Once

I have been visiting the blogs I gave links to in the previous post on-and-off since then. They don't feel like my blogs. For many of the posts, I don't even feel like I ever had, or could have had, those thoughts. And I am not talking about those that I wrote in an inebriated condition.

One interesting aspect of revisiting these old blogs has been to also revisit the links in the blogroll. Many blogs, as expected, have not been updated in 2-3 years. But more interesting are the ones that continued to be written on during the extended period I hadn't visited them, and how the person writing at these blogs seems like a different person now from what I perceived him or her to be the last time I was there.

One such blog is now in the blogroll on the left. It is by a classmate from school. We were in the same class from Class V to Class XII, after which we went on to different streams. She got married about a year or so back, and though I visit her Orkut profile once in a while and exchange scraps with even less frequency, I have not really known much about her after school. Not that I claim to have known much when we were in the same class. I was reading some recent posts from her blog in the morning before leaving for office today and, as I said, I found a person different from what I had imagined.

What also made me feel strange - and I don't even know if it's good strange or bad strange - is that she is one of the rare people from my school who write really well. Here is another one, but she was in my school for just two years, so does not count.

The thing is that most people I know from my school really suck at writing in English, and not completely unexpectedly. Our school was a really small place, where we rarely, if ever, conversed with each other in English. Maybe with the English teachers and the Principal, but that was it. The size of a school does not necessarily have to to do anything with that, but it was like that at our place. Most of the students were from our own small colony, and the culture of speaking and writing properly in English never developed. In fact, even though I had always been confident of being able to write decently in English, I used to be extremely conscious of speaking in English, almost petrified of it. It gradually improved only after I joined college in Delhi.

Recently, my parents got posted again at the place I went to school at. During my visit home at New Year's, I visited the school too. Not much had changed. It just felt really small. Again, the person who had been to this place for 8 long, and at times painful, years, seemed like a different person from me. I used to wonder very often what I would be doing 10 years from then. I could never have guessed.

I also met three teachers teaching there now, who had been there during my time too. It's very rare for people to stay in that school that long. We had gotten used to teachers leaving in the middle of the session and we coping on our own for a few weeks. Used to hurt particularly bad in Board classes.

So, it was nice seeing them after such a long time. Since my father has stayed in the same firm all along, they surely kept hearing of my movement after graduating from the school. They didn't seem exactly enthused by the fact that I was working in an investment bank, especially one that they hadn't even heard the name of, but the names of the colleges I have been to should have been enough to make them understand that I haven't exactly sucked since I left school. One of them showed me around the school excitedly, including the honour boards. Another enlisted names of other (illustrious) alumni, many of whom I didn't remember.

I also had this thought then - does a teacher actually feel happy when he sees his student doing better in life, at least monetarily, than him? I have read stories and come across adages that suggest that the greatest proof of a teacher's success is when the disciple surpasses him. I wonder if that's actually true. Doesn't a tinge of envy color that supposed feeling of selflessness? Doesn't the teacher feel cheated for the opportunities he might have had to forgo because of the times, the conditions he was born in?