innocence and charm has been transformed into one of unnecessary rhetoric and drama.

From endearing cheesiness and airy good cheer, it has become just another point in another brick in the wall of misguided dogma and unnecessary ideology!