God's Gift

For some strange reason, I got reminded of Reddy Sir today. I got my 12^th physics tuition from him. He was a great teacher. He was an expert in his domain and was a fun guy to have as your teacher. In particular, he knew how to relate to his students, most of them in their mid-teens.

Ours was an all-boys batch and we used to have a great time cracking jokes(mostly non-veg). One day one guy was like “Sir I got terrible backache”, and Reddy Sir asks in his inimitable south indian accent “Abe kya yaar abhi shaadi nahi kiya aur abhi se yeh sab”. And another day, it was somebody's birthday and one guy asked, “Sir why do we celebrate birthday when actually we are getting one year nearer to our death”. Pat came Reddy Sir's response, “You duffer! you should be happy, you are one year nearer to your marriage”. Jokes apart, he had this knack of explaining complex physics theories like some interesting story. Thanks to Reddy Sir, I started liking physics which is to date one of my fav subjects. And yeah, I did score 92% in my physics boards much to the surprise of my physics teacher in school.

Great teachers are really God's gifts. Funny thing is most of the teachers you find in schools are there because they need some job and not out of passion for teaching, which is really sad. Its the students who suffer and resort to rote learning and in the process are unable to find out their interests and preferred domains. Thanks to the history teachers and our educational system, through out my entire school life I really hated history. History classes were such a drag. We used to sleep in the back bench while Ms Sashi will just sit in her seat and keep reading from the text. I think she was as clueless as we were. Luckily the national economy opened up and we got to watch Discovery and NGC. But for History in Color in Discovery, I wouldn't have realized that history can be so fascinating.

Same goes for mathematics. We studied trignometry, integration, differentiation but nobody knew why on earth were we doing all this and cramming up all those formulas. That's when Rao Sir entered the picture. (There's something with me and Andhraite tuition teachers). I got maths tuitions from him for couple of years and the fact that the hottest girl in my class and my crush (actually crush of pretty much all the boys in the school) used to sit right across me made maths that much more interesting. He was quite opposite of Reddy in his manners. Shy and soft-spoken, he used to get excited only when he started ranting about the power of mathemathics. The whole world is based on maths, as per him. Well, I dont quite agree with him on that count but he did manage to kindle my interest in a subject which I feared like hell. So much so that half way into the class I used to forget to steal glances of “the love of my (then) life”.

Looking back, its unfortunate that the best teachers I got were not in school, but in tuitions. But that's the sorry state of our educational system. If you get a great teacher, its your good luck, for s/he will surely inspire and motivate you for greater things in life. And you will remember them fondly thoughout your life, like I remembered Reddy Sir today.