To Srivastav Sir; with Love

I have been fortunate to have many good teachers in my life - both formal and informal.

But today I remember you Prof. Vinay Kumar Srivastava Sir; our beloved Srivastav Sir.

I have never spoken about you Sir; not in public like I have spoken about some of my other teachers from my LLB and LLM days.

And maybe that was my mistake Sir. I took you for granted that you will always be there in our lives.

You are not there in our lives anymore but your being and doing always fill, inform and influence our being and doing.

I can say this confidently on behalf of each of your students from that last batch of research methodologies you taught us in 2001-2002 at the Faculty of Law, Delhi University LLM course.

You are my role model and benchmark, Sir.

And I thank Prof. Upendra Baxi for bringing you to Law Faculty from your department of sociology and anthropology.

We were a blessed lot, Sir.

I am yet to come across anyone who has bettered your love and affection for your students; your giving nature and your erudite scholarship.

We learnt more than just research methodologies from you Sir and we learnt more from who you were because of your genuineness, kindness and your giving nature.

You for me, are one of the shiniest examples of what Bob Burg and John David Mann talk about in their book: The Go Givers.

There will be an entire chapter on you and your kindness towards me in my autobiography, if I ever write one.

To take just one small example, I couldn’t have applied in time for the Commonwealth Scholarship for my PhD in Law had it not been for your timely intervention when one of my own law professors was ambivalent in helping me get my mark sheet in time from the university office.

And there are so many other experiences that we all have as your students.

The only promise I make to you as part of my continuing Guru Dakshina Sir, is that I will never be satisfied with what I do since there was no end to the love and support we all received from you. You never believed that you had done enough for us. Your doors - be it your office in the anthropology department or be it your home in B-349, CR Park were always open for us; even on a precious Sunday.

Therefore how can we be satisfied Sir, with whatever we do for our students or participants?

Sir, even though I don’t want to take a rebirth but if I have to, I hope to have you as my teacher the next time around as well. And maybe that time I will be your student in sociology all the way from the BA to the PhD level, Sir and also get the opportunity to study at your alma mater - the Cambridge University and be at the Balliol College to which you wrote a recommendation letter for my PhD in law in 2002.

Sir, I resisted all the requests and offers to join a regular university but Sir, I can say this that in my guest lectureships at various universities and now more so in my training career, I have tried to embody your spirit.

I never got around to saying this to you or aunty Sir, but I miss you a lot Sir. 😔😔😔😔😔

Sir, I wish I had not misled myself with the belief that you are an eternal presence in my mortal life. That way, I would not have taken you for granted and I would have kept in touch with you even more regularly and that way I could have been there around last December and got to say all this in person and thank you, touch your feet, receive your hug one more time and seek your final blessings.

Richard Dreyfus’s Mr. Holland’s Opus and Oscar winner Sidney Poitier’s To Sir With Love are two of my all time favourite movies, Sir. And I have shared these movies in a number of sessions that I have conducted with school teachers.

And today I say it to you Sir:

To Srivastav Sir, With Love.

Sohum.

😌😌🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽