Book review: From determinism to autonomy, through mirror-image of students

Chennai: Food and cuisine bring cultures together, much more than religious beliefs or social mores do. The processes that lead to good food — the art and science of cooking — have evolved into a transnational comparative discipline, peaking to a science of hospitality management as wings of a global Hermes.

As an unseen harbinger of change, the author of this wonderful clutch of memoirs – a memoir of notebooks in a way more than a structured autobiography — M.S. Neelakantan, who found “his true calling as a teacher in IHM, Pusa, New Delhi (1989-1994)”, as he recounts in his tale, has splendidly and perhaps a little unwittingly unfolded a hitherto neglected dimension in our education system.

From within the portals of one of India’s premier institute of hospitality education — the ‘Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) — Neelakantan by example has shown how a teacher’s role is not just confined to the classroom; nor does the making of persons end with giving a degree or diploma at the end of a course, however, professional it may be. The key is empathy through which one enlarges the world of the other, something that can be shown only by a ‘real’ teacher who cares for his/her students. It means being and playing ‘Ammai-Appan’, as our Tamil tradition says, with goodwill outside the confines of our narrow family walls.

What motivated Neelakantan to internalise the ideal, model teacher is something only he can explain in another book. But psychologisms apart, his family roots in Palghat — a heavenly abode famous for its cooks and civil servants as former Chief Election Commissioner T.N. Seshan once put it  — and being born and brought up in Ahmedabad, one of our textile cities that uplinked India to modern, industrial times, Neelakantan’s memoir is a thoughtful and touching chronicle of its times.

The book, as sub-text, is simultaneously a throwback to the 1990s, the beginning of the economic reforms in India. Alongside a Dr Manmohan Singh the well known economist — Finance minister piloting bold reforms from Delhi those days, few seem to acknowledge that how change also came through assimilations, even if slowly, taking place in select, diverse educational institutions in different parts of the country, nurturing a fresh outlook among youth. Food, hotels and the service industry was by then, a key stage-setter of cultural exchanges and globalisation.

As this sociological drama unfolded at a macro-level, at more disaggregate, group and individual levels the happiness and pathos of an upcoming Indian middle class is playing itself out. And every little episode with each of his student at Pusa, the ups and downs of his own career, his house-hunting travails in Patel Nagar in Delhi that led to finding new, enduring friends from the media, the soft corners of one’s life — in the author’s case the chance meeting with Sabeena Khan in romantic Jaipur — the innovations he tried to introduce as a teacher that ‘set the knives in’, petty politics even in big institutions, and campus fisticuffs he had to wade through to make peace, in each of these recollections by Neelakantan, the illuminating macro-micro interplay comes through as if it was another yesterday or a possible tomorrow.

One of his adored students Diganta Dass suddenly passing away was perhaps one of the saddest moments in the author-teacher’s life. “How can you leave me, we have to play more cricket,” is how Neelakantan has recorded that moment. Amid the vicissitudes and sufferings in his personal life – he profusely thanks his wife Geetha for standing by him like a rock, the author’s catholicity as a teacher is marked best in the way he has profiled every student he taught at Pusa in those five years and their subsequent career-path, to make his life a ‘ode’ to them.

“My only prayer to the Almighty if I am ordained to be re-born, is I have all my students again as my family,” is how Neelakantan signs off this memoir, something rare for an accomplished teacher, the likes of whom usually thank only their own teachers and at best their research scholars.

It is perhaps appropriate to end this review with a thought left behind by one of 20th century’s greatest philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein.”You cook badly, if you are guided in your cooking by rules other than the right ones,” because “cookery is defined by its end.” So, the ‘rules of cookery’ cannot be arbitrary in that sense.
But unlike the rules of cookery, the rules (grammar) of any language as a whole are quite different. “If you follow grammatical rules other than such-and-such, that does not mean you say something wrong; no you are speaking of something else,” argued Wittgenstein to drive home that this is what makes human language ‘autonomous’ in a certain sense.

Neelakantan’s memoir is unconsciously reflective of such a wider transition from the ‘determinism’ of the internal rules of cookery to the ‘autonomy’ of a fuller life as a teacher through the mirror-image of concern for his students. And when the book gets into another reprint, he will have an occasion to set right some of the typos and related issues to make his memoir even more elegant for one and all.