Skip to main content

Mani Sir

Mani Sir was no ordinary teacher.

Indeed he was no teacher at all.

Flowing silken white beard. Ash on his forehead. Flowing hair. Wore a kurta and a dhoti - sometimes saffron, mostly white. And he wore actual wooden slippers (I thought that was cool and wanted to try how that held on the feet). And came to school on a rickety bicycle (with those wooden slippers).

He was old, I don't know how old. Whatever his age was, he was active and always full of energy. He was different from the other teachers with his glowing visage and gentle demeanor. He was tall and stood with great command.

As gentle as he was, he commanded the students attention. And in his class, never did the students ever create a ruckus - I wonder why. Perhaps he knew how to channel energy or perhaps he just let them be. I remember him asking us to make noise, but keep it under control - which no other teacher ever told us. I don't remember him raising his voice.

He was not a regular teacher - though I suspect he could teach any student anything. He would turn up when there was a need for a substitute teacher.  Perhaps he lived nearby and came in at short notice. We never knew.

But when he came in, we were happy - because that meant the regular subject teacher was not there. As children, that meant fun rather than studies. So, I guess all classes welcomed him.

I remember how he most shared stories in his soft. Interesting stories. Stories that made us think. Made us play a game or two. A quiz. Some questions. Or let us be.

I still remember myself swelling with pride when I answered 'rickshaw' for some question he asked. And he added it by saying that it was 'jinrickshaw' in some parts of the world. And once, I learnt that tuition had that extra i in it (that shocked me, I had no idea).

We knew nothing more about him. He came gently and went away gently. But as learning experiences go, he remains imprinted in my mind.

The teacher without a title perhaps! Thank you Mani Sir, wherever you are. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call