Faces From My Past: The English Teacher

“I fall upon the thorns of Life, I bleed,” he would recite in his trademark fashion. 

The victorious demeanor as he pronounced these words would baffle me.  Was it evidence of love he had for the English Language and its vast body of literature, or was it an expression of pride at knowing so much?

A short, dark man of slight, almost scrawny build, Mr.Ramachandiran M. a Tamil Brahmin in service of the Royal Bhutan Education, was posted at Punakha High School. That he was an MA in English and had a distance M Phil in Phonetics was impressed upon his students time and again amidst stories and anecdotes.  He had a distinctive gait of short steps, slightly favoring his right leg.  His face would bear a look that could have been construed as either borne out of disdain or maybe constipation.

The first class I attended of Mr. Ramachandiran was in the ninth standard. He started off with Milton’s “On His Blindness”.  The distinction between Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearian sonnets, words like octet and sestet, the iambic pentameter, had us all spellbound. We would scribble down in our notebooks whatever information trickled down from his lips.  However as time went by, John Milton spread his wings so wide that by the time we finished ’On His Blindness’, we also came to know of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. 

“Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.” he would invoke in his nasal drawl.

 

The fascination for this extra learning was soon lost among the students. There was indignation among the pupils and more so because most of the lecture would be directed at the first few benches in the middle of the class. The seating arrangement in the classrooms consisted of three columns, the two outer ones seating the boys and the central column populated by the girls of the class. The smartest and prettiest girls of the class occupied the front row of seats. It was this portion of our class that would seem at times the object of the complete extent of Mr. Ramachandiran’s pedagogy.

We as a class were not at our best in terms of English pronunciation at that time. Mr. Ramachandiran would look with contempt at a student for his faulty pronunciation and rectify him. Taking a piece of chalk he would write the word on the black board in bold letters…

T    A    B    L    E  

Then, brushing the chalk powder off of his fingers, he would say with a smug countenance,

“It’s not pronounced /tabʌl/,”

“It’s /ˈteɪb(ə)l/.”

Then he would scribble again on the black board

B    O    T    T    L    E  

“Now tell me how to pronounce this?” he would call out names and ask.

Clueless about what he is expecting, each of us would stand up and try to pronounce the word in a different way. Often some such outrageous pronunciation would draw laughter from everyone else in the class.

“It’s /ˈbɒt(ə)l/,” he would declare at the end of it, bidding the standees to sit down with a dismissive gesture that seemed more like forgiveness of the sin of wrong pronunciation.

The funniest one was however the difference in the sound of ‘TH‘ in the words ‘There’ and ‘Theory’. He would demonstrate,

“Place your finger on your throat.  Feel the difference while saying these two words. You will see that the “TH” in “There” is accompanied by more vibration in the throat. This sound is called Eth.  ‘TH’ in ‘Theory’ lacks this buzzing in the throat.  Otherwise the tip of the tongue touches the same point on the upper palate for both the words.  This silent counterpart of the ‘Eth’ sound is called ‘Theta’”

Half of the class would start feeling for vibrations in their throats and the naughtier ones would start making cacophonous sounds and finally break out into giggles. Others would simply gape in amazement at the person in front of the class. Mr. Ramachandiran, having successfully completed this phonetic demonstration would look at the first benchers in front of him and soak in their admiring glances. If one of the girls happened to ask any question or doubt, he would simply melt over. In his eagerness to impart all that he knows, our English teacher would go through the entire length and breadth of Phonetics to impress them. John Milton or William Shakespeare would be disregarded and only the period bell would bring him out of this spell. He would then wrap up with a satisfied expression on his face and leave the class room.

Thus went our four years of English lessons with Mr. Ramachandiran, as he took us from sonnets of Milton to odes of Keats. From thence, hand in hand with “the winged Psyche with awakened eyes”, he took us where “two roads diverged in the woods”. There we followed Robert Frost as he took the road less travelled by. We reached the sunny valley where under the shade of a tree with William Wordsworth, we listened to the songs of the solitary reaper. We saw him as he “wandered lonely as a cloud” and came upon “a host of golden daffodils”. Coleridge lent us wings as we flew with the albatross over the ancient mariner’s ship and thence into the measureless tumultuous caverns of Kubla Khan’s Xanadu.

With Shakespeare we felt the pain of a love stricken Orsino as he proclaims music as the food of love. “All the world’s a stage,” we philosophized with Shakespeare, “and all the men and women merely players.” We went from partaking of Lord Byron’s opium induced dream where, “She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies,” to being blown away with the dry leaves of autumn, as Shelley’s ode invoked the West Wind.

In spite of his snobbery and the resulting displeasure he caused among his students, I have to admit that he stoked my passion to read. In spite of a school curriculum leadened by heavy syllabi, I sneaked in time to read anything that I could lay my hands upon. From Tinkle comics to the British encyclopedia, I read indiscriminately. Reading has since been a source of immense joy for me. It has always provided me the thrill and excitement that my heart longs for.

I remember Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Village Schoolmaster’. It’s funny that these lines seem so like our good old English teacher.

“While words of learned length and thund'ring sound
Amazed the gazing rustics rang'd around;
And still they gaz'd and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.”