Chennai: Good teachers are far too self-effacing to come to the limelight. Earlier this week, this fact was more than evident when Ms Catherine Simon, who taught the present Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms J. Jayalalithaa at the Church Park Presentation Convent in Chennai in the early 1960s’, passed away at the age of 88.
Ms Simon — whom Ms Jayalalithaa in her condolence message described as a “great influence in my life and we shared a very special relationship as a teacher and student,” and that how she had the “good fortune” of having been her student from 1958-1964 — came as yet another affirmation how wonderful teachers settle for posthumous fame.
For the simple reason Ms Catherine Simon came to be known to the wider world, not only for her contributions to physical education, but the special place she had come to grace as one of the important teachers of a more famous student in Ms Jayalalithaa, a versatile artiste-turned politician.
In our tradition, ‘Upanishad’ literally means, sitting at the feet of a teacher to learn. It includes a craft, a measure of discipline, as much as a spirit of free dialogue. The arduous life-long romance for the search for knowledge and truth is not without its pains, while an understanding and compassionate teacher comes as a timely balm for the student.
A few nuggets of this teacher-student dialectic from our modern times bear testimony to this. When Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom many consider as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, went to study Philosophy under the great Bertrand Russell at Cambridge in 1911, Russell’s initial reaction was typically British: “An unknown German appeared..obstinate…., but I think not stupid,” was how Russell reportedly responded to an unsure Wittgenstein wanting to pursue Philosophy under him. He was drawn into it by some problems in the Philosophy of Mathematics while Wittgenstein, himself from a troubled aristocratic German family, was studying Aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester (Russell’s words as quoted by the British Philosopher Ray Monk in his famous book on Ludwig Wittgenstein).
Bertrand Russell was intellectually honest enough to admit that “for a whole term” he could not make up his mind on admitting Wittgenstein, for he did not know whether the latter was a “man of genius or merely an eccentric”.
At the end of the term, so the famous episode goes, an equally earnest Wittgenstein reportedly asked Russell: “Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?” If Russell thought he (Wittgenstein) was a ‘complete idiot’, he would not want to waste his time in Cambridge anymore trying to do Philosophy, and get back to aeronautics.
A far-sighted and compassionate Bertrand Russell would not leave things at that to a simple either/or situation. He told Wittgenstein, going by biographical accounts on the late thinker, to write about a philosophical subject in the intervening holidays and come back to him with it when the next term at Cambridge began. And Wittgenstein promptly handed over a paper he had written when the term began.
The story goes that after Russell read “just only one sentence”, he was categorical that Wittgenstein should not become an aeronaut. “He will do great things,” Russell reportedly said about Wittgenstein and the rest, as they say, for the author of the incredibly brilliant work, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, was history. That is the story of Bertrand Russell’s discovery of a great student and philosopher in Wittgenstein, one who went on to “outshine his own teacher”.
Back home in our own erstwhile composite Madras Presidency, around the same time, it was not pseudo-liberalism when the late Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who chose Philosophy as his subject at the Madras Christian College (MCC), more by chance than by any conscious choice, was more than disturbed when Western critics dubbed the ‘Vedanta’ system of Philosophy as far removed from values as the West understands it.
After having had his early school education in Tiruttani — interestingly it was the PMK’s poll manifesto for the 2016 Assembly elections that committed to build a fitting modern library in Tiruttani in memory of late Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan- he first went to Voorhees College in Vellore – an institution that has produce several eminent intellectuals including Dr Malcolm Adiseshiah -, but later shifted to MCC.
When Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan — who was to later occupy distinguished chairs of Philosophy at several Universities, including at the most prestigious Calcutta University at that time, and later the first Indian to be invited to be the ‘Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics’ at Oxford, before he became the President in Independent India-, completed his M.A. dissertation at MCC on “The Ethics of the Vedanta and its Metaphysical Presuppositions”, he was apprehensive whether it would offend his teacher and the distinguished Philosophy professor, Dr Alfred George Hogg. But Dr Hogg being a great teacher and a true liberal, appreciated his work so much that a new star in the East was born. Sarvepalli was later hailed as a “bridge builder” between the East and West.
Even closer, one cannot but recall how last year, barely two weeks before President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam passed away in Shillong, he called on Rev. Ladislaus Chinnadurai, his venerable former Physics professor at St. Joseph’s College in the 1950s’ in Tiruchirappalli, at the Beschi college in Dindigul.
“Even after 60 years, he (Dr Kalam) remembered me and my teaching. I taught him light, sound and other Physics subjects. I am happy to see him again,” was how Rev. Chinnadurai responded, when Dr Kalam went to honour his teacher. Dr Kalam thought of teachers not just as conveyors of information, but also as inspiring role models, another instance of a student who outshone his master.
