A funny incident happened when Prof KSS Nambooripad (KSSN) started his career as a faculty member in the math department of UC College, Alwaye in central Kerala. One of the students stood up and asked, why should they learn mathematics as he could not find any compelling reasons to learn it. As KSSN didn’t have a ready answer to provide, he told his student that he would discuss with his colleagues and would get back to him the next day. When KSSN returned to the staff room for lunch, he narrated the incident to a group of faculty members whom he met first and requested their response. Amazingly, all the teachers turned against KSSN in unison, in their opinion, KSSN had brought disgrace to the entire teaching community by revealing his ignorance before the students. They further added that even if he didn’t know the exact answer, a teacher should not reveal his ignorance in front of students, instead, he should provide some sort of answer even if not fully correct to hide his ignorance from the prospective disciples! The matter was brought before the staff council, where many teachers shared the opinion that KSSN did the wrong thing of accepting his ignorance and the disgrace theory gained ground among his colleagues. However, KSSN couldn’t simply digest this idea of hiding ignorance on the part of teachers. He thought that teaching was a noble profession in the sense that he had been paid for properly thinking and sharing the thoughts with a younger generation to shape their ideas and concepts to make them better citizens. That was the reason for his choice of teaching among other jobs available at that time for his kind of qualifications. In short, he disagreed with the hypocrisy of pretense and tendered his resignation from UC College.

KSSN

Prof KSS Nambooripad

This was not the beginning of the struggle of KSSN against several odds in his life, which in fact, started as early as his childhood. KSSN was born in 1935 in an aristocratic Namboodiri family who are better known for their orthodox, traditional Hindu way of life and for their true repositories of ancient Vedic religion. As a Namboodiri child, young KSSN was not allowed to go to any one of the modern English schools that were gaining popularity at that time, instead, he was taught Vedic literature and scriptures in the traditional schools until he was fourteen years old. KSSN still remembers, a Christian teacher by name Chacko in the neighborhood always warned that he would lose a lot if he didn’t dare to throw out the traditional Vedic education and go to English schools for proper learning. KSSN knew better than anybody else that he could seldom break the iron walls of Vedic traditions and discard his alleged role as a Vedic practitioner for the well being of the community.