There are some brilliant students at Deerwalk Sifal School such as Sonic shrestha and Yawat Malla and others whom I look at with a sense of envy- for they are much more brilliant than I was at their age. They are putting up with an educational curriculum that intends to bore them thorouglly. Despite it, they maintain a certain charm and charisma and embrace learning in ways I wish more students did.
When I approached Ujjwal Poudel and Madhu Sudhan Bhusal with the possibility of organising research projects at Deerwalk under the aegis of Gyan Research for Advanced Communication and Education, they were gracious enough to allow a bum like me to mentor students. Since I am a student of astronomy/ astrophysics and students are quite naturally drawn towards this field, it is quite seamless to guide them. In some cases, it feels as if they are the ones who are guiding me. The knower, the known, the unknown, and the knowing, do sometimes bleed into each other.
One of my hopes with these guest lectures is that students don't end up becoming a fachidiot- a narrow minded technical expert. With this whole modern idea of specialising in a narrow field of studies, I am worried that the newer crop of students might end up being so. I mean if the human consciousness were such that it were specialized only at a certain thing- say purely at hearing or exclusively listening or solely feeling, we would have been much poorer in a lot of ways- after all the universe universes all at once. There's a great deal of connection between its seemingly uncorrelated microcosms.
As a part of showing them how to make sense of any piece of writing (and I had the hopes that they would also get as much a sense of their own writing), I organized this lecture. It was about the most glorious opening sentences I had ever read. After all, an opening sentence is a dive into a well-crafted piece of writing. How could one make sense of a sentence like "Once upon a time there was a prostitute named Maria" or Orwell's soul-stirring "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
Orwell is an almost uncontested champion of opening his works in the most uncopy-able idiosyncrasies. Take his account of when he, who was vegetarian for he never wanted to hurt an animal, had to shoot an elephant:
"In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me."
Or Nabokov, when he announces, "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." gives us into the predatory instincts of Humbert Humbert. But the predatory instincts do charter into the most romantic of lines when he announces
"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
I wanted students to get a sense of these musings. I don't know if I was successful but I felt that it wasn't a huge waste- and that is sometimes consolation enough.
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