Two letters, a hundred years late, given to the one profession that never asked for anything
The Karnataka government says the two letters stand for Teacher.
In my trade they mean something else, and I think something closer to the truth.
A trustee holds what does not belong to them. Holds it for a beneficiary who cannot yet protect themselves. Takes no profit from it. And must hand the whole of it back, intact, when the beneficiary comes of age.
In a classroom, the beneficiary is literally a minor.
Tr. Teacher. Trustee of the next generation.
So before anything else — my congratulations to Chief Minister Shri D K Shivakumar and the Government of Karnataka. On 5 September, by a simple departmental order, they became the first government in this country to give teachers a name of their own. It costs the exchequer nothing and is worth more than most things that cost a great deal. I hope every other state is watching.
Now, what those two letters actually do.
• • •
The intelligence we already had
At the outset –
The world is spending more on artificial intelligence than on almost anything in its history. I am not a sceptic. I think it is extraordinary. It will teach any syllabus, in any language, at any hour, endlessly, without losing its temper at the ninth repetition.
There is exactly one thing it cannot do, and no amount of capital will ever buy it.
It cannot notice.
It cannot notice that a child has stopped eating. That a bright student has gone quiet over three weeks, and nobody has asked why. That the girl in the third row has been absent four days and her father has begun mentioning a wedding. That a boy flinches at a raised voice. That the same uniform has been on the same child for three years, because there is no money at home and too much pride to say so.
None of that is on the answer sheet. None of it is in the data. It appears for about four seconds, in an ordinary room, on an ordinary afternoon, in front of one adult who is either paying attention or is not.
And here is what should stop this country in its tracks.
We have had a crore of people paying exactly that kind of attention, every working day, for a hundred years, in every village, on almost nothing.
We never once called it intelligence. We called it a government job.
Every doctor, every judge, every founder this nation has produced walked out of that network. It never raised an invoice. It never scaled. It sat in a room, noticed something, and did something about it — generation after generation, without being asked twice.
We are now spending fortunes to build a version of what we have had all along and never valued.
• • •
Out of the gate
On Monday morning, in a school somewhere in Karnataka, a teacher will open the attendance register and sign it the way she has signed it every working day for twenty-two years.
Except this time there will be two letters before her name.
A prefix is not decoration. It is a standing instruction to strangers. Dr. says a life has been placed in this person’s hands. Er. says a structure stands because of them. Each is a society deciding, in advance, that this one has earned something.
Teachers have never had one.
Inside the classroom they were always Sir and Madam. That was never the problem. The problem began at the school gate, because their standing ended there. At the bank counter, in the ration queue, in front of a parent who runs a shop and earns four times what they do — they were nobody in particular. Someone to be kept waiting.
Tr. follows them out of the gate.
It takes the respect that lived only in a room of forty children and makes it portable. And the order says something I find quietly moving: it stays with them for their entire service life. Not for a term, not while posted. Once earned, theirs.
Four and a half lakh teachers in that state. More than a crore in this country.
• • •
And what we ask in return
We send them to count voters. House to house, in the heat, for weeks, with a register and a bag. Survey children. Verify scholarships. Reconcile meal accounts. Whatever the district office is short of hands for that month, it knows exactly where to find people who cannot say no.
Parliament saw this coming. Section 27 of the Right to Education Act says teachers shall not be deployed for non-educational work. High Courts have said so, patiently, for years. Little has changed.
And through all of it they keep teaching — back from three weeks of election duty, into a room of forty children, beginning exactly where they left off, because a child who has fallen behind cannot wait for a circular.
I have spent thirty years among people who negotiate for every inch of what they are owed. I know of no other profession that asks for so little.
• • •
The harvest they never see
A surgeon watches the patient walk out. A lawyer watches the deal close. A builder can drive past the building.
A teacher almost never sees the result of their work.
The child sits in that room for a few years and then disappears into a life the teacher will hear nothing about. The confidence is built at eleven and spent at forty. The one sentence — you can do this — is said on an ordinary Tuesday and quietly turns a whole life, and the person who said it goes home, marks thirty notebooks, and never learns what came of it.
They plant. Somebody else, decades later, eats. And then they do it again the following Monday, for another forty children, knowing perfectly well how it ends.
Which brings me back to the two letters.
The corpus is a child’s capacity. Received at six, held for a decade, returned at sixteen with whatever growth the trustee could put on it. The trustee takes nothing out, and is not in the room on the day the beneficiary comes into the estate.
And there is an old principle of equity that fits this better than anything the order itself could have said. A fiduciary duty binds most tightly precisely where the beneficiary is least able to enforce it. A child can enforce nothing at all. Which is exactly why the standard is highest.
A crore of such trustees. No deed. No security. No accounts anywhere. Holding the future of a nation on a modest salary, and never once taken to court over it — because they have never given anybody reason to go.
Karnataka has now put two letters in front of their names. It fits better than the order knows.
• • •
I did not come from a family that could open doors for me. Whatever I have, somebody decided I was worth the trouble long before there was any evidence for it.
So let me end with the useful thing rather than the sentimental one.
Two letters are a beginning, not a conclusion. Karnataka has done its part. Ours takes four minutes.
Find them. Many are still alive. Most are not on LinkedIn, so you will have to actually ring. Tell them what you became. Tell them you remember the afternoon. They will not believe you, and they will never forget it.
You can name the person who held your future before you could hold it yourself. I know you can — the name arrived while you were reading this.
Have you ever told them?
— Nitin
• • •
Connecting Dots
— every fortnight, I take a deal, a policy, or a person and tell you the thinking behind it. Insights and instincts.
I’m a corporate and M&A lawyer in Mumbai. For three decades I’ve advised global companies and their boards on coming into India, on joint ventures, and on mergers and acquisitions, and I still do. Busy as that keeps me, I always make time for younger professionals — through this letter, and through my conversations with law students — because staying close to young minds keeps me learning. If something here struck a chord, write back. I read every reply.