Nov 7, 2007 -Cartesian, Kantian, Shavian, Orwellian, Kafkaesque: the world has been gracious enough to give us people who have completed with their presence the inexpressible moments of our fears, doubts and aspirations.

What is Powdyellian then?

Teaching is the most public of professions – apart from public executions, perhaps: a blade of grass from the pasture of Powdyellianisms, here goes another, “The size of our universe is the size of our mind.”

“When the song-birds stay away

And the sound of the deer is a

Retreating wail…

When the smog chokes the air and

Hides our peaks

And the dead tree gives no shelter…

That is the time a country is sad.

This is Thakur S. Powdyel knocking the hearts of readers with his first book, As I Am, So is My Nation.

“But Mr. Powdyel, the song-birds are still here, the sound of the deer has not turned into a wail, our winter fog has not been bethroed to the factory smoke and we rest in the ancient silence of our pine shades. We are not sad,” the hip-hop-geared disco track may snub you back la.

Why this book then?

“This is too small a piece of work to carry the burden it presumes to, but it is my hope that those who care to turn its pages, particularly the young men and women of our country, will find the necessary incentive to do so,” says Thakur S. Powdyel who has witnessed thousands of students pass by the shadow-lit corridors of our centers of learning.

“One thing is certain though: we cannot expect our country to be good if we are not good ourselves – each one of us, that is. We make the nation. We are the nation.”

This is why the reader is invited into his house of conversation. To be a partaker of the thoughts that formed this man from a boy who looked after cows in the distant hamlet of Dorokha to become one of the finest teachers Bhutan has ever produced.

A note to the students of Thakur S. Powdyel who had taken you with him to the English countrysides of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, with whom you had brightened nights of Deusurey, from whom you had hid your cigarettes: This book is not a recollection of how he taught, neither is it a recipe for personal success. He is not the Bhutanese version of Shiv Khera, Deepak Chopra or Robin Sharma. This book is about a few things he had not told you while in Sherubtse, the National Institutes of Education and schools.

Did he tell you why one day he had to withdraw in shame and guilt from his son? Turn to page 36.

“My little son was desperately looking for pictures and photographs of our kings and spiritual masters to collect and paste them in his picture book as part of his class assignment. He was not succeeding very well and I ventured to suggest:

You are very good at drawing. Why don’t you draw the pictures yourself? That will be much better.

That spelt my utter undoing and proved a disaster. He said he couldn’t do it and wouldn’t do it. I asked why.

I will not be able to draw them exactly they way they are, and If I don’t, that will be a sin.

That was it. I choked and withdrew in shame and guilt.

We have not spoken about the assignment again. I daren’t ask him what he did. I have yet to recover from the impact of this child innocence and pure faith.”

This book is about the reclamation and maintaining of the pure faith and the child innocence that would enable every citizen to humbly claim, “as I am, so is my nation”. It is about the little unacknowledged moments from the margins of life that if we care to notice would help us realize the reasons why we are students, teachers, parents, business people or civil servants.

He discusses this idea while elaborating on the otherwise bureaucratic reasons why the Royal Civil Service Commission is RCSC.

“Everybody working under the umbrella of the Royal Civil Service Commission is called a civil servant, in fact, a royal civil servant. Three terms stand out prominently: royal, civil, service.

…One may not have a royal birth, but one may still have the nobility of mind and quality of action befitting royalty…Being civil, that is being refined, polite and cultured, is, therefore, an important standard required of a person working in the civil service….The civil service is intended for and created to provide service, not as charity or favour, but as the right means to organize the varied activities of the state and to reach the benefits of development out to the people…Being a royal civil servant, therefore, carries both personal and professional obligations that both elevate and humble an individual.”

In his Essay on Criticism, what Alexander Pope wrote about writers would apply to this book too: “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

The ideas and hopes shared in this book must have passed through the minds of many a reader. But few in this world are gifted to articulate what passes through the minds of the common folk.

As a teacher, what you have wanted to share with your students but never had the words to put it; as a parent, what your kid had always asked about this world and you could never express it; as a person, what your heart always asked about yourself, but could never answer it, welcome to this book, this house of conversation serves as a mirror to reflect upon yourself.

“In many ways, As I Am, So Is My Nation is a statement of the way I have tried to live my life,” says Thakur S. Powdyel about himself and his book, “There may have been many defects and deficiencies in the living, but not in the intention.”

This book constructs for you a little space in your heart, a house for conversation and meditation. The words in the book will not talk to you, but the space between the words will. That space is for you, to frame a different sentence of your aspiration, a conjunction that connects your little life to that of the nation.

Source: Bhutan Times Newspaper 

Tags

• Bhutanese Book
• Bhutanese Writer
• Thakur Powdyel