Me too,
recognized
by Vijai Pant
I had never thought that
name and fame would come to me in this way. After
37 years of teaching and nearly 20 years of
freelancing, liberally interspersed with my
passion for conducting language workshops, I
assumed quite a few people already knew me. Maybe
I wasn’t too far off the mark, as that call
from the educational agency seemed to confirm.
But this time, it was a different ball game
altogether—offering me a little more, hmm…
recognition. I was told about a screening
test to be conducted online, before being sent
for a training session to become eligible for
this honour.
As always, I prepared well for the two-minute
exercise—yes, you read it right, a two-minute
exercise. The attention span may be shrinking in
today’s jet age, but this ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’
policy did puzzle me. Still, I quickly buried my
skepticism and told myself that experts can,
after all, spot talent in seconds.
And so, I sat for the preliminary round,
presentation rehearsed and ready, only to find
that everyone I knew and many I didn’t know
were already there- the figure touching a
staggering 120. After all, each one has the right
to try to acquire recognition, no? Having
said this, I was also quite certain that many of
these ‘also-rans’ would fall by the
wayside when the assessment concluded. But lo and
behold, barring a paltry few, recognition rained—not
just for me, but for nearly everyone who had
shown up. It was a different kind of ‘Me Too’
moment: recognition for all under the sun…
oops, under the clouded sky, with the entire
exercise itself soon coming under a cloud.
The organisation, apparently believing in the
adage ‘The more, the merrier,’ and for
this they kept on motivating (a euphemism)
teachers till they made the cut, put us on the
road to a hilly destination where a two-day
tutorial class was expected to make us ‘resourceful.’
And now, having emerged as ‘Recognized
Resource Persons’ or what is grandly termed
as RRPs, we patiently wait to unleash our ‘resources.’
Those who have been given this opportunity, after
coming back, have told others in queue that the
academic body trusting our credentials (or should
it be not trusting) is mailing the picked and
chosen RRP for the Capacity Building Programme a
bagful of resources with slides, handouts and
details written to the minutest details, and all
this just to help facilitate our further
recognition.
Meanwhile, the regulatory mechanism has
recognized that there are now more recognized
persons than there are people left to applaud
them. And so, after packing us like sardines into
this ‘recognized’ bandwagon, the
academic body has now devised a solution- we will
each be given just one shot in our lifetime at
this type of recognition. Naturally, the
initial euphoria surrounding this whole
recognition business seems to be... well, wilting.
As an afterthought, I still wonder what made the
governing body choose the word ‘recognized’
when ‘certified’ was available.
But then, to be fair to the mandarins sitting at
the top, ‘recognized’ gives us the
feeling of being celebrities—only, we’re
still waiting for the stage where we need those
fancy sunglasses to hide our aura and ward off
fans and paparazzi.
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