The Horror that was 9/11

I was nearly 10 years old when I noticed the hushed tones of my parents and grandparents. They were glued to the televised news. A plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers.

My grandmother was frantically calling my uncle to inquire whether he was fine. Relatives were telling that they were safe. One of them had a meeting scheduled for later, a meeting that never took place. The towering structures were no more by that time.

By some childish curiosity and horror, I was watching the news silently. When the second plane hit the other tower, I yelped in surprise. It was a dark, obsessive compulsion to keep watching. As the flames spread, there was something in me praying for a miracle. At that age, I didn't have a notion of countries or any division. They were people trapped in a collapsing fiery nightmare. And that unsettled me immensely. When the first tower crashed, I was hoping, praying, somehow that the other one would be miraculously saved.

News started pouring in, of innumerable brave stories, of near escapes and tragic encounters. The story of Flight 93 was so touching, so brave and so unfathomable. Just like the story of Neerja, so many real people sacrificed themselves to save others.It was the first time I had heard the word "terrorism". At that moment, it had succeeded. It filled the ten year old, hundreds of miles away, with fear. I devoured any information related to it.  One distinct memory I have is the haunting image of steel scraps bent beyond measure.

We live in a world which is under siege by many natural disasters - and we seem to be creating more devastating ones by our apathy to climate change. In spite of all this, human beings are deadly. Any form of hatred or violence stems from resentment. Resentment from inequality, resentment from mistreatment - both real and perceived. If we spent less time filling heads with facts and figures and more time in empathy, friendship, love, compassion, humility and the ability to differ and still respect people genuinely - perhaps we'd have better peers, parents, teachers, society and governance. The world is so rich that there should be no poverty and we have enough food that there ought not to be hunger. Yet, power and privilege rule today's capitalist society.

This was just a general comment. What can I personally do? Try and be a little more empathetic and add to the love in the world. All is not lost. There are countless compassionate souls working for the betterment of society. News, unfortunately, is associated with things that went wrong that we do not know the good deeds done by others. Yet we know the latest controversy, suicide, murder, attack and all other macabre things happening.

With Gandhiji's birthday coming up, I am reminded of what he said - the heart that can be taught to hate, can be taught to love much more readily. I've paraphrased it. If I Googled it, it would become yet another "statement of purpose" I helped write ;)

All About Teachers

Today is 5th September - traditionally celebrated as Teacher's Day in India. We cut a cake in our lab and that pushed me off the precipice and plunged me into pleasant memories.

Our first teachers are our parents. It's from them we learn language, life skills and even learning. I'm blessed to have had parents who never tired of my curiosity nor did they snuff it out.

I was also extremely fortunate to have wonderful teachers throughout my school life. It would be a grave injustice to any of them if I started naming them, because there were so many. For me, marks were a consequence of my thirst for knowledge. It was much later that I realized the flaws of the education system and how much of rote learning existed. My style of learning is such that I take a very long time to understand a particular concept but once I do, I do not forget the basis of it. Every student has a particular bias towards learning - some are visual learners, some are auditory, some are kinaesthetic, some are a combination of all the three and the best teachers have something for everyone.

Flashes of few memories do beg for my attention. There was a teacher in my fifth grade who assigned me to take tuition for a boy. She would let me not pay attention in class and prepare notes and questions for him. When he got full marks, I was the happiest sun beam on this planet. My mother would applaud my will power when I wrote exams through asthma attacks. It taught me a certain amount of grit. A cheeky disproving of my parents' understanding of eclipses are caused by shadows also resurfaces. I loved every subject from history to physics. That was only possible because I studied under teachers who taught us as stories and not as things we had to remember. In some sense, the story teller emerged as an amalgam of my experiences with my teachers. A teacher helped me overcome my stage fear by pushing me on stage at every conceivable opportunity. Ironically, a teacher's insult of my English catapulted my language skills into another realm and I thank her from the bottom of my heart as well. A teacher really close to my heart dragged me from the depth of depression and made me achieve my dreams.

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be a teacher. Initially it was because I knew only three careers - engineer, doctor, teacher. A doctor seemed too demanding. An engineer seemed too boring. A teacher seemed exciting. As I grew up, I became more convinced I wanted to be a teacher. For me, it began with clearing doubts. I have seen some glimpses of hope that I may be a good teacher - I won a 'be a prof' event in college, I have dabbled in a few YouTube videos, I have been a teaching assistant with so much of soul satisfaction. I come from a family of teachers on both my mother's and my father's side, so I hope there is some genetic help as well. At the outset I did not realise it, but a teacher's job is as responsibly and morally demanding as that of a doctor. A doctor may save your life but a teacher teaches you to live it.