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Fires that ignite the mind
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It's not just in classrooms. You can learn how to live your life from books, movies and people around you
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PHOTO: K.K. MUSTAFAH
LEAVING AN IMPRINT A book you chance upon can take the place of a mentor
Ask Shekhar to name one teacher who made the biggest difference to the way he looks at life, and he will scratch his beard, chew his nails and look tentative. "Quite a few were competent, but... I mean... "
Ask him to name a book that made him see things in a new light and he will again start his beard-scratching, nail-chewing routine. But this time for a different reason: so many books qualify to be named that it's hard for him to pick one. You see a great range in his long list: from P. Sainath's Everybody Loves A Good Drought to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And when Shekhar is in one of those dark, Kafkaesque moods, he will blame books for his condition just as you would blame your school math teacher's knuckle-hitting prowess for creating a lifelong horror for numbers.
No chalk and board
From Shekhars in our neighbourhood to the mighty Shakespeare, everyone is "taught" by a range of sources besides those that come into our lives accompanied by chalk piece, blackboard, duster and attendance register. They come as books, movies, travel experiences, events, friends, chance encounters...
Wasn't it a journey on a train in South Africa that made Gandhiji experience the horrors of racism from up close? The constable who threw the "coolie barrister" and his luggage off the compartment barred to coloured people, perhaps, was the first to teach Gandhiji how colonialism and racism hit where it hurts most — at a man's fundamental notion of dignity. It was again in the course of a train journey that he read John Ruskin's Unto This Last, which shaped his political thoughts in a big way. He could not sleep that night and read the book over and over again. He writes in his autobiography that he woke up the next morning with a resolve to put the principles of the book into practice. Thus was born the famous Phoenix colony.
Laura Miller, a senior editor at salon.com, writes about this wonderful capacity of books to transform people: "Reading is acutely intimate, the opening of your mind to the voice and imagination of another human being. And, being intimate, it takes us both deep inside ourselves and also beyond, out into the world, and into the hearts of men and women we had no idea were so much like ourselves... Again, like love, it's a matter of alchemy as much as anything else: the right book at the right time in our lives."
J.R. Ramamurthy, who has been a librarian in many universities and publishing houses , has seen this alchemy happening to many. In fact, it was with the belief that you can shape lives by guiding people to the right books that he chose to be a librarian, though he holds postgraduate degrees in both English Literature and Library Sciences. "By being a librarian, I could be a teacher to all the teachers!"
In his article Benares: Learning to Read, novelist-journalist Pankaj Mishra speaks about libraries and books as great teachers, especially to those who have no access to expensive university education. He was in his 20s "with no clear idea of my future or indeed much of anything else" when he became a disciple of Edmund Wilson somewhat like the mythical Ekalavya. Those were days when he "read randomly, whatever I could find, and with the furious intensity of a small-town boy to whom books are the sole means of communicating with, and understanding, the larger world." In the otherwise chaotic Benares university, he stumbled upon the "dust-laden, termite-infested, but beautifully, miraculous present" books of the well-known critic-writer which held "promise of wisdom and serenity".
In the dark
Many such moments of epiphany have come to media person Manisha in what is generally regarded a space most antithetical to a learning experience — in a dark cinema hall, with a tub of popcorn in hand. She had read and heard a great deal about gay rights "issue", but it was the tragic love story of Brokeback Mountain that convinced her at an emotional level that a homosexual relationship is as tender, lyrical and complex as a heterosexual one. "It touched my heart. That's another level of learning," says a visibly moved Manisha.
Not that you can always trace learning to a specific book or a movie. For instance, what inspired well-known filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli's conversion from a career in pharmacy to filmmaking was the passionate "spirit of the times" (what German philosophers called "zeitgeist") of the 1960s and 1970s. "There was so much ferment in Kannada literature and theatre. It was a period of radical experiments. But nothing was happening in films as yet." And off he went from Manipal to Pune in search of a new expression in Kannada cinema.
It was, perhaps, the spirit of the times (coupled with an innate ability to go beyond their times) that mentored some of our greatest writers and artistes. The great Malayalam writer, Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, left school in fifth form to join the freedom movement and was imprisoned. Inspired by the lives of martyrs like Bhagat Singh, Basheer began to write and started a revolutionary journal. He left Kerala because there was an arrest warrant on him and travelled across India and abroad for seven years. During these years he did just anything for a living. He was a loom fitter, fortune-teller, cook... He lived with saints and Sufi mystics in the Himalayas. In the course of his life he was twice admitted to mental asylums and he wrote some of his best stories from there.
Who taught men like Basheer, who never had university degrees, so much more than the best professors in the world can ever hope to learn? Life itself, shall we say?
Perhaps only men like him can dignify even such a mother of all clichés.
BAGESHREE. S
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