To Ricky with Love

Dear Ricky,

I came across your jotting of your life experiences as a teacher only a couple of days ago, though i heard about your book sometime ago. Though i do not remember where and in what context, the title stuck in my memory and some friend of mine spoke high of the book with that title; "To Sir with Love". The moment i browsed the book i had a tremendous urge to buy it. I do not know for sure that the urge is because of the fact that i am also a teacher. As a college teacher, as part of the ritual, i have to attend an orientation programme. Industries consider 'orientation' an essential anathema to put their employees through. Of late, education has also become an industry to bring in the programme of orientation to attune new teachers to the ecstasy of teaching.

The fact that startled me is that one can become a committed teacher after having taken up the job of teaching accidentally. Your description of your journey to the Greenslade school at the outset of the novel is very gripping. The attitude of the charwomen who travel on the same bus in which you are the only other male apart from the conductor and a Negro too, is as if you did not even exist. Their casual talk about things that are taboo to be discussed openly, in the presence of a male, conveys their ideology of the presence of an alien figure. However, one of the charwomen does not mind sharing a seat with you. As you are about to get down at Aldgate, a white woman does not want to sit with you and the conductor is about to chivvy her for keep standing when it is not allowed. In there, you really come to the rescue of the white woman even if she imputes you to the practice of equality. What seems to be a big slight on the bus happens to be an ordinary incident in your life as you narrate your struggle to find a job for your living after being demobilised from the RAF. I have never personally experienced the kind of grief that you have experienced on the day when you have been turned down the job of a technical engineer even if you possess all the required features. Your stint in the Aruba oil company and the expertise you have gained in the US and South America must get you a fine job. The ease that you have exuded on the day of the interview when you are put through the grill of questions must have promised you the great expectation of getting through the process of selection. As the interviewer rises to congratulate you and gives out the reason for not selecting you, oh! God, i do not know how you have taken it. You yourself states that you have come to see the complexion that has been with you ever since you were born only then.

Teaching becomes last of your options for survival as you are not a qualified teacher. The scene with a white man, a stranger, in a park, is, if you are a theist, surely God given. The old white gentleman not only gives courage but also attunes the aberration that your mind has gone into after continuous defeats. The image of the boy who welcomes you with the stub of a cigarette between his thumb and fore finger into school would have given a preamble to the kind of pupils that you are going to teach. The wake of the second world war is seen in the behavioral patterns of children. The squalid and dingy places of living have made them unclean and losing their morality. The hostility of children of the class that you take over is not because they intentionally want to be brutal but to alleviate the stress that they have been put through both at home and outside. The efforts taken by you to tame them and your interests in finding out from where they hail are necessary parts of a teacher. Your stint in psychology books provides with no clue of children of your school as they are a 'class apart'.

Your efforts to instill mannerism in them through making them realise that they too are grown-ups and they will be treated as ones if they behave in a way to get accolades from the outside society is a genuine effort to be honed in every teacher. your interests in finding out the functioning of the Juvenile court and law in general when one of your boys has been arrested for stabbing another boy unintentionally shows your earnestness in doing something to uplift your students. The best gift that you have received in your life is definitely not from Gillian, your love, but is from your students when they have presented a bouquet, a collection which is assorted in a sense that the flowers have been plucked from the places of their living and the premises of the school. The gift to be ingrained in yourself is the final gift of all the signatures of the children of your class neatly covered in a parcel with an inscription "To sir, with love". You have been successful in weeding off the 'skin-deep' race and caste feelings when they have obliged you in placing the wreath that they have bought from their kitty on the body of the mother of their classmate of mixed origin.

You are indeed a real teacher with the demure of a teacher. I salute you.

Bye. With Love. A teacher trying to be in your shoes.


PS: visit the following link to view the trailer of "To Sir with Love". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucnq_hPhdDI