Bollywood’s teachers: Extra or extraordinary, never ordinary

It is Teachers’ Day in India, and we are reminded of the big space teachers occupy in our lives; whether we acknowledge it or not is another matter. But the teachers we celebrate in real life are not quite the ones we have learnt to recognise in mainstream Hindi cinema. Bollywood, interestingly, has often turned them into outsized characters. They’re either saints, saviours, eccentrics, or plain tyrants: all memorable in their own way, but rarely familiar. There have been exceptions, of course, and those exceptions are perhaps revealing precisely because of how unusual they feel. Actually, there are so few ‘types’ of teachers we see in Hindi movies that I have created broad categories for them:

The Eccentric & the Buffoon

Think Virus in 3 Idiots. He has his quirks: His personal barber comes in at a particular time, and he takes a nap while listening to Western classical music (!) because he is multitasking. He is brilliant, yet the quirks tend to make him look caricatured. And when I talk of caricature, how can I not mention Anupam Kher’s Mr Malhotra in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, who bordered on buffoonery while almost chasing Mrs Braganza, the English teacher. Or even Rishi Kapoor in Student of the Year, who salivated over a much younger PE instructor played by Ronit Roy. And you would think that the principals of huge schools like those (both Karan Johar’s, by the way) would have a better handle on their feelings while at work!

The Sexy(?)

God forbid we said something like this in our actual schools. But someone tell me, who hires teachers like Sushmita Sen in Main Hoon Na? Her wind-blown hair, chiffon sarees and pretty blouses – everything about her was PERFECT, just not in a high school. I am not sure how many young women were inspired by Sushmita to grow up to become teachers. And I am not sure what her character was called in the film either.

The Tyrant

That’s Narayan Shastri in Mohabbatein. A strict disciplinarian, he seemed to almost hate his job and the kids under his watch. Again, too one-dimensional for a man heading an all-boys boarding school. Wouldn’t that man need to be a little nicer to get his way with teenage boys, especially the ones coming from really privileged backgrounds? He felt more like a modern-day preacher stepping up to the pulpit to give gyaan, totally oblivious to the fact that nobody was really listening.

And if you are talking about N Shastri, can Raj Aryan be far behind? All that this particular teacher did was play the violin, wear pastel-coloured pullovers, get moony-eyed thinking of his dead girlfriend, and offer some more gyaan to the students- this time about love (!) in a school! No wonder Narayan Shastri hated him. After all, who is going to help the kids with their grades?

Of course, Bollywood has shown us a few exceptions as well, but those, I feel, happened because teachers (finally!) had a huge role in the story. Like Taare Zameen Par‘s Ram Shankar Nikumbh. Or Hichki‘s Naina Mathur, or even Super 30‘s Anand Kumar. But these characters had a big role to play, so they better be exceptional, right?

No room for average?

The problem with all these archetypes is that they leave very little room for the teacher who is simply a teacher. Not a saviour, not a tyrant, not a walking repository of wisdom — just a regular person who teaches algebra throughout the day and has 40 teenagers to get through before lunch. Or spends their day trying to get a bunch of reluctant pre-nursery kids to take their literal baby steps in formal education. And all this while continuing to stand, as many schools don’t allow them to sit during class.

Their jobs don’t end when they get home. Because there are always assignments to correct, exams to schedule, and question papers to set.

And still, they know how to handle the loud ones, the shy ones, even the ones who are forever cutting class. Who will show us those teachers? Perhaps we have known them ourselves, and the memories are simply too dear, too particular, too lived-in, to risk being made smaller on the big screen.