Detached

The industrial society has reduced all relations to monetary ones. A teacher is no longer a rational individual who has personal struggles, aspirations and hopes. He is a cog in a machine that must keep churning out objective, unbiased information and to be paid with a full course of a scrawny salary with self-fulfilment as the dessert.

The recently concluded Teacher’s Day event has made me uneasy. I woke up to dozens of texts in class groups with students chipping in their wishes with as much enthusiasm as a WhatsApp text could hold. There was however, a pin-drop silence from the students over the teacher’s protesting against the NEP, as has been the case for any of their demands from the university; ranging from better pay, to response against casteist violence within the campus.

We are stuck in our rooms, taught by teacher’s we cannot see, reading material we cannot understand.

I am in a turmoil; it is difficult to understand whether teacher’s day is a quest for genuine appreciation, or a perverse bandwagon that all students must conform to, irrespective of what they feel about it.

In a world dominated by the mechanical keyboards of stethoscopes, the teachers of today live in either a world of no alternatives or an almost fanatical principle: doing the best for the people around them.

Principles do not fill your purses though, if they did, you won’t find another teacher out on the street protesting for a decent, liveable wage.

The ossified reality of the world as we know it today, has buried the Teacher as an individual and replaced them with a machine that must live in an ill-suited environment with personal mental health being put in the casket along with your identity.

Parents who do not co-operate, an administrative system that doesn’t care, bureaucratic processes that eat up most of the personal space and students who take your services for granted, are a few of the troubles that the vast, apathetic desert of this profession entails.

But hey, at least teacher’s day is an oasis in this desert of apathy, right? I mean, surely a wall of “HAPPY TEACHER’S DAY!” messages help them overcome ever-surmounting structural problems of our epoch.