The Quiet Ways Teachers Touch Our Lives

Some people enter our lives loudly.

Others enter so gently that we don’t realize their impact until much later.

Teachers often belong to the second kind.

When I think of my time at BITS Pilani, I only vaguely remember classrooms, problem sets, exams, and deadlines. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t a model student when it came to attending every lecture.

But there was one exception.

I definitely attended Linear Algebra.

That classroom was always full—sometimes overflowing. Not because attendance was enforced, not because of fear of exams, but because Prof. M. S. Radhakrishnan was teaching. He taught Linear Algebra, and somehow made it the one place students wanted to be. You could feel it the moment you walked in: this wasn’t just another class, it was an event.

Great teachers don’t merely transfer knowledge. They transmit orientation. They show you how to approach complexity without fear, how to stay steady when something doesn’t immediately make sense. Often, they do this without ever announcing it.

A teacher’s work is strange that way.

They may never know how far their influence travels.

A sentence spoken once in class can echo decades later.

A way of explaining something can become a lifelong mental habit.

A quiet integrity can become an internal compass.

Most teachers will never see the full arc of their impact. They won’t be present when a former student makes a hard decision with clarity, mentors someone else with patience, or approaches a complex problem calmly instead of reactively. Yet those moments often carry the teacher’s imprint.

In the Indian tradition, we speak of Guru not just as an instructor, but as one who removes darkness. That removal doesn’t always feel dramatic. Sometimes it’s subtle—a little more confidence here, a little less confusion there.

When a great teacher passes, it feels like more than a personal loss. It feels like a thinning of something essential in the world. Not because knowledge is gone, but because a particular way of being with knowledge has ended.

And yet, nothing truly ends.

Teachers live on in the way their students think, speak, decide, and teach others. They live on in habits of clarity, in respect for rigor, in the quiet confidence to sit with difficulty.

If you’ve ever had a teacher who changed you—even slightly—this is an invitation to pause and acknowledge that gift. Not loudly. Not performatively. Just honestly.

Because long after formulas fade and classrooms disappear, the touch of a true teacher remains—working silently, faithfully, in the background of who we become.

May his soul rest in peace. Om Shanti.