Respected by all
Jayadev Mastru was quite a famous man. If you came to Nehru High school, Sugavi in the early 80s you knew Jaydev Mastru much before you attended your first class. I am sure it must have been true for the students of the 70s and 90s as well. I have never tried to really figure out why he was so famous in the school, but for sure he took a lion share of student’s admiration and attention as compared to other teachers. Students talked about Jaydev Mastru a lot. Generally, in affectionate ways. For instance, how Jaydev Mastru came to class on-time, about his motor cycle and the sound it made, about how he kind of cornered some mischief in the previous class and so on. For some people, it was mini greatness even to get scolding from Jaydev Mastru as anything was worth getting Jaydev Mastru’s attention. Let me correct, for almost all of us that would be true.
Jaydev Mastru had a style of doing things. Even when it came to scolding. He never shouted and yelled at the student. He would scold the person in a very indirect way. He scolded people by narrating story or some incident by throwing few intense looks at the target while he narrated that story. That would really finish the job well. So well in fact, that the guy would remember this for his life! May be this unusualness about many things he did made him that famous.
Man on time
Another particularly noticeable trait of Jaydev Mastru was his discipline of being right on time. There was an alarming precision about his being on-time to the class. Almost all of his students would have noticed it and would tell you this about him. It is like a magic. You hear the sound of the gong in the background and ting Jaydev Mastru steps into the class. It is like if next class is Jaydev Mastru’s class you keep the book ready in this class itself, there is not much time left for you to change the books before he comes. Jaydev Mastru would be already there inside the class before the earlier teacher even leaves.
Stories
Of late, I have been hearing a lot about leader’s ability to tell good stories. If this is what it takes to be the leader, then I am sure Jaydev Mastru was or would have made a great leader. Jaydev Mastru had a phenomenal knack for telling nice stories. Big small short and all of the stories in all formats. He could turn any small incident also into a nice story if he could use that story for any of his purposes, generally to prove a point or to bring some one’s attention. This he did here and as often and on occasion when students were kind of not attentive due to long repeated theory classes.
I remember he once telling a story about a Poet Harsha. Poet Harsha was a brilliant student and he was studying with a master who for some reasons thought Harsha was bit over intelligent and wanted to bring it down a bit. So he made him eat Masha ( Urdaal). One day while Harsha was eating his breakfast his master came to see him and asked him, “Harsha, Kim Karoshi?” This kind of rhymed, “ sha” ending with “shi” meaning “Harsha, what are doing?” For that Harsha replied “ Vishesha shesha mushi musha masha bhakshyam bhakshaami” that ends with sha, shi, shyam, sha repetitively and rhyming with the question his master asked. . Meaning, I am eating a food specially prepared in Musha.
You would hear lot of these stories and the stories made the class interesting. Many times stories also had powerful messages.
Expert
Jaydev Mastru was quite an expert of his subjects. Many of us thought, Jaydev Mastru could have taught Ph.D. level students. He could have done that easily in Sanskrit at least. He was that good with his subject. Well he presented it only if necessary and in very non-threatening way. Never tried showing off his super knowledge about the subject. But if something triggered it, he could introduce you to the depths that were not demanded by the syllabus. That really impressed me. In fact I was very impressed by the unassuming nature of his, about his expertise. Well, for what he knew about his subject, he could have really acted like one knows- all like many I see around me know in the corporate circle. But here was one man who was so humble about his knowledge.
In my opinion that is something we all can learn from that man.
Regret
Actually speaking, I am not very happy about what I have done with Jaydev Mastru. We, myself, my younger brothers Dayanand and Laxmish, wanted to organize, if not a fancy one, a small function for Jaydev Mastru and say “thank you”. We wanted to let him know, we really felt like thanking him for being our teacher. I was thinking about it for few years. You know how you get busy. And I got busy and kept on postponing hoping we would do it next time. And that kept on getting postponed. I even thought may be just visiting his place once. He just lived right across two miles away from my Village. Well finally I did not do any of these. This, I am not very proud of.
For me, Moral of the story is- you may not notice greatness of someone if he is not from England or America, or has not won Rashtrapathi Award. And many of these people who really matter to you are just around you and near you and you are likely to ignore because he or she was not on national TV. Catch hold of them and say thank you. That is the least I could have done to my teacher!
