When Joshiji speaks…

To me, Dr Joshi has always been ‘Sir’. And as any of his students from the Physics department of Allahabad University would agree, Joshiji is first and foremost a teacher and then the towering intellectual who has left his indelible stamp on contemporary politics.

In his birthday week, with so much talk about Joshiji the Man, the mind travels back to my own green years and I see today’s tall political leader as a younger man. Allahabad was then a premier centre of education. Teachers mingled freely with the students at impromptu seminars, a regular feature of campus life.

On one such occasion somebody asked Professor Krishnaji, one of the most respected members of the faculty, how he plans his teaching.

According to Professor Krishnaji, he never arrived at a lecture without extensive preparation. Even the questions from students were anticipated and answers were ready.

On the rare occasions when he could not make his ‘advance plans’ he would delay his class by a few minutes which was all he needed to scribble down a quick ‘strategic plan’.

Now, Joshiji was another matter. He was very young at the time — not even 30. But even at that early age, he made an impression with his personable ways and his grasp over so many subjects. The shelves in his house in Tagore Town were stocked with books on not just Physics, but Economics, History, Politics, Philosophy and Ethics as well.

But like Krishnaji, he too was very meticulous about note-taking. He used to lecture us on optics and carried fresh notes on A-4 sized paper. Curiously, he never stapled the sheets together and sometimes the bunch was held together with a clip.

Needless to say, the lessons I learnt in Allahabad have never left me. By the time I was 31, I had accumulated enough credentials to be a professor in NCERT. In August 1994, when I was handed my appointment letter as Chairman of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), I had to build the institution from scratch.

So I decided to go around and consult eminent people from various fields on how to start an organisation and run it smoothly. Those days I took extensive notes at every interview, filling up 300 pages in the process.

My habit of playing the eternal student helped. Everybody recognised this trait in me and rewarded me by sharing their vast knowledge. This helped eventually in developing the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education in August 1998. In November 2000, a year after I moved to NCERT, we could announce the National Curriculum Framework for School Education at the end of a nationwide consultation process. Note-taking played an important role in this too.

The writer is director, NCERT