The Guru Who Saw Me Before I Saw Myself

Shri Chandan Singh Pawar Pawar Saab to all of us who both feared and adored him in equal, confusing measure and, in the wider constellation of school memory, the formidable presence of Shri S. K. Gupta, the legendary principal of Birla Vidya Mandir, Nainital, whose very footsteps in a corridor had the uncanny effect of transforming even the most irrepressible adolescent into a model of sudden, suspicious virtue.

Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwara,

Guru Sakshat Parabrahma, Tasmai Shri Gurave Namah.

Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu…

He was not simply a teacher.

He was, if I may borrow a slightly more elaborate register than my usual conversational restraint permits, the quiet architect of a life I had not yet imagined, and certainly not applied for in any known admission form of destiny.

When I entered Tagore House as student Folio No. 513, I was not the person most people know today. I was painfully introverted. Crowds drained me as though they were elaborate Victorian contraptions designed specifically for the extraction of social energy. Conversation, unless it involved books or trees or silence, felt like an unnecessary expenditure of breath. I was, in essence, a young hermit who had somehow been misfiled into a boarding school through what can only be described as a clerical misunderstanding of cosmic proportions and in this case of a certain SK Singh my father's bosom buddy whose overreaching presense in my life has both been a blessing and curse depending on my day and sense of injustice that I feel that day. 

Had you told anyone then that this boy would one day speak to audiences, conduct meetings, debate complex ideas, and hold forth on matters ranging from the philosophical to the absurdly practical, they would have smiled with the indulgent disbelief usually reserved for optimistic railway timetables and weather forecasts promising “light showers” in Nainital.

Except one man.

Pawar Saab saw something in me that I, in my own rather limited self-assessment, had not yet been formally introduced to.

Instead of allowing me to dissolve quietly into the comforting anonymity of institutional wallpaper, he sometimes gently, sometimes with the strategic firmness of a man who knew exactly what he was doing pulled me into the foreground of school life. I was made to deliver the Thought for the Day, read the news in morning assembly, and even recite the Sanskrit prayer before lunch, a ritual I approached with the enthusiasm of a man being asked to perform open-heart surgery with a butter knife and believe me the pain at time was the same except that there was no anaesthesia given to the patient that is me. The Gods of course chose to ignore my prayers to have an earthquak or lighting strike the mess but as is their wonet to almost all of my prayers this too was ignored. God you see is like a  bureaucrat with a large amount of pending files on which the general note is only seen and disregard. The fellow might have gone to the hollowed Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy Of Administration Charleville estate, Mussoorie and learnt the art of doing nothing there.

I resisted, of course. I complained. I negotiated. I attempted, on at least two occasions, tactical invisibility.

It did not work.

Pawar Saab, with quiet amusement and the patience of someone who had seen every possible variety of adolescent rebellion, appointed Satya Bhaiya, the house prefect, to “keep an eye” on me. Satya Bhaiya, in turn, had the relentless efficiency of a well-trained English bulldog and the moral seriousness of a Victorian headmaster. After that, resistance was no longer a strategy; it was merely a memory.

As a junior student, I had the peculiar privilege of sharing the stage with Shri S. K. Gupta, whose intellectual presence could reduce an entire hall of students to attentive silence. He made me the master of ceremonies for house functions, and, with what I now recognise as a mixture of encouragement and controlled provocation, pushed me into debates and public speaking.

He loved it when I argued with him.

And I, in my youthful audacity, obliged often with great passion and very little sense of self-preservation only to find my arguments dismantled with surgical calm and a faint, almost paternal amusement.

Every assignment terrified me.

Every opportunity stretched me.

Every experience, in retrospect, was not an event but an elegant act of quiet transformation, conducted without announcement, applause, or even the courtesy of warning.

And yet, what I remember most vividly is not discipline, but curiosity.

Many teachers, understandably anxious about academic order, regard curiosity outside the syllabus as a mildly dangerous indulgence. Pawar Saab belonged to that rare and enlightened species who did not confuse curiosity with disobedience. He never stopped me from reading newspapers, magazines, or library books. He never restricted my intellectual wandering, because he understood something profoundly simple: education is not a closed room, but an open window through which the world insists on entering.

He allowed curiosity to breathe.

He allowed thought to expand.

He allowed a boy to become, slowly and almost imperceptibly, a thinker.

I was, by no reasonable metric, a perfect student.

I made mistakes.

I was occasionally rude.

I complained with the enthusiasm of a professional grievance collector.

And yes, I even cheated in exams, an episode I recall now with a mixture of embarrassment and reluctant admiration for my own theatrical incompetence. He knew. Of course he knew. But he never made it a public spectacle, never reduced it to humiliation, and never allowed it to become anything other than a lesson quietly absorbed.

He corrected me without discarding me.

He guided me without diminishing me.

He believed in me with a certainty that I, at the time, did not deserve, but was nevertheless fortunate enough to receive.

Looking back, I realise that what seemed like small acts of discipline were, in fact, tectonic shifts disguised as routine school life.

Today, people often assume I have always been an extrovert. A colleague once told me he could not imagine me as anything else.

He never knew that the happiest version of me was a boy lying under a tree with a book, a sandwich, a pillow, and a bedsheet sitting above the fabled Birla tanki looking at Nainital below mentioned an arrangement so idyllic it would have made even P. G. Wodehouse pause mid sentence and smile in quiet approval.

That boy still exists.

Pawar Saab simply taught him how to speak without losing his silence.

Last year, we lost him to a heart attack.

And yet, “lost” feels like an inadequate verb for a man like him, as though language itself has failed to keep pace with the enormity of absence. His passing was not merely an event; it was a quiet rearrangement of the emotional furniture of those who knew him.

Even now, I find it difficult to believe he is gone in any final sense. There are people who leave this world, and there are those who, rather inconveniently for our understanding of closure, refuse to leave it entirely.

Their lessons continue.

Their voice continues.

Their presence, in some inexplicable way, continues.

Pawar Saab belongs unmistakably to the second category.

To Shri Chandan Singh Pawar Pawar Saab thank you.

Thank you for your faith, which you dispensed so casually and yet so profoundly.

Thank you for your affection, which rarely needed words.

Thank you for your discipline, which never felt like cruelty.

Thank you for your worry, which continued long after we had grown into adults, as though we were still your responsibility in some cosmic register of care.

I may have resisted you.

I may have misunderstood you.

I may even have, at times, resented the pressure of your expectations.

But today, with the clarity that only time and loss can confer, I understand.

Those expectations were not burdens.

They were scaffolding for a life I had not yet learned to build.

The greatest teachers are not remembered merely for what they taught.

They are remembered for the slightly improbable, often astonishing human beings their students became in spite of themselves.

On this Guru Purnima, I bow my head in gratitude to the man who saw me before I saw myself.

And now, in his absence, I find myself not merely remembering him, but missing him in a way that feels almost physical like a familiar voice that has just stepped out of the room, leaving behind an echo that refuses to fade.

Thank you, Guruji.

If there is any measure of life beyond this one, I hope it records, somewhere in its quiet ledgers, that I tried imperfectly, but sincerely to become worthy of your faith. As for you at evening like ever day you would be lighting a diya in front of your father photo say a prayer and then continue in the journey called life. Some people live in memories long after they are gone. So does the resplendent Chandan Singh Pawar Guruji and house Master Tagore House Birla Viday Mandir Nainital! 

Of Gurus, Fellow Travellers and a Well-Spent Weekend

There are weekends when one intends to accomplish something productive. Organise the study, answer neglected emails, perhaps even persuade the wardrobe that shirts do not belong on chairs. Instead, one watches two series and convinces oneself that this too is education. I have become remarkably good at this form of self-deception.

The first was Adarsh Vidyalaya on Amazon Prime Video.

One approaches it expecting another school drama. Schools, after all, are favourite hunting grounds for scriptwriters. What one discovers instead is a gentle reminder that our education system often mistakes information for education. Buildings become grander, syllabi become thicker, and examinations become increasingly inventive, but none of these things has ever produced a remarkable human being.

Teachers do.

Or, to be more precise, Gurus do.

There is an important difference. A teacher completes the syllabus. A Guru quietly rewrites the student. Years later, one forgets trigonometry, chemical formulae, and perhaps even the capital of Kazakhstan, but one never forgets the man or woman who first convinced us that we were capable of becoming something better than we imagined.

Then there is Cafe Musafir on Netflix.

Kay Kay Menon has arrived at that delightful stage in an actor's life where he appears to have stopped acting altogether. He merely exists, and the camera faithfully records it. His silences have become more eloquent than many actors' speeches.

The series reminded me of those of us who have spent years living away from family. Strange cities have an odd habit of lending you temporary families. A colleague becomes a brother, a neighbour becomes an aunt, a tea stall becomes a drawing room, and a café becomes the place where friendships and relationships quietly begin.

Equally quietly, some of them end.

People arrive without invitation, rearrange your life with astonishing efficiency, and depart just as you begin to believe they have always belonged there. I have long suspected there should be a railway timetable for such people. It would save everyone a good deal of emotional confusion.

Such, however, is life. It rarely consults us before altering the cast.

One series reminded me that a Guru can change the course of a life.

The other reminded me that fellow travellers can do precisely the same thing.

I recommend both. Preferably with a cup of tea and sufficient time. Or, if you are feeling slightly more adventurous, make yourself some garlic bread, add a generous helping of mature Cheddar cheese, and enjoy it with a bunch of grapes—my favourite meal. Use sourdough if you really want to do it properly. Above all, resist the temptation to check your office email. It has an uncanny habit of waiting patiently until Monday.

From Taxila to Audits: How a Colonial System Tried to Turn Genius Into Bookkeeping

 In 1907, an 18-year-old Indian government accountant named C.V. Raman sat in a finance office in Calcutta balancing ledgers. That same year, he published a paper in Nature titled Newton's Rings in Polarised Light, politely pointing out a serious error in standard physics textbooks based on Isaac Newton's optical theories.

He had no formal university lab, no research grant, and no funding. The British colonial administration had decided his best use was auditing government expenditures by day. Years later, working nights at a modest local institute, he discovered the Raman Effect and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The ironic part is not just that an accountant corrected Newton. It is that a bureaucratic machine designed to produce obedient clerks failed to stop him.

The Systematic De-skilling of an Empire

To understand why a world-class scientific mind was auditing expense receipts in 1907, look at what the colonial education system was designed to do.

Centuries earlier, the Indian subcontinent was home to global centers of learning like Nalanda and Taxila. These were residential universities drawing scholars across Asia, teaching astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. This was the intellectual ecosystem that produced figures like Aryabhata, who calculated the Earth's circumference and concept of zero, and Sushruta, the ancient surgeon who detailed rhinoplasty and complex surgical tools millennia ago.

When colonial rule took root, those institutional structures were systematically dismantled and replaced. Lord Macaulay explicitly outlined the goal in his 1835 Minute on Education: build a class of people Indian in blood and color, but British in taste, opinions, and intellect, tailor-made to serve as mid-level administrators.

• The goal was not discovery; it was documentation.

• The goal was not innovation; it was obedience.

• Higher research facilities were virtually non-existent for Indians.

A civilization that mapped planetary motion was reduced to training generations to file paperwork for foreign masters.

The Legacy We Still Carry

C.V. Raman won his Nobel Prize not because of the colonial education system, but in spite of it. He had to treat his government day job as an interruption and his nighttime physics research as his real work.

The dark humor in all of this is that the clerk-producing machinery was so efficient, its echoes still linger today. Millions of students chase safe corporate ledgers while ancient intellectual legacies sit as mere footnotes in history books. Raman proved that you can force a genius into bookkeeping, but you cannot stop him from looking at the light. Yet the Raj rules over us still; we carry out the saab's orders, dutifully running the same old engine.

• The Factory of Clerks: Designed centuries ago to churn out obedient administrators rather than independent thinkers, the system still operates like a conveyor belt, producing compliance instead of curiosity.

• Quotas as Permanent Fixes: What was meant as a temporary socio-political remedy has turned into a permanent fixture, used to manage numbers while primary learning and foundational quality collapse in the background.

• The Unmentioned Price: High-pressure academic ecosystems push young minds into corners where failure feels absolute, yet the resulting suicides are quietly absorbed into administrative noise as isolated incidents rather than systemic defects.

• Policy Over Life: By prioritizing rigid institutional mechanics over actual student well-being, the machinery claims to build equity while indifferently consuming the very lives it promises to lift.

Riding the White Horse: Do Our Folk Deities Disprove the Aryan Invasion Theory?

I was recently watching the Tamil movie Karuppu, a gripping story centered around Vettai Karuppu he legendary God of Justice, also known as Karuppannaswamy. In the local traditions, he is revered as a fierce, protective manifestation of Shiva.

As I watched, a striking parallel hit me.

Deep in the northern peaks of the Himalayas, the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand worships Golu Devta. He, too, is considered an incarnation of Shiva (specifically Bhairav). He, too, is universally hailed as the supreme "God of Justice" to whom devotees write literal petitions. And remarkably, just like Karuppannaswamy, Golu Devta is traditionally depicted riding a divine white horse, galloping across the land to deliver swift, uncorrupted justice to the innocent.

Here is where it gets fascinating. For decades, conventional history textbooks heavily propagated the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), drawing a rigid cultural divide between a "Vedic/Aryan North" and a "Dravidian South."

However, look at the nature of these two deities. According to the foundational definitions used by the proponents of the invasion theory themselves, both Karuppannaswamy and Golu Devta belong to: Folk and Non-Vedic Roots: Neither deity originates from mainstream, Sanskritized Vedic literature. Instead, both emerge from indigenous oral histories, tribal roots, and local clan lineages (Kula Deivam or Kula Devta).

If the North and the South were populated by entirely distinct, conflicting ancient races as the old theory claimed, how do we explain the exact same folk archetype evolving independently in both places? How do two completely different landscapes share an identical, non-Vedic deity who rides the exact same mount to serve the exact same cosmic purpose?

When you combine these deep spiritual parallels with modern archaeological findings such as the mapping of the ancient Saraswati River basin, which proves that the cradle of Indian civilization never experienced a sudden, violent rupture the old "invasion" narrative completely crumbles.

Instead of a history defined by invasion and division, our folk traditions tell a completely different story. They prove that India's spiritual unity wasn't just built from the top down through mainstream texts; it was already deeply woven into the soil, riding a white horse from the southern plains all the way to the Himalayan peaks.