The Day of the Teachers

We mark this day each year. The Day of the Teachers. Twice a year. Once on Guru Purnima and once again on S. Radhakrishnan's birth anniversary. We 'pay' respects to teachers on the day and then duly disregard them, put them in the their place of the barely respected lower rung of our social and consequently economic ladder. But this barely affects teachers. The have a bent of mind which does not align with societal norms. A true teacher is a potential vagabond, a wanderer, a dissenter, someone who rattles and renegades.

S. Radhakrishans himself said, "Again and again... when traditionally accepted beliefs become inadequate, nay false, on account of changed times, and the age grows out of patience with them, the insight of a new teacher, a Buddha or a Mahāvira, a Vyāsa or a Śaṁkara supervenes.... when at the summons of the spirit's breath, blowing where it listeth and coming whence no one knows, the soul of man makes a fresh start and goes forth on a new venture.."

Chesterton would say that every remedy is a desperate remedy, every cure is a miraculous cure. In the same vein every walk is a pilgrimage and every line a poetry and every utterance a song. So I would think that every teacher is a potential Buddha and Mahāvira. Only if that potential is accepted, not the actual realisation, only the possibility, then we might have a chance, a very small one, to leave the world better than we found it.

A room in my school is named "The Sunrise Hymn". Here is a poem for that and for teachers.

A hymn to the sun
A hymn to the rising
To the birds who sing
Upon the east-rising
To the leaves of the Saman
Waking up, uprising.

A hymn of congregation
A hymn of reflection
A hymn of contemplation
A hymn of meditation
A hymn of insurrection.