There is a saying in Tibetan which says, "Pha lama meth pai gong rol na, Bu sangjay gyel was ming yang meth" that where there is no teacher, there is no Buddha. So thus I attribute whatever success I achieved to my teachers.
My late father was my first teacher. He was one of the village gomchhens who passionately believed that all children should receive some sort of education. Education in those days meant learning kakha followed by Dorje Choedpa and slowly graduating to being able to recite prayer books and performing Buddhist rituals. In those days, there was no concept of modern school in a remote village like Wamling. Very few people had the opportunity to learn to read and write. Some of the village boys came to live with our family and helped in the farm. In return, my father taught them how to read and recite prayer books. My family carried the additional burden of feeding these learners. That was the closest there was to a school in a remote Kheng village. My late father had a big influence in my life. A self-taught man, he showed me how to read and write, and to think and appreciate the teachings of Lord Buddha even before I started my primary school. My father taught me never to take a short-cut to success. He made me realize that there was no royal path to glory. He had inculcated in me a sense of timing and the values of hard work. The only son amongst six sisters, I was dearly loved but never spoilt. Early in life, he had ingrained in me the lessons of humility, hard work, lay jumdray and tha damtsi that have never failed me in life.
Then in the winter session of national assembly, meme Dorjila the member of the national assembly from Wamling had the nerve to ask for a real modern school for those forgotten people of remote Kheng. The real modern school began thus. The six villages of Khrisa, Wamling, Shingkhar, Radhi, Nimshong and Thajong built the school. They all blamed the meme for having the audacity to ask for a school. The first teacher to arrive there was Lopon Tsheringla. He was a strict disciplinarian. And all of us feared him. He was a passionate teacher though, and adopted a no-nonsense approach to school management. If you made a mistake, you paid for it. There was no two ways about it. And we all knew it. It was he who inculcated in me a sense of love for reading. The school had a library, actually a cupboard lined with books. It was in those books that I learnt that there was a world bigger than where we lived; it was in those books that I learnt about other cultures, faiths and peoples, and left me sleepless at nights thinking of the great wide world out there. He showed me the strategies and tactics of life by way of teaching a game of chess. Sixty four spaces on a chessboard became my world to strategize for winning or losing kingdoms. In later years, he became more mellowed and treated us more like his own children. Thank you, Lopon Tsheringla. You have showed me a path that has led to truth and meaning in my life. A village boy from rural Zhemgang never forgot you when he boarded a flight to the United States of America on a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship in the summer of 1990. You have asked me never to waste my time for that was the very stuff our lives are made up of. You have taught me beyond mere reading and writing. You have showed me how to prepare for a meaningful life. And I have listened too!
My next academic journey took me to Samchi Central School. The principal was a dignified-looking, bearded South Indian called G.B Kurrup. I still do not know what G.B stands for, but I do not have to. He is one teacher who has made a great impact in my life. He took an immediate liking for this rustic-looking village boy from a far-away village. He encouraged me to excel in academics and often invited me to read some of his writings. He was a renowned writer in Malayalam and wrote about simple things of life. Although he was firm on his stands, he was flexible and humorous. He was an avid lover of gardens and during his tenure as the principal of the school, I would bet that the school had the most beautiful campus among whole of Bhutanese schools. He was a naturalist and loved to plant trees, flowers and fruit trees. He encouraged students to work hard and use their minds. He used to tell me that the purpose of schooling was not only to learn mathematics, sciences, economics or languages, but to learn to live our lives more meaningfully with nature. He was a great shepherd who knew how to goad his sheep to better grazing grounds. He told me never to settle for anything less than what one was capable of achieving. “The sky is the limit to what you can achieve”, he used to urge me on. He said that I could be whatever I wanted to be in life if I kept pace with my learning habits. When His Majesty the King visited the school in 1986 while I was the chief prefect of the school, my principal was looking for me while His Majesty visited the boys’ hostel. He wanted his protégé and the model student to receive an audience with the King. However that was not meant to be as I was not found then. It was not until 4th April 2008 that I received a memorable audience with the Monarch of the Land in Samteling Palace, along with six other candidates of the People’s Democratic Party, in the aftermath of the epic defeat in Bhutan’s first general elections.
He had inspired me with his knowledge of rural Bhutan. He who had come to Bhutan from Kerala, seeking a career in the Himalayan Kingdom in the early eighties, had lived and experienced hard life in remote villages of Bhutan. He had awaken in me a sense of pride in being a Bhutanese and being unique; he had made me believe in myself and not to put myself down; and most of all, to always strive for the best and never to settle for a second place. As I write this tribute to you, dear sir, I know that you are looking down at me in the arms of your angels and smiling and asking me to never stop believing in the super human potential that you strongly believed in. Even when all else is lost, I will keep my promise to you to neither compromise on my integrity nor waver from truth. That I will do in the memory of my best-loved teacher!
My journey to Sherubtse College in the spring of 1987 brought me to Father Legg, our Physics lecturer. He was a frail-looking Jesuit priest from Canada. He was a good teacher but spoke very softly, so our class could hardly hear. Most of my classmates wrote him off as an ineffective teacher but I thought he was a remarkable teacher. Even when the backbenchers drowned his lecture with loud noises, all he would say was “silent please” and go on explaining how the forces between two masses were directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. I never saw him lose his temper despite loud noises from the backbenchers. One day, I came down with fever and missed his class. That evening, father Legg came to my hostel room bringing along the class notes. He offered to go through the missed lessons. As the frail old man picked up his umbrella to leave my room, I felt a sense of love and deep respect for this man. Today, I often think of that frail Jesuit priest who had the strength of courage and passed on to me a little of that courage. He has taught me that it is not always the loudest and the strongest that is the most effective.
Today, as I raise my own children in the spirit of my teachers and celebrate one hundred years of Monarchy under the Benevolent kings of Wangchuck dynasty, I pay tribute to those four great teachers – my late father who unfortunately did not live to see me graduate from an American university with an engineering degree; lopen Tsheringla whose advice I still seek and value; my friend and principal G.B Kurrup who had passed away some years ago in his native village in Kerala; and Father Legg the memory of whose soft voices and actions still make my hair stand with deep respect for that frail Jesuit priest. It is not to say that other teachers did not impact my life in anyway. But none of my other teachers including my university professors in the United States and the United Kingdom have touched my life and left such indelible memories as these four great teachers have.
Lay Buddhist followers who acted as local healers were often the only ones in a village who knew how to read and write
This is one of the sutras often taught after being able to identify alphabets. This is where combinations of vowels called jorlok is taught.
Zhemgang is also called Kheng and is often used as a derogatory term for poverty
Lay jumdray literally meaning cause and effect
Tha damtsi meaning secret bond to be respected
Endearing term in Kheng for an old man
Literally means a teacher
He was a Christian by faith
