Teaching While The World Burns Down

I recoil and remember the pandemic now because it was never just a crisis. It was an event full of Easter eggs from hell. A dress rehearsal for everyday vulnerability that defines our everyday life, everywhere and anywhere in the world. The likeness of tired souls, living and dead, the inequity of access to life and breathing. These markers that defined those years of breathlessness have emerged in new forms, in endless wars, genocides, pollution and the gradual but complete collapse of care; nation state’s or individually. This is how I want to comprehend that how teaching, grief, mourning, living, and surviving have congealed into a mess that keeps on burning, with no sign of extinguishers in sight.

This piece was written while we were still battling the pandemic. But the emotions we dealt with then are still relevant even today, in some form or the other.

I have always been afraid of numbers, as long as I remember. Tangibility rendered through rational sieves made me scared, cowered, and forgetful. However, I can no longer escape numbers anymore. My mother’s death anniversary is coming up in August, and 11 days later my grandmother’s; it is with numbers that I must live with.

For the last one year, I have witnessed loss, personally, indifferently, and pointedly through numbers; a mother, a grandmother, a random old bully, a friend whom I have forgotten, an old couple who gave me shelter on a winter’s night, a night watchman, another friend who loved his healthy life, a mother I met on a shopping spree who gave me advice about a bachelor’s chicken curry, a right-wing activist who dreamt of a profitable, industrialised, if not an equitable, life for men and women, a left activist who gave up hope of a Marxist utopia—all of them became numbers for me in their death.

Every day, one of us, in this billion-populated nation, wakes up to numbers, from oximeters above 95 giving hope to readings below 92 snatching that. But then how do we live with numbers dictating our lives? We can and we can’t. Every day, there is a graph that decides our elevation or downward fall, our minds skipping stones on a flat pond, where every stone thrown sinks. But, in times like these, to use a grammatical cliché, small things make the world go around.

I remember my mother and my grandmother’s death and then I remember that I have students who have gone through hell and back, with their life stopping midway before it took off, losing parents and friends, support systems, and being able to finish a paper on time, with little or no lax in deadlines. I remember and realise that the youth of this country, my students, are the beacons and sometimes immeasurable irritants of hope. In these times of gasping and grabbing at straws, I have found my students and their friends use their social media (any teacher’s nightmare post-2008) to save lives, moments, and fight just wars.

I have seen a careless, dozing-in-class student write up databases, fighting to get oxygen and lesser important materials for people. In times of normalcy, whether they cared or not, nobody knew. I know my students, the morbidly cynical ones, stretching their arms and minds in these times of scarcity, paucity, and lifelessness. This, for the first time, belies my fear of numbers. I fear for them, like my children, that these fires, recording deaths and saving as many, are going to affect them. I fear that as a teacher, I will see my students burnt out or begin (if not already shut down by systemic caste, class, religious, sexual, gendered inequalities). I, as a teacher, strain to extend my deadlines and rein in their waywardness. I try to tell them to give in to this world but to what extent, what consideration of deadline-induced academia. Yet, they need to submit their assignments while burning and burying their dead. We, as a generation of mid-30s teachers, be it in high school or in colleges and universities, might have failed them completely.

As a pedagogic paradigm, Indian education has failed these youngsters lately, with schizophrenic experiments from the left and the right, at state levels and at the Center, my students are struggling to get hold of rationality and class, caste hierarchies. But they are trying. In my experience as a teacher at a private university, not all is lost. My strangest and most fulfilling experiences are with students from non-social sciences backgrounds; their idea of numbers helped me allay my fear of numbers.

Resilience, alas, is a virtue in failing. Sold in governmental ads, party slogans, and, post pandemic certificates of death and living. However, when I talk to my students, eyes heavy with all-nighters and reel fatigue, I know resilience is just an armor for exhaustion that is always ready to take on the world. It is courage that consciously forgot being burnt out in the everyday hustle. Even if I want them to pause, to reflect, to empathise without acquiescing to the productivity that everyday requires which old world patriarchs scoff at, balance is lost in work and life.

I distinctly remember a student who was struggling with online classes as her audio and video were not working. After some patient days, my gruff voice admonished her: “how is this possible that your internet is not working while you live in a metro city, where students from far flung places could connect?” I learnt a lesson that day, she was attending her classes, regularly, while both her parents were in the ICU. Shame, hardly one can say was the primary emotion after learning that.

On the same day that her mother’s test result was positive, another student turned in a paper on “Breathing and gender in these times”. She expressed regret for being four hours late. “Anirban sir, what else is there to do, she said in response to my advice to rest. How would you respond to that? Which lecture can counterbalance that sentence’s weight? Pretending that Wi-Fi was sufficient to keep us human, we were all confined to our little rectangles of light and acting as though the semester still mattered.

And then there’s pollution, our quiet apocalypse. I once joked in class that Delhi had finally achieved socialism, we were all breathing the same air. My students laughed, half choking, half amused. That winter, one of them submitted an essay titled: “How to tame your lungs”, a masterpiece where she compared particulate matter levels with her own flickering sense of hope. She wrote, “I like the dusty dhund, it hides me.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. I underlined the line in red, added “brilliant,” and then coughed into my sleeve for five minutes straight.

Resilience, in both these moments, was useless. What held us together was absurdity, the kind of dark laughter that leaks out when despair looms large. It wasn’t strength that kept us going; it was the stubborn humour of those who know the world is ridiculous and still show up for attendance. My students kept showing up. Their screens flickered, their lungs hurt, their hearts were weary but they showed up. And in that small, impermanent persistence, I learned what numbers could never capture: how to live among ruins.

And yet, I hope for them. Not the radiant, nationalist hope that governments/states peddle, but the fragile, trembling one; that they may live gentle lives, make soft revolutions, and find love that does not need validation through achievement and violence. I hope they never have to prove their resilience again. I hope they fail sometimes, brutally, beautifully, honestly, and without shame.

Because perhaps the only thing left for us, teachers and students alike, is to resist the arithmetic of survival; to refuse to be counted only when we succeed. I think of my mother, my grandmother, and the thousands of unnamed faces behind those daily statistics. They, too, were numbers. But in remembering them, I have learned to see the pulse beneath the digits.

And maybe that is all hope really is, phones full of poses, despair, and texted gently.

Anirban Ghosh is assistant professor and director, Centre for Writing, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh.