Ironies

Most of my philosophical reflections emanate while I’m on my toilet seat. That day when I was sitting on my toilet seat patiently waiting for my recalcitrant bowel movement, a strain of thought took me back to my school days. As it happens with everybody, some of my teachers were exceptional, and some should have been prohibited from entering the premises and endangering the morale of the students. Among such teachers (the latter sorts) were my math teachers in the ninth as well as tenth standards and a teacher who taught me English in my earlier classes. First the math teacher in ninth: I could never grasp what she taught.

A long story preceded my entry into the ninth standard but there was a reason why I had difficulty studying English and math. There was a south Indian teacher who used to volunteer to teach me mathematics. I have no idea who let her volunteer for such a sensitive job because she made a total mess of it. First of all, she always called me “Amrut” and consequently, my friends started calling me Amrut whenever they felt like teasing me because they knew I hated being called like that. In south India, the sound “ri” is pronounced as “ru”, so Amrit became Amrut for her and no matter how persistently I corrected her, the anomaly lasted as long as she was in the school.

She used to let out a cry and say very often, “Amrut! You and math are just not for each other! Never ever touch a mathematics book after your board exams.”

I scored 9 out of 100 in mathematics in my finals but somehow I had scored enough total to qualify my promotion to the tenth standard. And then came another teacher.

He didn’t have a job so he started coming to our school. When he was not teaching me math, he was, to be fair to him, a good fellow. He laughed, he sang, he cracked jokes, he acted cute in front of the lady teachers.

It was only when he taught me, often he articulate in the grip of an immeasurable anguish, “It’s a shame that I have to teach you mathematics my dear friend, it is a shame, and it is an insult to the subject!”

Fortunately he got a job in the railways and left after a tumultuous stint of five months.

After leaving my special school, I joined a normal school. The principal of the school knew a relative of my father’s so I was allowed to take mathematics in the senior secondary. In the university I did my Honors in mathematics. I paid my university fees by teaching math to higher and senior secondary school students. I wonder how those teachers would feel now.

Then there was my English teacher. No matter how hard she tried, she could never make me write or speak even a single sentence in English, correctly. After math, this was the subject I feared the most.

Whenever I wrote something my teacher would make this prophetic observation, “Amrit you’ll always write English in Gurmukhi.”

My mother tongue is Punjabi and Gurmukhi is the script that is used to write Punjabi. The whole class would laugh.

These days I write content in English. I take up copywriting assignments. I write in English to earn my livelihood. When for the first time my article was published in the newspaper and I stumbled into my English teacher, she could only say, “Well, this isn’t the English we taught you.”

Those seem like days from another life.