My Income Tax Teacher

 My income tax teacher is amazing, but I need to talk about her in detail. She teaches a subject called Income Tax and, believe me, there is nothing more boring, clerical, and extremely baseless, just rules, than Income Tax. I also have a subject called Public Administration. It’s such a nuanced, interesting, theoretical topic, but the teacher is so bad that you are constantly looking at the watch, trying to sustain and survive that one hour with her.


With my income tax teacher, I really don’t know when the class starts and ends. She is a magician, able to take something so boring and teach it almost magically. I don’t think it’s human; it’s a miracle. Never in our class have we ever changed the time, but also, the concept of when the class starts and ends just does not exist. It passes so quickly that we never know when it’s ending.


Why I am talking about her is because her amazingness has changed my life for the better. Not only have I realised that when I used to, and still sometimes, discard subjects like statistics, finance, and accounts by forcefully putting them under this umbrella term of “clerical” as a way to prove how these subjects are inherently meaningless and how “good” subjects like political science and philosophy are better, she has fundamentally changed this view of mine. I love Income Tax now, and I just realised maybe I was not the problem all along. Maybe I just needed her in my life. I wish she had been here earlier, probably back in standard 10 when I was studying mathematics, so that I could have been as amazing in it as I am in English right now. I’m not good at maths anyway.


The way she empowers me is that now, when I look at a one-hour lecture, I don’t immediately discard it. I have the courage to actually open it in the hopes that the time will pass quickly and I will not realise what’s happening. This is important for me because I hate watching lectures for UPSC. Just the idea of studying a one-hour lecture by a UPSC teacher sounds daunting to me. But her being amazing has had a ripple effect on my life. She has made it better, and she won’t even know.


Apart from that, there’s an incident that made me feel proud. I have no idea about CAT right now, but I have to give it. So I opened a previous year’s question paper and just started solving the first paragraph with the timer on. I was able to do it in five minutes. My answers were correct, and I asked one of my CAT-aspirant friends what the standard time it takes is. She informed me that doing it under five minutes is crazy, and I was so proud of myself. The compound effect is real.


Popular posts from this blog

A bland yap on dreams

On Dreams These days I’ve been dreaming. I don’t usually dream, but I dreamt for two days, and now I’ve started wanting to dream because that’s the only time I feel like I’m not in actual reality. When I wake up, it feels like there’s nothing to look forward to, and then sleeping becomes the only thing I wait for. I know it’s extremely bad, but I’m not here to make a moral comment right now. If My life was actually tough, at least then I won’t sound fake. Because when I say it cannot be reality, it sounds as if I’m going through some mind-blowing problem, but these problems are so simple. So human. Everybody has them. There’s nothing extraordinary about my pain at all. Anyway, that is not the point I’m trying to make. I was trying to talk about my dreams. Two of them specifically. The first one was about a dog flu happening in my city. I can trace it back to reading about the Nipah virus spreading in Kerala, which I saw in the newspaper. And now that I say newspaper, I realise I’m ...
Read more

Yap on random things

  My mom showed me a photo from when I started college two years ago, and I clearly remembered how, at the time it was clicked, I didn’t like it at all. I thought I looked weird, the dress looked weird, and the photo itself just felt bad to me. But when I saw it today, the dress looked so pretty on me, and I was so much slimmer back then.  Now, I’ve gained weight mostly because I’ve spent a long time at home. I’m currently overweight and honestly struggling with it a bit. I’m trying to return to a healthier lifestyle, but I’m still very conscious of how I look these days. This has been a struggle for as long as I can remember, but it feels even stronger now because I’m aware that I used to be more in shape.  Seeing that old photo made me think will the photos I dislike now also look completely different to me a few years from now? Will I realise how silly it was to hate them? Even the dress I disliked back then looks beautiful to me now. At that time, I preferred more mod...
Read more

Partition

Right now, in India you cannot listen to some of Talha Anjum’s song anymore. It’s such a trivial thing not being able to listen to Abdul Hannan or Umair’s songs in India right now post-Pahalgam. Most listeners were simply unaware of their favourite artist’s country of origin until they Lost being able to listen to them. With all the bigger, heavier things happening, it feels almost silly to complain about this. Is it really that far-fetched to trace it back to Partition? That one event drew a line so deep that even now, decades later, we feel it in the smallest ways, in music, in access, in silence. This is not about songs being unavailable. It's about how that old wound never really healed.   Partition is understood as a large political event, shaped by leaders like Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi, and marked by riots, refugee trains, and lines drawn on maps. These images are all part of the story, however what this essay want to explore is how partition affected not just politics but...
Read more