In memory of your greatness...I bow to thee Prof.C.G!

Among all teachers I have learnt from, he has been the most memorable. It is said that Socrates was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock for the heresies he committed, one of them being 'corrupting the youth'...but what bliss it must have been to be corrupted by him. I had the brief opportunity too...to be corrupted by one such saint.
Technically, he's never taught me. I've never had the previlege of doing any course under Prof. Chinmoy Goswami. But it was during those intellectually stimulating discourses and thought provoking discussions in the chai shop over the past 4 months that I have learnt real philosophy. To us students, who do like engaging in philosophy but are part of this frustrating education system, wherein even streams of knowledge as beautiful as philosophy are taught in such dry and unexciting ways, CG seemed like a liberation. We'd sit with him and listen to him intently...atleast I always had a 'hangover' after he spoke. He'd buy us cups after cups of chai and I'd forget the maddening crowd around as he spoke of Wittgenstein or Kant. We students of Philosophy(not just in the University of Hyderabad but almost anywhere else in the world), are too few in number....but frankly, how many of our Professors really even know we exist? Would they know our names, let alone our academic interests or inclinations. CG was such a contrast....why would he be sitting till late in the evening despite poor health explaining Advaita or Set Theory to students who aren't part of any course he teaches, and that too spending from his own pocket for our chai and samosas?...simply because he was born to teach, to philosophize.
I only wish he smoked lesser. Pale in his hospital ward he said 'I'm alive...trapped in this ward' when I asked him how he was. He wouldn't miss the cricket matches even in the hospital. His predicament immediately took me back to the talk we had had on 'Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka.
It must have been more than coincidence that my own father had said the same words in a ward similar to CG's.
With tears in eyes and an empty feeling, I gazed at the benches of the chai shop...where ar't thou, Socrates?