A teacher is also a learner

Before he became “Uncle Moosa” to generations of children in Arunachal Pradesh, Sathyanarayanan Mundayoor was a young boy with a simple reading habit: grabbing a copy of The Hindu and turning to the cricket page.

“I was in Class 2,” he recalls. “I used to grab The Hindu and try to read the cricket news on the last page.”

That early curiosity stayed with him. Reading became a source of joy, learning and discovery — something he wanted other children to experience too.

Today, after more than four decades in Arunachal Pradesh, Mundayoor continues to work towards that goal, taking books and the joy of reading to young people who have limited access to them.

In 1979, Mundayoor left a secure job in Mumbai and travelled to Arunachal Pradesh. He was not looking for an adventure or even planning a career in education. A newspaper announcement about Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari inviting volunteers to help start schools for first-generation learners caught his attention.

“I thought this is a very interesting experiment in which I can definitely contribute something,” he says.

When he arrived in December 1979, he simply wanted to work with the people. Within weeks, he realised that schools could be a meaningful way to connect with young people.

He had no formal qualification in education, but he believed learning should be “free and open-ended,” and give children the freedom to explore.

Looking back, he has no regrets about the decision. More importantly, it shaped his understanding of what education should be: not merely completing a syllabus, but finding joy in discovering something new.

“We came because work [was] an act of love,” he says. “If it can give the joy of living, joy of learning, joy of growing up to the young people, that is the work.”

Mundayoor arrived in Arunachal hoping to contribute to the education of young people. Instead, he soon discovered that the children had plenty to teach him too.

“My best teachers have been the Arunachali children,” he says.

Their lessons did not always come from books. Children taught him how to care for gardens, work with materials from nature, do everyday tasks better and, most importantly, be sensitive to another person’s difficulties.

“These were all beautiful lessons,” he says. “They have been always teaching me how to become a better human being.”

This shaped his idea of what an educator should be. A teacher, he believes, cannot simply stand above students and expect them to listen. Learning has to work both ways.

Perhaps that is why he chose to become Uncle Moosa, rather than fit into the conventional image of a teacher.

“I would rather love to be someone who is a close friend of the children,” he says.

For him, learning can happen under a tree, in a library or on a veranda. What matters is the relationship between the learner and the person guiding them.