The first, and quite likely the most obvious, reason why I wish to immerse myself into teaching is that I ‘like’ teaching.

Over my career, I have conducted many seminars and given several guest lectures. Audiences in these forums have included people from professional bodies and university students. Mostly, the subject matter has been about marketing, advertising and consumers.

I have become a certified trainer by undergoing professional ‘train –the-trainer’ programs at Ogilvy. I have also been a certified trainer at some of my earlier organizations like McCann and Carat Media.

These initiatives have been beyond my call of duty and voluntary in nature. And there is a reason for this. I find training others to be deeply enriching. It helps me experience the vicarious pleasure of helping others grow up. Selfishly speaking, such programs help me remain young by interacting with fresh ideas and fresher minds.

The second reason to work as a full time teacher is that teaching runs in my family. My mother has been a mathematics teacher. She has also authored books on high school mathematics. I guess my coaching genes come from her side of the family.

Beyond the school, my mother would teach five to seven underprivileged children in the neighborhood. They were mostly children of neighborhood maids, drivers, the dhobi, the vegetable vendor and the postman. She did not make a big deal about the hour she invested every evening with them. Her logic was simple. These children should not fail, just because their parents could not afford fancy tuition. It was as simple as that.

I just want to follow her path in a more scalable model. Teaching, both offline and online, affords me this opportunity.

Beyond the first two reasons of the ability and the opportunity to teach, my last but foremost reason is philosophical.

Many people blame social discrimination or monetary disadvantage  for the backwardness of under-privileged children. Many a time, in a more insidious way,  the same people blame a genetic lack of talent. But, I believe, lack of equal opportunity is the primary reason for continued backwardness.

Opportunity is agnostic. It does not see colour, race, class or money. Equal opportunity is egalitarian. It promotes competition with harmony (much like sports!). And, over time, it unearths and nurtures the true talent of every individual.

Unfortunately, we Indians pollute opportunity with our own biases. These biases make us prefer ‘people like us’ to others. And then, we seek to overcome these biases with charity or reservation.

I believe that both these actions suffer from either tokenism or ‘passing-the-buck’! Charity is a one-off aberration. As the famous quote goes, it gives people a fish, instead of teaching them to fish. Reservation is discriminatory, both to the reserved and the unreserved. It discounts future talent, and celebrates regressive history.

Hence, I do not support charity or reservation, but I vote wholeheartedly for equal access to opportunity. But for this access to  become equal, as a society, we need to equip under-privileged children with modern tools and abilities. This, and only this, will give them an ‘equal’ platform to compete with the children from more privileged backgrounds.

It is this dream of an egalitarian India that makes me want to teach wherever and whenever I possibly can.

WHAT would I want my students to achieve? It would be a standard expectation to expect my students to do better in their academics.

But, beyond academics, I want to share my experiences of various Asian and global cultures. I would enrich this sharing with anecdotes of my work life with materials from my passion for travel, photography and philately.

Through such sharing, I dream of teaching them about the essential similarity of the aspirations of various people. I hope that this will fill my students with hope and optimism about their future, while widening their horizons to become a true citizen of the world.

What makes me suited to be a teacher, even if I do not have a formal qualification to teach?

Firstly, as a teacher, I seek to learn. This should not be discounted in a world where there are increasingly more advisors than advice-seekers.

Secondly, I hope that my corporate experience of ‘working-with-teams-towards-shared-objectives’ would be of use in a teaching environment, which helps out on initiatives that would need such team-building experience.

Thirdly, I have been specializing in the field of communications strategy for over three decades. I am confident that this is an essential skill to connect with potential students. In summary, I hope that I am able to continue teaching students for three reasons – to be able to chase my passion for teaching, to follow the footsteps of my mother in furthering education, and  importantly, make my little contribution to an egalitarian India.