Nature is a teacher. So is life. While Nature teaches passively, life does so through experience, and experience is post facto teaching. But how will young minds learn to handle experiences that life hands out to them? That is where the teacher, the spiritual guru, the philosopher come in.
‘Shri Gurubhyo Namaha,' a cultural presentation from Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan Schools, explored the role of all these three through neatly choreographed dances, pleasing music and succinct dialogue.
The role of seers in instructing us was shown through brief depictions of the lives of the three great acharyas from South India – Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva.
Drawing similarities
A pantheistic approach was adopted to show the similarities in the teachings of Confucius, Jesus and Ramanuja. Ramanuja's compassion for the downtrodden and his reformatory zeal were compared to Christ's concern for the meek. Confucius' exhortation to his disciples to treat others as they themselves wished to be treated found its echo in another country, when Christ taught the concept of love through His parables. The story of the Good Samaritan was enacted by the students to highlight Christ's teachings.
To show that guru-sishya lineage existed in other countries too, a skit about Socrates, Aristotle and Plato was performed. It showed how students in these academies were taught according to their abilities, therefore, affording a lesson to those running educational institutions. It was perhaps put up to tell teachers that they should tailor their training methods to suit the needs of the child.
‘Azhwar Acharya Vaibhavam' that followed was a lesson on the reverence a student should have for his teacher. Institutions such as Shantiniketan and Kalakshetra, which have fostered traditional Indian methods of instruction, were honoured through dances.
If Sachin Tendulkar learnt from his coach the important lesson that he was not bigger than the game, Arjuna learnt from Lord Krishna that in life he could only play the role the Lord intended for him. The One in charge was Lord Krishna – the Universal Guru. Such inspirational stories were colourfully depicted on stage.
Can a teacher be dispensed with? That's the question ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips' explored. The title was incidental and the skit had nothing to do with the original story bearing that title.
The ‘chips' here are the ones found in robots, which in the play, take over the task of teaching. The robots are efficient but uninspiring and unloving. And the teacher, being in loco parentis, must care for the child. A robot can never be a substitute for a teacher.
Can a robot conceive and execute a programme like PSBB's ‘Shri Gurubhyo Namaha'? The programme was itself proof of the indispensability of teachers.
