Teacher, teacher where art thou?

I remember the names of some of my teachers and a few faces as well. There a Mrs. Sen, a Mrs. Dutta, and a Mrs. Swing, Mrs. Wright and a Mrs. Sen Sharma among others.

To be honest none of these teachers have impacted me on account of their teaching or on account of having inspired me with what they did in the classroom.

These were teachers at the school I attended in India from K through 12.

Back then, I categorized teachers as good or bad. The kind one's--the one's who didn't scold us or discipline us at the drop of a hat, were "good," and the "strict" one's--those who were harsher and used the tactic of intimidation and humiliation as a tactic to establish control over students, were "bad."

All these teachers were however, universally feared regardless of the quality of their teaching.

Upon entering college, I had more of the same: Professors who taught because it was their job to teach; they didn't leave much of an imprint on my mind as inspirational or insightful.

The parameters for judging educators in India, were, I suppose, entirely different.

None match those highlighted by Mark Edmundson in his new book, Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. 

A good teacher in America and by default in the Western hemisphere, is somebody who sees teaching as a "calling" and an "urgent endeavor" in which the lives and "souls" of students are at stake.

I believe that in India, teachers didn't burden themselves with the task of shaping lives and souls; instead of "shaping" we, the students were merely accompanied through the various levels of education by our teachers, I feel. 

In America teachers are historically said to shape, influence and inspire learners. It's only lately that they are beginning to resemble the Indian teachers.

Real teachers, laments Edmundson, himself an English Professor at the University of Virginia, are an endangered species in the current academic ecology. The conditions of the ecology, argues the professor, are the consumer mentalities of students, their families and those who administer the educational systems. Administrators are bent on giving students, not real education, but a "full spa experience, whereas educators are eager to escape the actual teaching into esoteric research.

I don't recall ever receiving a spa treatment by school administrators in India, but then again I got my education under a socialist regime. These days, I hear, a deep consumerist culture drives private education in India and students with resources receive the spa treatment to an extent that many schools graduate students without needing them to follow a rigorous academic regimen, or any academic regimen at all. Diplomas are to be had in exchange for money.

But nobody laments in India and no voice like Edmundson's arise. Decline is a given in India and people turn a blind eye to it.

Decline is pervasive in American culture as well, but thinkers like Edmundson make a note of it. 

No girl, no Lolita

Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl considers the history of making a cover for Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Lolita, regarded as the most notorious and acclaimed literary work of the 20th century.

In our minds Lolita is associated with a sexualized teen girl, however, as Mary Gaitskill writes in an essay included in the book, Nabokov's book isn't about sex but about the "infernal combination" of love and cruelty.

In fact Nabokov did not want his novel cover to portray a girl or any human form for that matter:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.

Nabokov was looking for an artist, 

Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

But thanks to Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's 1962 rendition of the novel, the image of the "girl" has stuck to Lolita.

Time after time

Anand Patwardhan and Simanthini Dhuru's 1995 documentary, A Narmada Diary, takes a fascinating look at forms of tribal resistance against mass-scale industrialization.

The object of tribal ire in the film is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada, a project that displaced thousands and stole traditional means of livelihood.

London's Tate Modern recently held a retrospective of Patwardhan's socially conscious films. It says the following of A Narmada Diary:

The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Patwardhan and co-director Simantini Dhuru let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region – overwhelmingly adivasis, long scorned as ‘tribals’, are descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India.

What interests me is the kernel of the film--the collision of two temporal paradigms. Truly, as the blurb above reminds us, "industrial" or technological time has, with the help of all the apparatus of capitalism and industrialization, gained immeasurable advantage over the other time, illogically defamed as anachronistic. Yet, as the tribal resistance demonstrates, time's "other" isn't unworldly at all; rather, it is infused with elements of real, day-to-day living.