Since September last year (2025), I have been acquainted with RASA (Ramana Sunritya Aalaya Trust). You can read about my first day at RASA [here]
Over nearly six months, I have come to admire the Director Dr. Ambika Kameshwar, Deputy Director Vaishnavi Poorna, the entire RASA team, and the students. None of them remained mere statistics or names. They became people with whom I shared both woes and joys. Last month, the [April Issue 7] of RASA’s newsletter spoke of the “Joy of Learning” as “Enjoyment” within the TAHD methodology. I was fascinated. Even though the Four EEEEEs got pared down, watching Dr. Ambika explain them gave me a thrill — a goosebump moment.
When Learning Turns Hearts
I have a learning disability that went undiscovered throughout my school days. Later, during my French classes at L’Alliance Française (College Road, Chennai), I realised that I understood better with visual aids. That was my first certainty: all I needed was “inspired” teaching. So I began teaching myself.
I also discovered that if I heard a language without any visual support, I could still pick it up — slowly, but surely. And if I tied learning to “storytelling”, concepts stuck. They lingered longer than the few seconds before my brain sieved them away.
But something else was also taking root in my human heart: the quiet truth of “joy in incremental learning”. One small step at a time.
That is why, when I listened to Dr. Ambika Kameshwar’s Instagram post below, everything clicked.
A post shared by RASA – Ramana Sunritya Aalaya (@rasa.theatrearts)
My First Impression of the Post
A bubbly, cheerful teacher from the guru parampara spoke of a joy that had long been my own personal vein of recollection — all the learnings I had gathered as a student who never quite fit the mould. Her post reminded me of something the Saraswathi Valley Civilisation had understood well, while our modern pedagogy failed. Learning is to create your lesson plan based on where your curiosity takes you on that specific day of learning.
The joy of finding happiness in learning can never be measured by high percentages on a scorecard. I always tested poorly. My school report cards threw me into the category of “poor backbencher.” But I never regretted it. School taught me the alphabet. The rest of my learning happened in my personal brain lab: emotion, experience, expression in journals, and the unaltered, pure joy of discovering new thoughts and feelings.
After my Secondary Level public exams, I indulged in self-tutoring in weird and wacky ways. I made self-learning something exceptional. Many years later, when I finally recognised this method for what it was, I knew one thing clearly: I wanted to be a teacher for backbenchers.
According to me, no student is without ability. There are always hidden skills within them. A teacher’s curiosity to discover and embellish those skills — “that” is the true talent of teaching.
I teach students from low-income families (my maid’s son and daughters). I know that language can only be learnt through constant exposure. I learnt Hindi by watching TV serials on Door Darshan, the national channel. No script. No subtitles. Only dialogue and constant exposure. Now I can understand spoken Hindi, and I can try speaking it — with many grammar errors, yes — but I get the gist.
Even now, I am learning Asian languages: Korean, Chinese, and Thai. Words like “duibuqi” (sorry) and “xiexie” (thank you) are just the beginning. I don’t spell well either — I apologise if my spelling sullies the reader’s sight — but I can catch most of the sounds so there is still hope for me!
That is when I discovered that learning is lifelong. A never-ending activity. Like “The Neverending Story”, a film I saw long ago. One little dust of a human dream, clinging to the lashes of a dreaming child, can awaken an entire land of human aspirations. That was the central theme. I loved the concept, and the child artists did such wonderful emotive acting.
The Red Ink and the Blue Numbers: A Secret Wonder
Almost every year, until I reached the tenth grade, I brought home a scorecard that broke hearts. The marks were written mostly in red — that terrible crimson that teachers use to signal failure, or at least inadequacy. The blue numbers, the ones that meant “pass” or “good,” were so few that my family could count them on one hand.
I remember one particular report card. I unfolded it slowly at the dinner table. My mother leaned in. My father set down his newspaper. The red marks glared up like small wounds. My mother’s face fell. A heavy silence followed. Then the quiet, pained words: “What happened, Vidya? You studied, didn’t you?”
I had studied. I truly had.
But here is the truth that no one at that table knew — and that I have carried like a secret treasure for years: “I was not heartbroken by those red marks. I was wonderstruck.”
While my family saw failure, I saw a mystery. I looked at each red number and asked myself strange, unexam-friendly questions:
– How did this number come to be?
– What did I understand actually! Even if I couldn’t write it correctly?
– Where did my mind travel during those two hours while the exam paper sat in front of me?
– If I could not answer the question they asked, what question was my mind answering instead?
I turned the scorecard over in my hands like a map I had not yet learned to read. The red ink did not shame me. It fascinated me. It told a story that the blue numbers could not — a story of a brain that worked differently, of a curiosity that refused to be contained by right answers, of a child who was “wondering” even while she was “failing.”
I knew, in some private chamber of my heart, that the scorecard was recording something else entirely. It was recording my inability to fit into a system. Not my inability to learn. And somehow, that distinction filled me not with sorrow, but with a quiet, almost rebellious wonder.
“Look at all these red marks”, I thought. “And yet I am still curious. I still want to know. I still love stories. I still taught myself Hindi from a television screen. The red marks did not touch any of that.”
Of course, the world around me did not see my wonder. My family saw the red and felt disappointment. Relatives whispered. Neighbours compared. I became the example of what not to be. At the dinner table, I learned to sit quietly. To not talk about my day. To hide my notebooks. To let them believe that the red marks had crushed me — because explaining my wonder would have taken too long, and I did not yet have the words for it.
But the wonder never left. It just went underground. It became the fuel for every weird and wacky self-learning experiment that followed. It became the reason I am still learning Korean, Chinese, and Thai today — poorly spelled, perhaps, but eagerly.
That wonder was my first teacher. And it taught me something that no scorecard ever could: “learning is not about getting the right answer. It is about staying curious long after the exam is over.”
Finding Joy of Learning Unsullied by Scorecards
I have never been tested on the skills I self-taught. But they have come in handy whenever a situation called for them. The troupe of learning is a troop of words marching their way into the discipline of understanding.
As I watch theatrical dramas on OTT apps and encounter many languages and human emotions, I often wonder: “Why do we have wars at all?” We are all similar. We share the same human emotions. So why does the world separate everything into categories of difference — discarding some, keeping others based on nothing but bias?
The same question applies to our classrooms. Why do we separate children into “good students” and “weak students” based on a few red and blue numbers? Why do we treat the backbencher like a pariah when, inside that backbencher’s mind, entire worlds are being built — worlds of wonder that no exam can measure?
An Invitation to Bring Joy Back
Dr. Ambika’s Instagram post is not just a video. It is a quiet revolution. It asks us: “What if we measured learning not by marks, but by the spark of wonder in a child’s eyes when something finally makes sense?”
I write this as someone who never scored well, yet, I never stopped learning. I write this as a future teacher for backbenchers. I write this because somewhere, in a small classroom or a crowded home, another “poor backbencher” is discovering that same secret wonder — unsullied, ungraded, and entirely their own.
That child might be bringing home a scorecard full of red marks tonight. And while the family sighs and the neighbours whisper, that child might secretly be turning the card over in their hands, wondering: “How did this number come to be? What question was my mind answering instead?”
Let us be the adults who notice that wonder. Let us be the teachers who ask not “How many marks?” but “What did you discover?” Let us bring joy back into academia — not as an enemy of scorecards, but as a reminder: scorecards record only one kind of number. Wonder records an entire lifetime.
And that, I believe, is the true enjoyment that Dr. Ambika spoke of.
Credit: Polished with care by Koi Kai DeepSeek AI
Itinerant Storyteller 