Gerald D'Cunha

  “If you try to do your best, there is no failure.” Mike Farrell   T hroughout my school and college years, my marks had been very poor… Just like Raju Rastogi’s (Sharman Joshi) in the popular Hindi film, ‘3 Idiots’. Long before this film had come, (2009), I was asked the same question by my interviewer when I had gone for my first teaching job at the Atomic Energy Junior College (1981): “Your marks have been consistently low – any reason?” Raju had a clear and composed answer to this question: “Fear, Sir.” Somehow, I was picked for the ‘temporary’ job… and, like the new Raju, who had come there not with a begging mindset, but with the confidence, that even if he was rejected, he would not be disappointed and afraid, as he would certainly figure out what to do with his life – yes, I was telling the same thing to my own interviewer, :”Sir, I am passionate about teaching… That’s the only thing I will be doing in my life.” I got that temporary job at the junior Colle...

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein W hen I was a student in school and college, I was as anxious of my exams as any other kid was. All students have the anxiety about their exams – maybe, some have it more and some have it less; but, all of them have it… because, all of us had. Today, after spending more than four decades in the teaching field – ‘coaching’ to be precise - I feel, I am an odd-man-out in this field. I say this, because, even though we teachers were very worried about our exams – at times dreadful – we, now, fail to understand the stress we all induce on young minds simply because we adopt the same approach which our own teachers had adopted: make them work for marks… and more marks! Marks are definitely necessary for getting admissions into the right courses and institutes. But, to take this to extreme level –...