Homage to my teacher !

Swayam Sir was an uplift, always cheerful, always ready to engage.

He was a fresh wisp of an early autumn breeze, and as sublime as any early morning dew can ever hope to become. He was all this and he was all that. He was two flickers north of what every teacher aspires to be. The man was built of a virtuous heart, and that heart never blinked a beat and was there where it needed to be.

And now, as I weep because we’ve lost him, it’s time to look back and be grateful for the lives he’d touched all along with his care and with his wits.

The last time I saw him was back in 2011. I was in Dharan and would not miss, over any high hills or heavy waters, to go see him at his home. He was doing absolutely stellar. His beautiful wife, always cheerful, always hospitable, joined us in our conversation as she offered tea in the steel cups. The cookies were stunningly tasty as well.

 

The first time I met him was in 1994.

Then, he was organizing an inter school spelling contest on behalf of Summit School he worked for. There were certain guidelines in this contest that I absolutely thought was uneven and unfair. I can’t remember what those guidelines exactly were, but I do know this-I was young, I was stupid, and I was hormonally compromised, always seeking ways to find faults in other people’s endeavors, always trying to pick that proverbial knit.

Now, I have changed. But that day, Swayam sir had to put up with my silly brunt.

Back and forth, we spoke past each other. I was stubborn and adamant. He tried hard to talk me into my senses, but I wouldn’t listen. I seemed to have already decided what I wanted to believe in, and I wasn’t letting him get to me, ontologically or epistemologically. I seemed absolutely incapable of having a conversation as I was too embroiled in my teenage hubris…Now I look back at my younger self and realize how much of a dimwit I was!

When I met him in 2011, I brought up this story again with him and we had a good laugh.

I apologized to him for my earlier oversight, he just patted my shoulder with a chuckle and said it was ok. That was it!

Human foibles have no bounds, and oftentimes the spills of our frailties are so hard to contain because human ignorance outwits human knowledge every single time. It is exactly for moments like these that god created teachers and mentors who come to rescue us out of those never-ending regressive loops.

Gilles Deleuze, a twentieth-century French philosopher, has famously proposed the affective nature of ‘the flow’ in our lives. In simple parlance, Deleuze theorized that our lives are like the flow of water from hills down to the ocean in the form of streams and meandering rivers. The reason why rivers meander is that there are sturdy boulders, riverbeds, plant roots, gravity, and a multitude of other factors that affect the landscape of that flow. All these intrusions help the water to get from one point to another. This analogy, quintessentially, defines the role Swayam sir has played in my life and in those many who are where they are only because he was in the right place at the right time. He was there as our sturdy rock, as our riverbed, as the roots, and as gravity that got us to where we belong. He was there, just simply there for us.

There’s this story of a little boy on an ocean beach, frantically picking up starfish that are getting washed afloat by the colossal waves. The little boy is picking up one starfish at a time and is hurling it back to the water, so it gets a chance to live again.

The boy is relentless and doesn’t cease and goes on for hours trying to save as many as possible.

An old sage walks by and sees this little young man throwing those starfish back into the water.

The sage mulls over for a few minutes and approaches the boy and asks what difference it would make since there are thousands of these starfish beached out.

The little boy looks at the sage, bends down, picks one, gently throws the starfish to the water, and says, “To that one, it makes all the difference!”

Helping one soul at a time. And that is how I will always remember him!

Rest in Peace.