Love and Respect

It pains me a lot whenever I read in newspapers that so and so student has misbehaved with the teacher. I do not blame the students entirely for what they do, the teachers are equally to be blamed for failing to inculcate right moral values among the youth. In my time, there was a deep bonding between the teacher and student. I and my class friends had tremendous respect for our teachers. Likewise, our teachers had profound love for us. They used to treat us like their own children. I remember, when I along with 3 other students who were from higher class were selected to undergo advanced course (Visharad) in Sanskrit language in my school, I was very excited. Our Sanskrit teacher who was a renowned Sanskrit scholar agreed to give us private tuitions free of cost. We used to go to his house in the evenings to take private lessons from him. I recollect very clearly, he used to sit on a raised platform, and we used to sit around him on the ground in a typical Gurukul style. Before he would start giving us lessons, we used to touch his feet and get blessings from him. He would then order his family members to bring food for us after which he used to close the door and start giving us lessons. During the session, nobody from his family was allowed to enter the room. There was no fixed timing for ending the coaching session. He used to start at 8 pm and sometimes he used to get so much engrossed in teaching that session would go past midnight. Let me share with you that Sanskrit language like French is far more difficult than English. We had to struggle a lot to understand the basic concepts. There is lot of grammatical rules one has to follow. Once, he gave us some Sanskrit words and told us to make sentences out of these words. I tried very hard to make sentence out of a particular word “Pravishanti” but failed. Finally, I used a sentence which was actually a famous quote in Sanskrit. It was “Na hi suptasya shinghasya pravishanti mukhe Mriga” which means that Deer don’t enter the mouth of sleeping Tiger on their own. When I narrated this sentence to him, he was very furious. He told me that I betrayed him by copying the sentence from the textbook. In a fit of rage, he threw me out of the room. I was deeply hurt. I then stopped going to him. He was upset that I was not attending his class. He then sent his own family member to call me up. When I met him , I felt very guilty for what I did. I apologized to him for my action. He put his hand on my head and said. “My dear child, whatever, I did was for your own good”. What you did was absolutely wrong.