My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.
GRV was not, by any conventional measure, the sort of boy who demanded attention. Of rather ordinary height, unremarkable in appearance, a quiet occupant of the middle bench — he was the kind of student a teacher might overlook entirely if she were not paying close enough attention. And yet, the moment I turned my back and stepped out of the room, GRV became the centre of gravity for the entire class.
He was not the topper. He was not the athlete. He held no office, won no prizes, delivered no speeches. What he had — and what no prize or office could have conferred — was an effortless, spontaneous humour that made people want to be near him. Talking to GRV, his classmates said, was like setting down a weight you had forgotten you were carrying. He had fans the way some people simply do, through no strategy and no effort, purely by being himself.
The moment a teacher entered, he would transform — folding into his seat, adopting the expression of a boy in deep and earnest concentration, the picture of attentive innocence. A timid rabbit, suddenly and improbably studious. I was never quite fooled, but I also had nothing to complain about. GRV never disrupted a class. He simply waited, with admirable patience, for the class to end.
A couple of years later, the English department staged Shaw’s Pygmalion. Auditions were held, the cast assembled, and roles were distributed with the careful attention they deserved. GRV appeared at auditions with an enthusiasm that caught us off guard. We were not entirely certain what to do with him — his stage presence was an unknown quantity, his talent unproven in any formal sense. We gave him Neppomuck: the flamboyant Hungarian phonetics expert whose brief appearance in Act Three is easy to underestimate.
Rehearsals began in earnest. The focus was on the first two acts, on coaxing accurate English dialects from the cast. It was painstaking work. GRV attended every rehearsal with perfect regularity and was, almost as regularly, sent home without having practised a line — there simply was not time to reach him in the schedule.
He came back each time without complaint. And while he waited, he watched.
He was, it turned out, absorbing everything — every character, every intonation, every comic beat. He began, quietly, to imitate them all. Rehearsals started to acquire a new quality: funnier, looser, lit by his interpretations from the sidelines. We laughed more than we perhaps should have. We did not entirely mind.
On the day of the performance, all eyes were on Professor Higgins — as they always are, as Shaw intended them to be. Neppomuck was a supporting role, a colourful flourish in the third act, easily done adequately and just as easily forgotten.
GRV had watched the film twice. He had then, in the privacy of whatever preparation he kept to himself, added something entirely his own. When he walked onto that stage as Neppomuck — the Hungarian language expert, imperious and absurd and utterly convinced of his own authority — the audience felt it immediately. The timing was precise. The humour was alive. The character, in his hands, acquired a sheen that made the climax of the play land with a force none of us had quite anticipated.
We had to admit it: Neppomuck had stolen the evening. GRV’s fan base, already considerable, doubled on the spot.
I had always taken him for a happy-go-lucky boy — charming, funny, pleasantly adrift. That evening revised my understanding considerably.
Years later, I find him on Facebook. He is dining with Donald Trump. He is dancing with ghosts. AI videos, crafted with the same comic instinct he brought to Neppomuck, delivered now to a far larger audience with the same effortless timing. The humour is intact. If anything, it has grown.
The fuller picture is this: GRV runs a software company. As a Rotarian, he works on social awareness around drug prevention. He has given a TED talk. He encourages young entrepreneurs. He has stayed rooted in Madurai while making it proud of him — which is a harder thing to do than it sounds.
Comedy and warmth, it turns out, were never the whole of GRV. They were the visible surface of something deeper — a genuine gift for human connection, an instinct for what makes people feel seen and at ease, a quiet understanding that the room is always more important than the performance. He knew this as a child sitting in the middle bench. He has simply spent the years since finding larger rooms.
May he fill every one of them.
Some children carry their purpose lightly, disguised as laughter. The wise teacher looks twice at the boy in the middle bench — not to catch him out, but to catch a glimpse of what he might become.