An accidental teacher’s Life teaches us to live meaningfully

Listen to your heart. Allow your purpose to lead you. Then, what you set out to do will touch people’s lives for a long, long time, in more ways than you can ever imagine. 

​By the happynesswalas™, Vaani and AVIS

8-minute read
Synopsis:
Live meaningfully. Do what you love doing and makes you happy. Do it very, very well. Stay true to what you believe in. Don’t chase rewards, recognition or even worldly success. When they come, embrace them with humility. But don’t chase them. When you live Life this way, what you set out to do will most likely outlive you. It will touch people’s lives for a long, long time, in more ways than you can ever imagine. This is how you make your one Life count. This is how you live happily.

​Style guide: Vaani and AVIS spell Life with a capital ‘L’ and Happiness with a capital ‘H’. This is because both of them believe that Life is the greatest teacher and Happiness is the biggest wealth. However, when quoting the subjects of their writings, they use these two words without the accentuated capitalization of their first letters.

​How do we live meaningfully? This blog post explores the answer to this question. It does that through paying tribute to Sudha Mahesh, a legendary educator.

Sudha was the founder of the Chennai-based HLC International School (HLC). She passed away last week. She was 76. Sudha and the remarkable institution she founded in January 1995 were the subjects of a biography that we wrote in 2021. The biography is titled ‘At The Heart Of A Head Start’.

To us, her biographers, Sudha was a quiet force. She reimagined education and relentlessly, silently, worked on transforming it.
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To almost everyone else, she was Sudha Aunty. She loved children. And she lived a Life of purpose, consistently doing the one thing she strongly believed in:  Enabling children to be happy, have fun and learn through play.

On January 20, 1995, Sudha set up Headstart Nursery and Primary School in a two-room space in Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai. Sudha’s husband C.N.U. Maheswaran (Mahesh) supported her endeavor wholeheartedly. By then Sudha had been a teacher for close to two decades. Her idea of setting up a school, she told us, was not to be in the business of education. So, right at the beginning, Sudha resolved that Headstart will be:

• A happy place – where children always felt at home.
• Inclusive – where not just children with special physical needs but even those who felt excluded anywhere else felt comfortable, felt wanted.
• Focused only on activity-based learning.

​Over the past three decades, Sudha’s venture has evolved into a center of excellence. It has become HLC, an institution that serves as a social incubator today. HLC offers an environment where children are inspired and enabled to be better leaders, responsible citizens and better human beings.

​Sudha’s beautiful Life carries an important message: Live meaningfully. As you read on, we hope you will be inspired by her journey and what you can learn from it. 

Sudha Mahesh (center) with (from left to right) Raaji, Vaani, AVIS and Naveen at HLC International School.

Listen to your heart, witness your design play out
As we see it, Sudha’s Life is a perfect example of what the 13th century Persian poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi had to say about human journeys. We are paraphrasing him here: ‘Each one has been made for a particular work. And the desire for that work has been placed in each heart. Listen to your heart.’

​We will soon see how Sudha’s story connects to this Rumi verse. But first, here’s an interesting anecdote from her Life that tells us how she became a teacher.

A lady named Lakshmi Radhakrishnan was Sudha and Mahesh’s neighbor in Chennai in the 1970s.  Lakshmi had great admiration for Sudha’s parenting style. She felt that Sudha and Mahesh’s children, Ashwin and Naveen, always came across as happy, curious, well mannered and gentle. It was Lakshmi who encouraged Sudha to enroll for a teacher-training program. Sudha ended up topping her class at the training program. Impressed, the conductor of the program set up an interview for Sudha at the storied Vidya Mandir School. The interview, according to Sudha, did not go well. She felt that the interviewer had made her very nervous. True to her style, she even told him that! Confident that she was not likely to get the job, Sudha traveled with Mahesh and the children to Bengaluru for a short vacation. But the management of Vidya Mandir thought otherwise. They made an offer to her and asked her to join immediately. Cutting short her trip, Sudha rushed back to Chennai and took up her first job. She joined Vidya Mandir as a teacher on January 5, 1976.

“I had no plans to be a teacher. I became one, well, accidentally,” she told us when we were interviewing her for the book on her and HLC.

Clearly, Sudha had listened to her heart while accepting the offer from Vidya Mandir. But if you pause and reflect, you can also see Life’s serendipitous nature at work here. It artistically, stealthily, ensured that an ordinary homemaker and mother was drawn into the world of teaching. Because she belonged to this world. Also because this world needed her. This is why we believe that what Rumi has said rings true in Sudha’s case.

Surely, teaching went on to shape Sudha’s Life. But something more profound has happened over time. Through Sudha’s stellar contributions and her Life’s work, the fields of teaching and education have been significantly transformed. In the time that it has been around, HLC has been purposefully reimagining education. It has been enabling authentic learning and leadership in children. The HLC way of Life has been embraced not just by teachers, children and their parents, but also by contemporary educators and institutions. We will paraphrase another Rumi verse to explain why we believe Sudha’s work has had such a profound impact: She simply ‘allowed herself to be drawn silently by the strange pull of what she loved doing. It never led her astray.’

And that’s our learning here. We must remember that, for each of us, our cosmic design is playing out continuously. Or, in other words, Life is constantly executing its mandate for us through us. We can be happy, content and peaceful while we witness our designs playing out by listening to our hearts, by relentlessly doing what we love very, very well. Our role on this planet is to just be led by Life. And that’s what Sudha did exceptionally well.

Let us further understand this aspect of Sudha’s Life. You see, she was a teacher for almost 50 years. In this time, the world has become more confused, fickle and pretentious. Everyone’s working very hard to demonstrate that they are more successful and famous than everyone else. Yet Sudha never walked in the direction of seeking fame or demonstrating success. She stayed focused on children. The child, the learner, was always at the center of her universe – not HLC’s management, not the curriculum.

​We must highlight an ironical coincidence here. Sudha’s obituary announcement appeared in a leading newspaper in Chennai last week. Interestingly, another school had placed a full-page ad on the adjacent page of the newspaper. That ad championed the school’s value proposition and carried a picture of its founder. The two founders could not have had more contrasting ideologies. We believe that Sudha may have never been comfortable promoting herself or HLC that way. In fact, she was never on social media. So she had no social media following. Yet, she leaves behind a glorious community of followers. So many, many, many people whose lives she shaped when they were children are leaders in their own spaces today. Some of these people are even working on making our world a better place. That Sudha has been able to achieve this level of influence in her lifetime is what living meaningfully really means.

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​Family support is a big enabler
Sudha’s journey could not have been possible without Mahesh choosing to walk with her, every step of the way. In fact, their companionship is a wonderful example of how partners must support each other in Life. In the first part of their journey, Sudha played the anchor’s role. This enabled Mahesh to grow in his career. But when Sudha expressed her desire to set up a school of her own, Mahesh too quit his job with a multinational tyre company. He wanted to be with her, to enable and support her vision. “There was no hesitancy, no self-doubt. We simply went ahead with our plans. We employed a simple principle – we knew that whatever was happening had divine sanction,” Mahesh had told us in 2021.

As HLC grew, while Sudha focused on the school’s students and the education they received, Mahesh’s sharp focus was on the nuts and bolts of running the school’s operation. He led the administration, finance and accounting functions. To many at HLC, Mahesh is Mr. Unflappable. His trademark equanimity always shone through every crisis that the institution has faced and overcome. These are his favorite two words: “Divine sanction.” They reflect an undeniable truth about how the universe operates. They also point to how Sudha’s design has played out and how he has had an important part to play in her Life.

Now, HLC as an idea could have well ended with Sudha and Mahesh. But Sudha’s intent behind setting it up in the first place had great integrity. Which is why it will live on beyond her. In fact, Life has willed it that way. That’s perhaps why Sudha and Mahesh’s second son Naveen and his wife Raaji joined HLC as partners in purpose after they moved back to India from the US in 2005. They have admirably built on the solid foundation that Sudha and Mahesh had laid. This second couple have transformed Sudha’s modest venture to the HLC of today.

​Our learning here is that the support from family plays a huge role in making people’s purposeful ideas grow and last. This opportunity is often squandered by families. Either because families don’t understand what is being attempted by one of their members or because they misunderstand them and their intent. Well, no family is perfect. Differences in outlooks, ideologies, tastes and priorities are likely to exist. These may divide people. Yet like-minded family members share a unique, natural bond between them. This bond is their secret ingredient to creating value – for themselves and for the world. What Sudha, Mahesh, Naveen and Raaji have demonstrated through HLC is how this bond can be nurtured and preserved for a larger cause. What must be remembered, importantly, is that their family had a larger cause to focus on. And that’s only because of Sudha’s quiet leadership and sense of purpose. 

​Staying true to what you believe in
For Sudha, the very reason for her being – for her creation, for her role as a professional, as a teacher – was to only do what is right by the child. Doing right by someone means taking great care to be kind to them. Sudha had made this a fine art at HLC.

Whoever we spoke to for our book told us that:

• She was compassion personified.
• She never stopped innovating to make learning simple and fun for the learner, the child.

We recall our conversation with Yashasvini Rajeshwar who studied at HLC. She had shared this anecdote: “On one occasion, when I was in Grade 6, I took an eraser out of my classmate’s pencil box without her permission. The girl protested and complained about me to Sudha Aunty. I can still vividly remember how Aunty handled the conversation with me. No, she did not reprimand me. She did not talk down to me. She spoke to me. Years later, now, when I look back at that incident, I realize that Sudha Aunty had that day taught me how to respect privacy and value consent. She had seeded these principles in me by taking time to sit with me and by being kind, gentle and empathetic with me. She saw a 11-year-old and treated me as a human being. I was not a student, I was a person in that space.”

​During another interview for the book, we had asked a close friend of Sudha and Mahesh, N.C. Raghava, to describe her. He had replied enthusiastically: “She is, well, affection, affection, affection…she is an embodiment of affection! She constantly wants to ensure everyone’s well-being.”

​Even so, Sudha considered herself to be pretty tough and pushy. In one of our interviews, she told us that she was steadfast about doing what was in the best interests of the children at HLC. She added that while she was open to hearing all ideas, she always insisted that people must convince her if she needed to review an approach or idea that impacted children. She also took great pride in her work. She once painstakingly explained to us how she had innovated and made math fun for children. She need not have gone into so much detail. But she insisted on presenting her teaching methodology that way. We understood that this assertive dimension of her leadership style was coming from the deep conviction she had in what she was doing. This is true of most people who have a strong sense of purpose. They are invested in the why of their work. That matters more to them than what they will gain from doing that work.

Internalizing the message of Sudha’s Life 
One of our favorite quotes of Sudha that we have used in ‘At The Heart Of A Head Start’ is this: “The HLC story is that of an ordinary teacher who chose to put the learner at the centre of the universe. It is the story of ordinary people who worked together with extraordinary discipline, dedication and devotion to the cause of doing right by the child. When you work with such integrity and passion, something meaningful, something of lasting value, is always created.”

This quote aptly sums up Sudha’s era and her contributions to HLC’s journey. But while human beings die, the institutions that they set up often live on – particularly when they are driven by purpose and are guided by a sound set of values. HLC is one of those institutions. It is built to last.

When we got the news that Sudha had passed away, AVIS summed up her Life with a couplet written by the revered Bollywood lyricist and poet Majrooh Sultanpuri: ‘Main akela hi chala tha janib-e-manzil, magar log saath aathe gaye aur karwaan banta gaya.’

Specifically in Sudha’s context, the couplet means: ‘I set out alone, without knowing where I am headed. But people joined along the way and soon we had become a movement.’

Majrooh’s words truly highlight how Life works – particularly when someone listens to their heart and allows their purpose to lead them. They also amplify the message of Sudha’s Life: Live meaningfully.

Here’s how you may want to internalize this message in your Life’s context: Do what you love doing and makes you happy. Do it very, very well. Stay true to what you believe in. Don’t chase rewards, recognition or even worldly success. When they come, embrace them with humility. But don’t chase them. When you live Life this way, what you set out to do will most likely outlive you. It will touch people’s lives for a long, long time, in more ways than you can ever imagine. This is how you make your one Life count. This is how you live happily. 

[Vaani and AVIS are the happynesswalas™. They are expert writers and biographers, accomplished speakers and conversationalists, and culture specialists. To know their fascinating story, click here.]