Lost. But Found
Teacher Tales: A Personal Essay
So this happened.
I got lost.
Inside the college I teach in.
Exams were going on, and some of the regular classrooms were requisitioned. Which of course I didn’t know because most of the time I live in this beautiful haze where I can’t see anything much around me.
So I go and stare, frowning, at a padlocked door, and then I call up one of the co coordinators and she requests me to proceed to Room no.36. So I sashay down, smiling beatifically at the students I meet, who do a double take and look again. Not many people wear sarees now, you know. Hence the scrutiny, I suppose. So anyway I go to the third floor and see classrooms marked 306 etc. So I walk around the entire floor and then I decide that I must go back and make inquiries again. Then I find a group of my students hanging over the banister and shouting themselves hoarse trying to attract my attention. The entire female population of the class has come to escort me to the assigned class room. It becomes difficult because they are giggling so much that they are almost falling down.
I think they are rather fond of me.
Anyway, I go to the assigned class and all the boys are standing around looking crestfallen and disconsolate. The class room, assigned to me, was apparently occupied by some other professor. To be fair to him, the gentleman came out and invited me and the students to come in and sit down. I politely declined and left. Beginning to feel like the Pied Piper, I told the kids, jokingly, that they could sit on the very wide staircase and I would teach them. Instantly, all of them sat down on the steps, and looked at me very expectantly. By then one of the coordinators had found me another classroom and we went there. Before that, the kids, who were tickled pink, wanted a group photograph, and I obliged them.
And at the end of all this, the very professional, extremely efficient, no-nonsense Principal of the college, Dr V Shetty, personally came to apologise to me for the confusion. When someone who has both a designation, and a chair, thinks that the people who work in her institution are human beings with feelings, you know you are dealing with greatness.
Life doesn’t always follow the path we chart out for it, does it?
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