a teaching career

WHAT TEACHING MEANS TO ME (Uday Mitra)

I have behind me three decades and more of English teaching experience among the hills, valleys, rivers and forests of this enchanting country. Invincible memory regurgitates a host of mellifluous images that both elate and distress the psyche, reminding of days that are no more, of youthful passions spent, and dreams unfulfilled.

Yet I consider my teaching career worthwhile, coping up with the myriad challenges of boarding school life, the early morning and late night duties amidst the bone chilling, pollution free Tsimalakha atmosphere in Chukha. Hostel life brought me closer to the young men and women who dominated the hilly green landscape. My seven year bachelor stint of loneliness could not have succeeded without several helping hands delivering water, vegetables, grain, milk and cheese.

Before stately Thimphu spoilt me with extravagant fantasies, I was rural enough with my sights firmly fixed on the steadily increasing bank balance each month and deftly calculated the cash I would carry home each December. In spite of the Thimphu sensationalism, the money and the substance abuse, I endeavored to keep my sights on that spiritual bond with the children at a plane I could communicate and deliver the lessons I had myself learnt in school and college.

I was an unschooled teacher before the teacher training came in Orissa, India, and then the new curriculum workshops, Canadian professors, evaluation camps in Punakha, the multimedia, the internet and cable television. I taught through publishing school magazines and my own books of stories and poems, themselves inspired by the fairy tale landscape and adorable populace.

I communicated with four classes each day and most  were young adults in sensibility and held profound values compared to my concrete jungle Indian city background. As an expatriate teacher, I had an overwhelming sense of a destiny to fulfill. I believe that things just do not happen by chance. The newspaper advertisement in Bangalore, the Chennai interview and the epic railway journey that delivered me to Siliguri and the bus and taxi rides to Punakha remain riveted in my soul.

Somewhere along the way, the native Bhutanese started catching up with me. The divine vision amidst Thimphu skies convinced me of my supernatural bond with the earth beneath my feet.

Helpless toddlers sought my support just like the big guys in high school. I initially taught from a distance before I forged an understanding with a bevy of pretty girls and my boyish instincts took over. Childish games spread through the classroom and after classes were done in the hostel sanctuary. I discovered nature and took to kitchen gardens vigorously, pleasures denied by urban existence.

My spiritual communion with the local children can have no ending, a union of the earth and the sky. At the Pheuntsholing gate, I often felt a magnetic attraction that drew me powerfully like steel cables all the way to Thimphu heights! My lonely dreams in Gaylegphug were sedate enough before marriage blossomed into reality. Yet fate denied me a child. Today, a generation later, I have accepted my students as my deserving children and pray for their salvation.