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!