People say that life is a vicious circle. I have known it to be so. Actually it is an apt instance of the simple, yet hard-hitting idiom in Hindi “aasmaan se gire khajoor mein atke”. Life changes colors, transforms and takes new shapes, sometimes even distorted ones and leaves you wondering ki yeh kya ho gaya mamu? I have felt the crests and troughs of being a student and a teacher. It seems like I am testing the conditions to find out which of them presents the shinier side of the coin. Well if you are able to read this, then surely you have known what it is like to be a student. If you are smiling, then you have known how it is to be a teacher. Both are equally exciting, both have their advantages and disadvantages, both come with some limitations and repercussions.
By God’s grace (or my teachers’s), I was always a nice, above average, obedient, sober, calm student. (Hope my English teacher is not reading this. I almost had shed my sweet, cute little girl’s attire to address something I strongly felt against.)
Getting into a teacher’s shoes was even more challenging. You could see the world turn around just by standing on the other side of the table. The problems change, responsibility increases many-fold, you get critical about happenings, have a widened perspective, develop more patience and tolerance etc. But at times, I feel connected to a line from the Bollywood movie song - Seedhi sapat zindagi bawaal ho gayi. But that was my decision, no regrets.
But the wheel has turned again. In the never-ending search for satisfaction, I have swapped roles. I have joined a post graduate course in HR. Somewhere around this time next year, I would be working again. In all these years of my life, certain subtle changes have become noticeable upon retrospection. Entrepreneurship has changed to apprehension, acceptance to speculation, trust to stipulations, freedom to security and expression to depression.
My teaching career was far more interesting than my student life. It was so not because I could have a stick in my hand to make students abide by MY RULES, but because I could see things on a wider screen. Mischief turned out to be a learning experience, studies turned to action research, arguments turned into brainstorming, results turned into milestones and smiles into lives.
I could relate to most of the things my lecturers try to accomplish when they teach us. Growing up is an interesting experience. You have your own guiding principles which let you understand the best on both the sides. Such an individual can be compared with a collector of tea leaves, who selects the best color, odor and taste so that the product that would be served on the morning table would be enriching enough for the rest of the day to be a pleasant one. The same applies when you teach or learn, the ingredients have to be in perfect proportion otherwise the consequence would be not as good as it ought to be. We waste time in blaming people or circumstances when things go wrong. Only if we were taught to be on the lookout for what has to be done perenially, only if we were taught to be strong enough to take those responsibilities on our shoulders, things would have been very different. All this takes a small amount of wisdom on our part and our teachers. As we keep blabbering in management courses:
“Put the right people in the right places.”
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