A romance life long, a tragedy too personal and too deep for tears

Nothing is more belitting to a man than the awareness that his child cannot feel proud of him. Human brain is yet to invent a language that can express the eerie pain of reaisation that the tone of respect in your child's voice in your presence is tinged with a concern for your sentiments and an elemnt of pity towards himself,

Anyone who has ever been a teacher can understand this even better for he has to deal with this phenomenon not only while he is dealing with his children in the classrooms but practicaly all his life. Just as a father can never grow out of fatherhood, a teacher can never free himself of the emotional, the sentimental and the conscientious baggage which rides his shoulders invisibly even when there is no student around.

This is the reason why I always say that teaching is not a prefession for the weak-hearted - especially if he has ever taken 'teaching' seriously and with even the sightest degree of commitment.

The pain of reallisation of not being a worthy father is matched only by the poingnacy that follows the realisation in a teacher that he has failed to earn the love and respect of those he loves. I did not say "loved" because once you have been a teacher - and have loved being that - there is no retiring from it.

As I wrote once in one of my newspaper artices in The Tribune, " A teacher is nothing if he is not a lover, first and last. Teaching is a life-long romance. It has a moment of beginning followed by eternity. " But if this romance is life-long, then so too is the poignancy of the pain that rides one's disappointments in the role. A teacher's experience of disappointment with himself is a tragedy too deep for tears, and it affects everything in his mental and material experience of life."