My work as an educator puts me in contact with hundreds of high school students every month, and of late I have found myself taking many trips down memory lane, trying to remember what India was like when I was in high school, compared to what it is now.I have also been trying to remember and contrast how politically aware my fellow students and I were back in the day compared to the high school students I teach nowadays. I have been trying to recall – Were we bothered about what was going on in India and the rest of the world politically? Did we discuss politics? Did we even have political opinions as adolescents?What I do remember as rather interesting is that my political science teacher wasn’t political in the least. She would come into class, ask us to open our books, teach us all about the various branches of the government, gram panchayats, blocks, districts and the differences between the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha and leave, without connecting any of it to what was actually happening in the country. I remember either struggling to remain awake in her classes or reading James Hadley Chase under the desk (and occasionally getting caught and being marched to the principal’s office on account of that author’s salacious book covers.)The person who actually ended up sparking my interest in politics was my English teacher, Mrs. Raghubir. Mrs. R., as we called her, had a deep, husky voice, short grey hair, and a very dry sense of humour. She must have been in her mid-50s and wore glasses with photo-chromatic lenses that were always dark regardless of whether she was inside the classroom or outside it. I skipped many other classes in school and got in trouble for it, but always made it a point to attend hers.I don’t know how she did it but Mrs. Raghubir managed to effortlessly connect Walter Scott, V.S. Naipaul, Tagore and Shakespeare to current events and the times we were living in. She turned English literature into a portal through which we learned to see the world. While she most certainly had her own opinions on everything, and rather strong ones at that, she assiduously encouraged us to develop our own. The first time I learnt of Bertolt Brecht and his famous quotation on ‘political illiterates’ was in her class:“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate; he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in political events. He doesn’t understand that the cost of life, beans, fish, flour, rent, shoes and medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician.”Mrs. Raghubir made sure we read at least two newspapers every day and watched the news every night. She poked fun regularly at Doordarshan’s servility and reminded us to read the news with a critical eye. We had lively debates in class that often got heated but never turned acrimonious. Mrs. Raghubir taught us to disagree without being disagreeable.This was the time when Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were transforming “the evil empire” into something very different and the Cold War was beginning to thaw. This was also the time Rajiv Gandhi, despite being one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, had managed to charm the Reagans in the White House and the Senators and Congressmen and women on Capitol Hill.Those were the days when showing off your father’s wealth was considered obscene by the great majority of students, at least in my school. Those were also, incidentally, the days when it was unthinkable to be anything but secular and if you made a big deal out of your religion and tried to lord it over your neighbour’s, you were frowned upon. The BJP barely existed and the RSS was anathema.All of that changed one day in 1985 when the Congress government allowed the locks of the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid to be opened. When I asked Mrs. Raghubir what she felt about that, she went unusually quiet. When she finally replied, it was with a passage from Macbeth:Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death,And prophesying with accents terribleOf dire combustion and confused eventsNew hatch’d to the woeful time… I had no idea what she was talking about back then, but I do now. Looking back at the demons of hate that L.K. Advani’s rath yatra unleashed 7 years later in 1992, I realize Mrs. Raghubir had been prescient.If there was one lesson that Mrs. R. taught us thoroughly, it was that everything begins with how we see. She taught us over and over how important it is to always examine our own paradigms. Her favourite line was, “The way you see someone will determine how you treat them, and the way you treat them will determine who you are.” She explained to us that communalism is what happens when we see another human being only through the lens of religion.She made sure we saw Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi once a year. Her favourite part of the movie was where a Hindu man confesses to Gandhi that he is going to go to hell because he has killed a Muslim child, to which Gandhi replies, “I know a way out of hell. Adopt a Muslim child who has been orphaned and raise him as your own. Just make sure you raise him as a Muslim.”I did not realise it till much later but Mrs. Raghubir shaped my worldview profoundly. The perspectives she taught stayed with me through my college years, and thereafter. Mrs. Raghubir passed away many years ago, but the lessons she taught our class played a quiet and pervasive role in many of the better decisions I have made in my life.She is one of the biggest reasons I am not voting for the BJP.
