To Sir with love...

The year was 1972. I don't exactly remember the date and the month. It was probably one of the winter months. I was a VIII standard student at what was then called Nazeer Memorial High School at Chikkamagalur. Now the school is known as Mountain View School.

It was a morning Biology class taught by my favorite teacher, Mr M N Shadakshari. A brief intro about MNS, as we use to call him. He was about 25 or 26, smart, very confident looking and always immaculately dressed. That day he was in dark trousers, white shirt and an army style scarf around the neck tucked under the shirt collar.

The class was about to begin. Someone in the class had a different idea and that someone knew that it was MNS's birthday! Suddenly, and rather a little unexpectedly a few students said "Sir, it is your birthday today and we want to hear either a story or a novel, not biology please..". And all the rest of the class joined the others.

What happened next was sheer magic. We closed our books and lent our whole selves as the story (Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth) of Peter Miller and Eduard Roschmann unfolded. The streams of fiction and history ran sometimes in parallel and sometimes into each other. They merged and separated many a times. We got introduced to the Holocaust in general and the "Butcher of Riga" in particular. We got to know so much about the Nazis and the SS that we were in disgust hearing about what the Jews had to go through. And finally, we were seething with anger as Roschmann makes an escape to Argentina.

It went on for about a week. Each period of chemistry and biology was transformed to an episode or a chapter of Odessa file. One great Kannada novelist has said that - "reading a novel is also as creative an experience as writing one" and I might extend that to say narrating a novel is also equally creative and MNS was just too good at it.

So a precedent was set. I spent three years at NMHS and we got to hear two more narrations of novels. While in class nine, it was Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and in tenth it was The Outsider, by Albert Camus! It was as enthralling as the first one. The character of Raskolnikov and his complex state of mind with the mental anguish and moral dilemma captivated us for a couple of days. The Outsider was a difficult story to understand, as we were too young
for the existential philosophy it deals with. I must say it also put the first seeds of rationality into my mind.

I went on to other things in life. But, thanks to MNS, my interest in reading continued. I read The Plauge, The Idiot and also some of the great works in Kannada such as Samskara, Kaanura Heggadthi and many others. I was so happy the day when my daughter, Hema finished reading Odessa file, I had to call MNS to share my joy.