Guru Govind dou khade, kake lagoon paay. Balihari guru aapne, Govind diyo batay. Guru and God both stand before me. Whose feet should I touch first? I give myself to my guru, who showed me God. The couplet is attributed to the poet Kabir. Its wording varies slightly between editions.
The Teacher’s Full Moon
Guru Purnima, the day to honor teachers, falls on the full moon of the month of Ashadha, in June or July. It is also called Vyasa Purnima, because it marks the birthday of Veda Vyasa. The Hindi newspaper Patrika describes Vyasa as adiguru, the first guru.
All Men Are My Children
One of the edicts of the emperor Ashoka at Dhauli, in Kalinga, reads in D.C. Sircar’s translation: “All men are my children.” Ashoka goes on that he wants for all men what he wants for his own children, “welfare and happiness in this world and in the next.”
Amma, Didi, Behenji
Amma. Mother. Jayalalithaa, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, was hailed as Amma, “an epithet that she deeply ingrained in the public mind,” the news site DailyO wrote.
Didi, elder sister: Mamata Banerjee. Behenji, sister: Mayawati. Chacha, uncle: Jawaharlal Nehru, “to India’s children.”
Such names, DailyO wrote, create “a sense of belonging and familiarity.”
Exams with the Prime Minister
On February 16, 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took questions from students at Talkatora Stadium in New Delhi. The event was called Pariksha Pe Charcha, a discussion on exams. The students asked about exam stress, pressure from parents, concentration and self-confidence. “Don’t think of me as the prime minister but as a friend,” he told them.
Eleven Vows
Mahatma Gandhi asked the residents of his ashram to keep eleven vows, the ekadash vrat. They were truth, non-violence, chastity, non-possession, non-stealing, bread labor, control of the palate, fearlessness, equality of religions, swadeshi (the use of goods made at home) and the removal of untouchability.
Sundays at the Office
In October 2023 the Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said on a podcast: “My request is that our youngsters must say, ‘this is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week.'”
In January 2025 a video of S.N. Subrahmanyan, chairman of Larsen & Toubro, reached the public. He told employees he was sorry he could not make them work on Sundays. “How long can you stare at your wife?” he asked, Moneylife reported.
Business leaders, among them Harsh Goenka and Harsh Mariwala, criticized the remarks. L&T replied that “extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary effort.”
The Art Teacher
In Taare Zameen Par (2007), Aamir Khan’s first film as director, a boy named Ishaan is sent to boarding school to be disciplined. A new art teacher, Ram Shankar Nikumbh, realizes that Ishaan is not happy at school “and sets out to discover why.” The cause he finds is dyslexia.
The Phone
During the Rio Olympics in August 2016, the badminton coach Pullela Gopichand spoke about his player P.V. Sindhu: “Sindhu did not have her phone during the last three months. The first thing is I would return her phone.” He added: “I also stopped her from eating ice-cream. Now she can eat whatever she wants.”
In Search of a Guru
In 1933, at the age of 11, Bhimsen Joshi left his home in Dharwad to find a music teacher. He traveled to Bijapur, Pune, Gwalior and across North India, until his father found him in Jalandhar.
In 1936 the singer Sawai Gandharva accepted him as a student. Joshi lived in his teacher’s house, in the guru-shishya tradition, the bond of teacher and disciple. He later received the Bharat Ratna.