Click here to view E J John’s Memories and Musings.
This post is about English Teacher E John who joined the school a decade after Mac who was the established English and English Literature teacher. The difference between Anglo-Indian Mac and avowed, proud Malayalee E. John is worthy of note. At first, John taught pupils at a level just below Mac but within a year or so, he was achieving final year results just as good if not better than Mac.
E John was a family man and never ever abandoned his pupils. He took on the responsibility for which he was paid.
E.John had a wonderful career both, before and after Lawrence School Lovedale. If only he was taken on instead of Mac, the lives of a lot of pupils would have been far better for John was a physically tough, no nonsense teacher. I have read from his musings ONLY THOSE BITS OF WHICH RELATE TO LOVEDALE but I gathered some valuable information, among the gems being that Physics teacher K.C. Jacob left after a falling out with legendary Headmaster Thomas. This was disastrous for the school and me in particular for initially, there was no Physics teacher and Thomas pressganged a visiting former student, Vasanti Vasudevan to fill in the gap before recruiting Dorairaj who was so below standard that he wouldn’t have got past interview stage in any respectable school.
I would invite readers to only read relevant bits. John’s career outside Lovedale may not be relevant.
In my blog, I am particularly scathing about bullying and theft. I set out below an extract from E John’s musings about how he dealt with bullying; What a contrast to Mac (see many posts) who to all intents and purposes encouraged bullying and theft by his very absence from his duties:
My choice of Sumeru House was not accidental. I was the Housemaster of Sumeru for a little over two years from 1969. I had earlier been Sumeru House Tutor for three years. I would like to believe that I gave of my best to the boys, even if I say so myself. There were times, however, when I had to be quite severe, against my better professional judgement, in dealing with bullies. When you are up against hardened bullies, you are frequently flummoxed while looking for a psychological approach to deal with them tactfully. On the other hand, like a red rag to a bull, the instinctive response of ‘retributive punishment’ presents itself to your impulsive nature. Truth to tell, I had succumbed to this kind of knee-jerk reaction on more than one occasion. One such occasion refuses to leave my memory.
One of my wards was found in possession of a camera that did not belong to him. Let him remain nameless. The compulsive bullies in my house who came to know of this act of ‘borrowing’, promptly pronounced him guilty in a kangaroo court of their making, and then without ‘due process’ proceeded to thrash him virtually to within an inch of his life, short of lynching him that is. The news reached me through a school prefect who did not want to be named. And there I was, my head and heart both warring. First, it raised my hackles that my authority as housemaster had been challenged. The perceived hurt to my ego rankled. But on reflection, my training as a teacher cautioned me against a knee-jerk reaction.
I was later told that a school prefect, who happened to be one of my wards, was also involved in it, and that proved to be more than I could condone. It would seem he had aided and abetted the perpetrators of this act of cowardice instead of restraining them. I summoned him to my office straightaway and without waiting to hear his version of the incident and throwing caution to the winds whacked him with my bare hands so hard that I could easily have been charged for causing grievous bodily harm had he decided to complain in a court of law. He did not. The rest of that gang also received the same treatment. Initially I had only wanted them to have a taste of their own medicine, but I lost my head when once I had started. I realized that I had gone too far only after I had regained my composure. What is that about hindsight being a perfect science?
Fortuitously, KIT was out of station and it was to Major Mehta his deputy that I had to report what had transpired. Happenstance favours the remorseful. And he weighed up the provocation and my reaction and decided that the boys had it coming to them. For an old soldier, with a martial mindset, retributive justice would strike as the most immediate sanction against wrong-doing. For a few days after that incident I was persona non grata to the prefects, whose collective pride in being members of a select band of school leaders had been seriously hurt. How was I to impress upon them that privileges did not give them the licence to act on impulse with impunity? That would have been like the pot calling the kettle black.
THE REST OF THIS POST CONSISTS ENTIRELY OF E JOHN’S WORDS, NOT MINE.
Born on the 9th of September 1929, to John Easaw, an Indian father, and Najeebah Weibber, an Iraqi mother, in the oil town of Kirkuk in Iraq, he was brought to, brought up and educated in India. After obtaining a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Travancore in 1954, he did a stint teaching English at St. Thomas College, Kozhencherry, before he left the shores of India, towards the end of 1955, to take up a teaching position in Tanganyika, then part of British East Africa. After teaching there for nine years -by which time the territory had become the independent nation of Tanzania- he left for London to specialise in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language at the Institute of Education University of London.
Returning to India in August 1965, he found an opening at the Lawrence School, Lovedale, one of the better-known public schools of India. Teaching there for over six years helped him broaden his horizons professionally. The opportunity to interact with some of the best teachers from across India was to stand him in good stead later on. In January 1972 he went back to Africa, this time to Zambia. And after teaching for two years at the well-known St. Paul’s School in Mulungushi, he was deputed by the Ministry of Education to head the department of English at the Copperbelt Secondary Teachers’ Training College in Kitwe. His experience there for the next three years as a teacher-trainer helped him secure headship of the English Section at the United Nations Institute for Namibia, where administrator-trainees for a nascent independent Namibia were being groomed by the U.N. He taught there for seven years. However, his misgivings about the questionable academic antecedents of the trainees -which he had expressed in his paper at an international seminar- did not go down well with the Namibian political leadership, whose immediate concern was the urgency of the need rather than the excellence of the end product. His contract was not renewed. He and his wife left for London in 1984.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity et cetera.” Three months later, in the August of 1984, he was appointed by the King Saud University to teach English at their Institute for Languages and Translation. For the next ten years, until he retired at the age of sixty-five, he taught English in Riyadh to Arab university students. Incidentally, there he was able to learn Arabic, his mother tongue. Since his retirement, he has turned to writing. Also, as a member of the Y’s Men International, he involves himself in community service. He also teaches English, as a labour of love, to those in need of enhancing their communicative competence. Occasionally, he and his wife travel abroad for a holiday.
His wife Achamma, a charming woman and a wonderful helpmate, is a retired secondary-school teacher, having taught geography with great success both in Africa and in India. They have three children: Bobby who is presently in London, Jacob in Denver, Colorado, and Miriam in Mumbai.