The Super Power That Can Change The World

“Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom”, said Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose while campaigning our country's freedom movement.

Somewhere, a few decades down the line, reading it to her class, a teacher pondered, “Give me young minds, and I shall turn the nation around.”

Powerful words by a powerful person.

It might sound like a tall claim to make, way too far-fetched even, but anyone who has been a teacher, anyone who has ever been influenced by a teacher knows and understands it to be true. It is huge and impactful, and, in no way, an overstatement.

PC: WeAreTeachers on Facebook

This idea became clearer to me when I myself got a chance to assume the most respectable, the most honourable profession in the world. The love, respect and admiration that I have seen in the eyes of my children (beautiful, lovely children that I doted on, and still do) strongly reinforced in me the idea that I had the power to influence and effect change. 

There is a lot a teacher can do to change the world around us. How do you help control climate change?  Teach your class to turn off the fans when they leave the class. How do help keep the environment clean? Teach your class to find a dustbin, and use it. How do you stop wars from happening? Teach your class the value, importance and necessity of peace. How do you save humanity from dying? Teach your class to be human.

And lead by example every time. Children know it when you preach but don’t practise.

You might be speaking to a batch of 50 students at a time. Imagine doing that over several decades. How many young minds will you be able to influence? I did the Math here – 50 students per year for 40 years of teacherhood makes it a total of 2000 children in the average professional life of a teacher. And that’s what a single teacher can do. What if all the teachers of a nation decide to put this superpower to good use? Can such a force be stopped or challenged? Can they not inspire a whole generation of young minds to work towards a brighter, better tomorrow? Can they not change the course of an entire nation?

Might be something to think about.

Words are powerful tools and powerful weapons of change. Sadly, in this loud and noisy world, where there is too much talking and too little meaning, we fail to recognize the power of great words and impactful statements. This Teacher’s Day let us vow to do complete justice to the most influential 7 letter word in the history of mankind and stand true to it.

Happy Teacher's Day to all the wonderful teachers out there.

#Dedicated to all my teachers who have touched my life, and all my students whose lives I have had the good fortune to touch. God bless you all. Cheers to life, and to the little things in life!!

PS: For Brits and Indians, practice is a noun and practise is a verb; Americans don't have that distinction, neither do they have practise in their dictionary, which is why the word "practise" is either autocorrected or underlined in red in the very American MS Word Document. Also, the word “teacherhood” has been underlined in red here at the backend, but I am keeping it anyway.

#TeachersDay #Teachers #TheLitteThingsInLife