Representative image of a classroom.
Credit: iStock photo
As a child, whenever I visited my village in present-day Himachal Pradesh, I would attend the government primary school along with my cousins, who were there as regulars. The school was situated in a place known as Brhuin. It had one highly respected school teacher who had a rather unusual name, Jamhula Ram, who would teach all the classes. It was in this school that I was to learn the multiplication tables up to twenty (by twenty) by rote, as Mr Ram made all students recite the tables in the last hour of school every day.
The teacher was so popular and revered that when assembly elections were announced, parents and guardians of so many boys and girls, including my grandfather, started persuading him to contest the election. The teacher was not willing to fight the election, as it was imperative in those days that if one wanted to fight an election, one had to resign from government service.
When the number of people persuading the good teacher to fight the election started increasing gradually, perhaps he too began to believe that he could win the election and become an MLA.
On the last day of filing nominations, a large crowd gathered outside the small premises of the school to goad him to file his nomination. The poor fellow resigned from service and filed his papers.
Then started the canvassing, in which enthusiastic little students played a good role. A few days before the voting or election date, he even addressed a press conference, where a few journalists from the vernacular press asked him what he would do for the region (Halka) if he got elected. He told them what he intended to do for the region. But in the end, he couldn’t help saying very honestly, “If I lose, I don’t know what I shall do.”
Unfortunately, he lost the election. I was told three years later that he was very dejected and had opened a kirana shop to earn a living in his native village, which was around 6 to 7 kilometres from the school.
Later on, I thought of visiting him many times whenever I visited my village but didn’t have the courage to face him. Since then, all these years later, I have been thinking about how he might have led the rest of his life. After all, he was the teacher who made me remember multiplication tables by heart, even though I was not on his school’s roster.