Dear Reader,
I remembered my own debts to my teachers – Teacher Nargis at my convent school who made dry history that was full of dates to be memorised suddenly sound like a story, and later at IIM Calcutta professors like Indivar Kamtekar, who awoke in all of us a sudden burning love for Indian economic and political history. I poured hours into preparing lesson plans, into making sure the kids had a lot of fun as they read and multiplied and divided. The classes grew in size and I was consumed. Till it came to a point where I had to choose – scale up or shut down. I stopped teaching. My days were so full and frenetic, I didn’t give it much thought.
Because i knew I didn’t want to be administering some sort of teaching franchise, the answer became obvious.
My book Career Rules: How to Choose Right and Get the Life You Want had just been released and I had been invited to conduct sessions in different schools as part of a Jaipur Literature Festival Outreach initiative. It was only years later when I found myself in classrooms around the country, that I realised how much I’d missed teaching, how much I missed the electric intensity of live sessions that go well. And how much I missed the feeling of shared exhilaration when my students got it and moved to the next level. One day I was at Rukmini Devi High School in Delhi, the second at a municipal school in Jahangirpuri, the third at Maharani Gayatri Devi School in Jaipur – all so different and yet the intensity everywhere felt the same, as the children and I wrote down stories of defining moments in our lives and together rediscovered the power of stories to provoke discussions, to change lives, and to get you the job you want. In those days, I was Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and was awed all over again with the power of the perfect teacher paired with the right stories, drinking in how a classroom could become a space for freedom, imagination and resistance. The sessions with school children, with college students at Ashoka University, St. Xavier’s Mumbai, and at business schools brought back to me just how fulfilling being a teacher was, even though it paid me even less than writing did.
